Issue 2020 – 5 Hello students, parents, professionals in 121 countries. This newsletter and its related website, allaboutenergy.net are dedicated to understanding the importance of energy, energy by-products and energy related sciences for the modern world. We cover many topics on the website. In each issue of the newsletter we focus on one or a few topics.
In this issue, we focus on understanding low dose radiation and its health benefits, including for the COVID-19 pandemic. The biological effects of low dose radiation are a particularly important field of science related to nuclear energy. In the first half of the 20th Century low dose radiation was used to treat many health problems. With the development of the nuclear bomb in the 1940s, alarmists developed a campaign to misrepresent radiation, saying that it was bad and should be prohibited. It was called the Linear No-Threshold Hypothesis with Collective Dose Corollary or LNT for short. It is represented by the straight white line between the orange and light green areas in the graphic to the left. This is what the world has been forced to use for guidelines since the 1950s. It has hampered the use of nuclear energy and nuclear medicine. It has destroyed lives by unnecessarily relocating people near Chernobyl and Fukushima. It has caused early deaths by limiting use of diagnostic nuclear medicine. The vertical axis is biologic response to radiation. The horizontal axis is radiation dose. The left side of the graph is how life has prospered bathed in natural background radiation. Alarmists demand technology have no man-made radiation or man-made radiation far below background levels. As radiation increases moving right on the graph, biological processes respond. Biological reality is represented by the J shaped white line between the blue and maroon areas. It says that low dose radiation provides beneficial effects on living things - the large blue area. For design of nuclear power plants, the twolegged straight graph between the green and blue areas would be simple to follow and eliminate tremendous unnecessary costs.
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