I fail to understand how whomever "wins" this debate will affect anything other than the egos of those involved.
At the risk of repeating myself too often (However, if no one's listening, am I really repeating myself - let's debate that!), we have no one but ourselves to blame for any overly restrictive standards. When generous research funding was available, it was expedient to promote LNT as a means of procuring more than our fair share. Well, strange bedfellows always look a lot worse the morning after! It's too late to change this, however.
The opinions expressed are strictly mine.
It's not about dose, it's about trust.
Bill Lipton
liptonw@dteenergy.com
RuthWeiner@AOL.COM wrote:
To Bill Lipton and others:I, too, am of the opinion that the LNT debate is probably the most important debate in health physics (and possibly in environmental health) today. We not only base all our regulations on this, we spend zillions predicting completely hypothetical "latent cancer fatalities" (which should really read "latent fatal cancers") and are even applying this totally speculative hypothesis to substances that have a well-extablished threshold of effect. I would like to propose an amendment to NEPA that requires assessment of DETECTABLE impact on the environment. Detecting even 50% of background is tough. 15 mrem/year is probably undetectable.
Ruth Weiner, Ph. D.
ruthweiner@aol.com