Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshe | Hacker News Reader

Just want to point out that low level radiation is probably good for you. It's cool that they found it, but this is not any kind of health danger.

Low level radiation probably acts as a beneficial stressor, like exercise or fasting [1]. Although this level is so low it probably does nothing at all.

You also probably don't have to worry about the radiation you get from bananas or plane flights. And it's possible those dumb sounding radioactive water spas might have actually been helpful.

Fukushima is aweful for the nearby region and still a cautionary tale. But it didn't poison the whole world.

[1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2015/04/06/small-radi...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2477717/

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph241/yang1/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26808887

View on HN

Here's a very straightforward study, "Evidence That Lifelong Low Dose Rates of Ionizing Radiation Increase Lifespan in Long- and Short-Lived Dogs" [1].

Two studies on beagles:

"One exposed the dogs to whole-body cobalt-60 γ-radiation."

"The other evaluated dogs whose lungs were exposed to α-particle radiation from plutonium."

For both studies, excess radiation improved their lifespans by 20-50 percent. It is a substantial beneficial effect. Above a beneficial level of radiation their lifespans shortened to the level of dogs who were not exposed at all and then to substantial reductions in lifespans.

This graph illustrates it best: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5347275/figure/...

We don't know why low radiation exposure is good, but it does seem to be.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5347275/

The lack of public trust in science is a real problem, and mostly unjustified or misdirected. That said, nothing reinforces the evil scientist image like irradiating puppies.

It is pretty dark. There's even a cute beagle picture in a graph. Apparently beagles are the preferred model animal for radiation studies going back to the 1950's.

I don't even have a problem with it necessarily, but they should probably use pigs. Nobody cares about pigs.

Pigs are actually great pets. They've been domesticated practically as long as dogs

Truth. Had pigs for a time as a kid. When people spend quality time with them, pigs respond.

They like people.

I lived on a farm for a year as a kid. The owner was missing an ear and always made sure to remind me to keep all body parts outside the hog pen.

But that's a waste of bacon!

Then you do a controlled blind study on extending the lifespans of humans eating bacon from irradiated pigs. Wastage stopped, science advanced, lifespans extended (maybe).

I don’t know, given p-hacking and reproducibility problems, science “journalism” that tends to report the results of single experiments as confirmed findings, and pay-gating of research behind for-profit journals, the scientific establishment does have some credibility challenges atm.

Back in the early 20th century, American doctors lobbied very hard to ensure that radium-coated water dispensers sold did indeed contain enough radioactive material to provide “health” benefits.

My, how times have changed.

I just got back from vacation in Germany, and while I was doing research for the trip I found a spa near one of the places I was staying that does radon therapy. From what I could gather on the web site, you sit for multiple sessions in a room with walls made of crushed radon-producing rock, reading, chatting with your neighbors, or having a snooze. Also, they ensure the radon levels comply with the German Spas Association's guidelines and you need a doctor's prescription to get treated.

I recall seeing a documentary about early glow in the dark wristwatches with hand painted radium dials. The painters would occasionally lick the brush tips to make a fine point. A large percentage of them died from terrible forms of lip, mouth and throat cancer.

Radium Girls is a fairly well-reviewed book about that: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31409135-the-radium-girl...

Radiation hormesis is taught to basically all X-Ray and CT techs (and I assume lots of other specialties) when they go through school.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis

Nothing like this in Belarus. Instead there are more than 10K/year of extra cases of cancer due to Chernobyl.

> low level radiation is probably good for you

colour me unconvinced.

sure, hormesis is a theory worth considering, but so is Petkau. There are good reasons that international standards retain LNT on review.

It sort of reek unsound doesent it? Like CRISPR-CAS in moderation is possibly good for you.

Remember that one time where the that massage felt like being kicked by a boxer in the back? The assumption for low-radiation beeing healthy goes like this:

We are creatures of a naturally radioactive environment. Actually the environment was much more radioactive in the ancient past - which is why we search living and deceased fossils for DNA-Repair mechanisms, as these creatures would have to be much more cancer resistant back then. But i digress...

DNA-Digression, that is what radiation inflicts - also known as damage. Now this is super obvious damage kicking alive the repair mechanism, which also fixes alot of other - not so obvious damages or kills the cell.

>Fukushima is aweful for the nearby region and still a cautionary tale. But it didn't poison the whole world.

I would be careful with that last statement because seafood from Japan is global.

Only time will tell the true impact of Fukushima's radioactive water.

"More than 1 million tons of radiation-laced water is already being kept on-site in an ever-expanding forest of hundreds of hulking steel tanks—and so far, there’s no plan to deal with them."[1]

12 US gallons = 100 lbs and 1 million tons is equal to 2.4 million gallons

https://www.wired.com/story/fukushimas-other-big-problem-a-m...

For perspective, that's 4 olympic swimming pools worth of water. It's not a small amount but it's not enormous as far as volumes of liquid goes.

A typical olympic pool (assumed 50m x 25m x 2m; the depth actually isn't standarized), contains 2500m^3 of water. 1m^3 of water has a mass of 1t (in typical conditions).

So 10^6 tons of water corresponds to 400 olympic swimming pools. That's quite a lot of water (still not much compared to the volume of the oceans, of course).

You're right, I was going off the parent. They made an error somewhere, 1 million tons is 240 million gallons, not 2.4 millions.

It's worse than that; > 100 tons of groundwater contaminated by the ongoing crisis still run to the ocean daily. [1] They've made progress in reducing the amount (it used to be hundreds of tons daily) but it's still a problem. Now there's talk of dumping what's been stored into the ocean anyways.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/remediating-fukushim...

