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Re: COGEMA Says No to LNT
RADSAFE:
For what it's worth, I remember reading, about 25 years ago, in a volume called the Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science published back in the teens of the last century an article decrying the fact that the Indiana legislature had passed a law making p = 3 because it was easier for the school children to remember. It was too hard for school children to remember 3.14156 or 3 1/7th. Therefore everyone in Indiana would use 3 as the value of p.
It seems that many folks like LNT for the same reason. It is easier to work with. It's so much easier to make predictions as to the number of deaths or whatever from cumulative small doses if we have a liner relationship that extends down to zero. It also may help in other predictions. But, as any good modeler will tell you, it doesn't matter how good your model is in explaining your data, it isn't worth a damn in making predictions beyond your data points if it doesn't reflect reality.
As many people have pointed out in messages to RADSAFE, there are a myriad of documented studies where LNT fails in the real world. However, we will not get agreement by name calling and accusation. So, as Bjorn, and others, previously said, can't we raise the level of discussion on this topic?
Read the whole statement someone posts instead of getting all worked up about what you think they said or by what you concluded by reading it with your own personal biased glasses working at 120%.
Just my own opinions and no necessarily those of my employer.
Kjell Johansen, PhD
Point Beach Nuclear Plant
Two Rivers, WI
kjell.johansen@nmcco.com
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