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Comment by devjab | Hacker News Reader

Radon gas is a pretty big thing in construction where I live since our underground is mainly boulder clay (which apparently has or leaks or whatever a lot of radon gas). Anyway, In Denmark a little over 5000 get lung cancer every year, and 300 of thouse are from radon gas. Acording to our Kræftens Bekæmpelse (anti-cancer NGO) there may be an additional 25% risk of radon causing lung cancer if you smoke.

Since around 2000, it's been part of building regulations that you gotta build air-gapped foundations in family homes. Those who can measure radon gas are adviced to buy things to fight it, and you can reduce it to basically 0% for little money.

I never really considered it from an advertisement perspective as it's adviced by our government and non-profit NGO's. So there is that, if that helps you.

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> and you can reduce it to basically 0% for little money.

which is why I'm confused by people second questioning how bad it actually is in context of _fixing_ it (not in context of a national health scope)

if there is something which is known to be quite unhealthy in a non small degree, and there is a cheap fix why wouldn't you just fix it. In the end if it's very bad, or slightly less bad or the 10th leading cause instead or whatever doesn't matter, fixing it is affordable and it's guaranteed dangerous on long term exposure so you do it.

Is radon mitigation affordable, though? Someone in another subthread said they got quotes between $1600 and $3000. Even the low end of that is a difficult amount to spend for a lot of people in the US. If they're going to spend it (if they even can), they're going to want to know it's going to meaningfully decrease their risk of cancer.

I'm not saying it's not worth it -- that's the point, I don't know -- but I agree with people upthread that it would be nice to have better information with which to make decisions.

It might be significantly cheaper if installed in new buildings. Even if not, it barely moves the needle compared to the total cost of building a house, and it's almost nothing spread across the lifetime of a typical building.

I don't know where you live but where I live in the Midwestern suburbs, $3k is on the low end for almost any significant home improvement/repair project except maybe repainting a room.

Midwest here. Radon mitigation usually starts at $1k. And can go up depending if they are drilling into the slab. For most cases it’s a trivial solve.

And those repairs often get put off years or until a house sale becomes dependent on the.

Relatively cheap for people that own a house

I found most people dont know about this or think about this until there is a home purchase and home inspection -- that is when it is revealed, and typically when it is remediated as part of the purchase contingencies. If youre living in the same home for a while, you wouldnt typically know. Also, if you are a renter, you probably wont know and the landlord will probably purposefully not want to test.

In my state, the state forces some of these tests (e.g., smoke detector) as part of the sales process so at least there is some hook for testing.

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