> They've made progress in reducing the amount (it used to be hundreds of tons daily) but it's still a problem

What exactly is the problem that it is causing?

Are you asking me what is the problem with 100+ tons of reactor-contaminated groundwater effluent entering the sea on a daily basis? On the surface this seems like a weak attempt at a strawman, please clarify.

edit: s/irradiated/reactor-contaminated/

Yes, I'm asking that. Because all sea water is irradiated anyway, the effects depend on the amount of radiation in the water. So, what problems is this water entering the sea causing?

My understanding is not all isotopes are equally hazardous. The stuff coming with the reactor-contaminated water is particularly harmful to the marine environment and people of Japan, and not normally present at such levels in the surrounding waters.

The half-life as I understand it is relatively short for the especially harmful stuff, but that's not so helpful if leaks are ongoing.

Yes, he is, and I am as well. First of all, irradiated doesn't mean radioactive. Most food in the US is irradiated for health purposes before sale at grocery stores.

How is it contaminated? What's the distribution of contaminants? Do they actually have a significant effect?

100 tons is roughly 100 cubic metres, or 1 cube of 4.65m. In a year it's a cube of roughly 33.2m each side. Given that the concern seems to be tritium, with a half-life of 12 years, if you want to reduce radiation to about 1/1000th, you'd need 10 halvings, so 120 such cubes. That's a lot, but if you were to build containment basins of "only" 1 depth, it'd be a basin 365 meters each side and 33.2m deep. That's not nothing, but it's likely also excessive.

Just a correction on this, 1 million tons is equal to around 240 million gallons [0], which is roughly the volume of 362 olympic sized swimming pools[1].

[0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+million+tons+of+water... [1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(1+million+tons+of+wate...

"Tons of radioactive water" is a silly measurement. The water itself isn't radioactive, it has radioactive material mixed in with it. If you quadrupled the amount of water, you would have 4 million tons of radioactive water but it'd be the same amount of radioactivity, just more diluted.

It's even sillier because "radioactive water" isn't a measurement of the amount of radiation or a description of the decay process that reduces the danger over time

You can buy radium balls to put in your bath on amazon japan: https://amzn.to/2JDwICi

Radiation from high altitude is a concern for frequent fliers and air crews.

There may be a concern, but so far, there's been no evidence to support there is any safety risk.

There is a noticeably higher risk of cataracts, at least. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/16087845/

Interesting. Didn't know that.

It should not be, "Cockpit crew had a low all-cause, all-cancer, and cardiovascular disease mortality but elevated aircraft accident mortality." [1]

In plainer, much less careful English: even with that exposure, they live longer than average.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4511278/

You could consider this an artificially selected population, since to keep an airline transport pilot license it is required to maintain a current FAA medical. I'm sure lots of pilots smoke, drink and eat poorly, but they try to avoid getting grounded and career-ended by their physician.

There was a good study and results that just came out about this in the past couple of weeks and it backs up that airline crew have higher cancer rates:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/well/airline-crew-have-hi...

I agree that the level found in the wine is inconsequential, but it's worth pointing out that studies of radiation workers have found that the linear no threshold model does a pretty reasonable job of explaining non-leukemia cancer risk, at least around the levels of radiation equivalent to, say, a multi-decade career as a flight attendant. Granted, the error bars are pretty big, and you have to get to levels equivalent to a trip to Mars for it to get appreciably above background.

TLDR: It's overenthusiastic to think the literature has concluded that low-level radiation is probably good for you, but good experiments are hard.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2634664/

Dose examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert#Dose_examples

"Low level radiation probably acts as a beneficial stressor, like exercise or fasting ..."

I have proposed that the common flu that we all get every 12-18 months serves the same purpose and that attempts to avoid this (via the influenza vaccine) could have unintended consequences for the long term health of our immune system ... but I have never been met with anything but incredulity ...

This would be a great theory, if influensa didn't kill ~50,000 Americans every year. Mostly the elderly and the immuno-compromised.

If it weren't for vaccinations, and the associated herd immunity, many more people would be dying to it.

I knew someone who felt exactly the same way, so don't despair :-)

I'm not quite so extreme, but I do avoid flu shots about one out of every three years for the same reason. In any case, I don't get the flu very often.

What? A vaccine is nothing if an outside stressor on the immune system! It is designed to provoke the exact immune system response the real virus would, so it can react more quickly to future infections.

Unless you mean that the upper respiratory tract inflammation itself is what would cause the beneficial effect?

Yes, that's the common refrain - that the vaccine itself serves as that same stressor - and of course that is true, on the date that you take the vaccine.

But from then on, while you certainly maintain information from the vaccine in your immune system, you aren't ramping up the actual mechanisms of your immune system like you do when you actually experience influenza.

Think of the temperature raise, the white blood cell production, possible gastro-intestinal reactions - these are all bodily systems being ramped up to a level of performance they don't typically see.

My thought is that if I "successfully" avoid the flu for, say, the next 40 years, those bodily systems will not be as robust - even if I maintain the informational content of the vaccine itself.

Please, please, do not confuse this or lump this in with kooky anti-science, vaccine opponents. I'm just thinking out loud about how stressors on body systems work - which is what my parent was discussing.

The common cold that you get every 12 to 18 month is a different thing than influenza. A lot of people die of it but the actual incidence is not that high that you get it every year (every 10 years would be quite often actually).

I wasn't talking about the common cold.

If you have kids in school, you're going to get the flu every year or two.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com