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Comment by nsxwolf | Hacker News Reader

I feel like we are talking past the sale here. Is rainwater actually unsafe to drink, or did someone just change a number in a spreadsheet? After I learned about how residential radon was determined to be the “second biggest cause of lung cancer” I stopped immediately trusting these things.

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Is rainwater actually unsafe to drink, or did someone just change a number in a spreadsheet?

Both can be true.

We know for sure one is true. The other is still TBD. Publications should be more forthcoming about that.

Are you one of the folks that doesn't have kitchen ventilation because, after all, how harmful can a little gas be?

No. I even have a radon mitigation system. I just don’t think the science that led to its installation is rigorous. It’s a basement not a coal mine.

> After I learned about how residential radon was determined to be the “second biggest cause of lung cancer” I stopped immediately trusting these things.

> I just don’t think the science that led to its installation is rigorous. It’s a basement not a coal mine.

Can you explain this thinking? What you've said so far sounds like an argument from incredulity, not backed up by anything.

Radon testing is fairly straight-forward, the nuclear science behind it is all rigorous and well understood; radon gas decays into radioactive "radon daughters" that, not being gases, settle as dust in places where there is poor airflow. You can test for radon in a building by either sampling the air in the building, or by leaving a filter there for a while and then testing the filter for radon's daughters. If you do this testing, you find that radon is prevalent in some areas and a non-issue in many others. Do you think this testing was never done, or the results mistaken for some reason?

> “second biggest cause of lung cancer”

Maybe you're incredulous because you heard this claim out of context? Smoking is said to be the cause of 80-90% of lung cancers; the "second biggest cause" is just the scraps, under 20%.

We don’t know that the amounts of radon found in residential environments is harmful because it’s never been studied. The claims about the number of deaths caused are arrived at by starting with something we do have knowledge about - the massive amounts of radon in coal mines and it’s effects on miners - and then drawing a straight line on a graph, assuming there’s no threshold where radon risk drops to zero, and computing what share of lung cancer deaths would result from that model.

You're wrong, radon isn't only found in coal mines. Testing has revealed that in some parts of the world there are very high radon levels in basements. This isn't true everywhere, it depends on local geological conditions. The mutagenic qualities of these radioactive isotopes is settled science.

You have a good point. It’s hard because radon dramatically boosts the risks for people who smoke or have other risk factors.

But since remediation is now part of the way of doing things, ironically nobody has an incentive to learn more.

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