Conca opined in mid-2021 that !e nuclear industry certainty values human life. All one has to do is look at Occupational Safety and Health Administration data to see that nuclear workers have the safest work environment, the lowest mortality rates, and the highest average pay of almost any industry.
Most of this is due to strict adherence to procedures and protocols that we have developed over the past 70 years, plus the fact that we understand the behavior of radiation and radioactive materials so well. None of this needs to change. Society, however, has a skewed idea of the value of human life. We have spent upward of a trillion dollars trying to adhere to the ultra- low radiation limits foisted upon us by the linear no- threshold hypothesis, or LNT. The LNT tries to save a few theoretical lives far in the future, while not saving tens of millions of real lives now for the same amount of money. This is as much an ethical issue as it is a scientific one.
Unjustified fear of low levels of radiation (<10 rem or 0.1 Sv, acute or otherwise) was an important part of the Cold War, purposely pushed by non-governmental organizations and countries such as the Soviet Union and China as a way to stop aboveground nuclear tests by the United States. No human
cohort has ever been found to be adversely affected by doses below 10 rem/yr, or even 10 rem acute, not even the Japanese bomb survivors. And we have tried very hard to find them.
This fear has led to some unintended consequences, such as people foregoing life saving diagnostic procedures and treatments, as well as an intransigence on the part of lawmakers and anti-nuclear groups to value nuclear energy, the best low- carbon, safest energy source we have to limit global warming.
More immediate, however, is the large amount of money and effort spent by our country, as well as others, to protect against what has never been demonstrated to be at all harmful. This fear of radiation originated after the dropping of the atomic bombs in 1945 and was coded into regulations around 1959, when the world adopted the singularly unproven LNT hypothesis for the negative biological effects of radiation and its resultant policy, ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable).
Dr. Conca concluded that the DOE could save over $400 billion, which, if put toward immunization in Africa against the three largest scourges, would save up to a billion lives over the next 20 years. If spent in the United States on health care and medical research, it would save millions of lives. Compared to saving a few virtual lives in the distant future, this is an easy, and correct, ethical decision to make.
The presence or absence of a threshold dose for radiation is a societal decision that society has been left out of. That needs to change. We have real problems that need to be solved. Yes, we need to deal with radiation doses above, say, 5 rem, 7 rem, or whatever level is decided upon as the threshold. But epidemiologically, there is always a threshold. No different than mercury, cadmium, or lead. Everything is in the environment at some level, but the old adage that dose makes the poison is still true.
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