Hacker News Reader

Could you expand on this? I didn’t understand the problem to be the threshold, but the convenient underestimation of dose by a factor of 2-20x.

View on HN

It's not my place to evaluate which method of calculating the exposure was correct. Just pointing out, that 1 mSv is a rather small amount of radiation. The smallest amount of radiation where one sees some indications of an increase in cancer risk is at 50-100 mSv [1].

I'm not arguing either way whether this should have an impact on any payments. Putting the threshold for compensation at 1 mSv is very conservative and will lead to the payment of compensation for many cancers that weren't caused by radiation. Which, again, is fine by me because I do believe that very little interest was paid to the protection of the neighboring populations.

[1] Pretty good summary: https://www.pnas.org/content/100/24/13761

The issue here is both the linear no threshold and threshold model are indistinguishable with our current data.

The problem is cancer is really quite common and has many sources so it’s hard to say what if any level is actually safe to expose X million people to. At least with medical X rays there is some benefit to offset risk, but without that it’s much harder to justify.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com