AW: [ RadSafe ] Chernobyl's Reduced Impact

[Maury Siskel]

Hi John,
Thanks very much for your feeling response.  Hopefully in time, the 
public will come to accept things nuclear as routinely as we now view 
gunpowder, antibiotics, satellites, and cheeseburgers. It has taken a 
lot of effort and time for the public to accept the realities of 
replacing longbows with muskets and trebuchets with ballistic missiles.  
We will get there (with the help of most of you on this List)  but 
nuclear digestion is painfully slow.
Cheers,
Maury&Dog      maurysis at ev1.net
___________
The sole universal physical constant in our solar system is human 
behavior -- not the speed of light.

========================
John Jacobus wrote:

> Maury,
> Thanks for comments and sorry for the delay in responding. I know 
> exactly what you are talking about. I routinely edit questions from 
> people who have or have children who had received diagnostic test.  I 
> and those who respond do try and educate the questioners. We often 
> spend quite a bit of time.
> Such people are not ignorant and present good arguements about risks. 
> But we try and educate and reduce their concerns. I am not sure we 
> will completely reduce their fears, but we try.
>
> What I am coming to realize that this list presnts an opportunity for 
> people to complain about these issues. However, few do anything but 
> complain.
>
> --- Maury Siskel <maurysis at ev1.net> wrote:
>
>> Please forgive the anecdotal intrusion, but ... I know and have 
>> known  uncounted numbers who fear radiation, BUT who have
>> little clue what is meant by ionizing radiation (not to say low level 
>> or chronic), by LNT,  by PET, by CT, by MRI, and even in a serious 
>> sense X-Ray. But radiation?  sure everybody knows about that -- the 
>> invisible rays that killed masses
>> of people from the atom bombs in Japan and that might kill us by a 
>> terrorist dirty bomb .... John, one can bandy
>> technically correct distinctions, but there are vast numbers of folks 
>> who have a variety of obvious vested interests in exacerbating fears 
>> of anything suggesting  radiation -- including even some sincere 
>> believers. This extends to some who expressly expend efforts to 
>> distort, suppress, and even hide
>> scientific data suggesting human benefits from some exposure to 
>> radiation. Supposedly, one goal of science and govt
>> is to promote knowledge.
>>
>> The promotion seems to me to have been increasingly
>> poor in recent decades. Often all one can do is feel dismay while 
>> continuing to work in the correct direction.
>> Cheers,
>> Maury&Dog maurysis at ev1.net
>> =====================
>> Rainer.Facius at dlr.de wrote:
>>
>>> John:
>>> "Do you know of anyone who has a fear of chronic low level ionizing 
>>> radiation exposure?"
>>
>> Maybe the American media and the public in your personal perception 
>> retain a more rational stance regarding chronic low level ionizing 
>> radiation. Similarly, maybe your clientele - educated trained 
>> radiation workers - indeed knows that neither
>> theoretical nor empirical reasons exist to worry about health 
>> detriment from such exposures below say between 10 and 50 mSv 
>> annually  (I concede that the true value of a proper threshold is 
>> subject to scientifically legitimate debate).
>>
>>> In Europe and particularly in Germany the examples to the contrary 
>>> abound. Hardly a month elapses where radiophobia is not propagated 
>>> by media reports - often backed up by reference to peer reviewed 
>>> nonsense-papers. A not too old example that comes to my mind was the 
>>> following excerpt from the GermanTimes or Newsweek Magazine, DER 
>>> SPIEGEL:
>>
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