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Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

> If nuclear hormesis holds up

TIL of that theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis

It's fiercely debated but as time goes on it seems like it is at least partially true. I'm guessing that some effects of radiation really do map better to LNT whereas others map better to radiation hormesis; why and when is a mystery, I think. Maybe some folks more vested in this topic have an idea.

The most fascinating example of hormesis I can think of is that after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, some people who would've received a relatively small dose of radiation seemed to have a slightly lower cancer risk than people who wouldn't have received any additional radiation.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6937943/

I'm sure there is plenty of debate about these studies and their methodology, but I have some suspicions. There seems to have been a lot of handwaving and intentional omission to explain away or ignore why LNT didn't seem to match reality. Radiation hormesis may be an illusion itself, but as it stands it appears LNT is unable to explain experimental evidence sufficiently. We're clearly missing something, and there is a lot of potential conflict of interest, especially given the obvious incentives for the energy sector...

But also, I just read Wikipedia and watch YouTube causally, so hell if I know.

> after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, some people who would've received a relatively small dose of radiation seemed to have a slightly lower cancer risk than people who wouldn't have received any additional radiation.

What if this is survivorship bias selecting for some common trait that correlates with better radiation tolerance and lower cancer risk (like age).

IIRC, it's based on the distance from the blast radius. The confounding thing about it is the fact that there is apparently a range of distance from the explosion where people have lower incidence of cancer than people who were even further way.

That seems hard to explain.

Death typically hits your heart first.

I am not sure what you mean to say with this but reading back through this thread I'm not sure if what is implied here has come through very well. The idea is that well outside the range of where people died from being evaporated, there was a much larger range of people who were exposed to a lot of ionizing radiation from various sources like black rain. But, then, there's a range where people exposed to relatively low doses but higher than background radiation seem to have lower cancer incidence than average. So there is a distance where it is higher than average, then further away from that, it becomes lower than average, before finally going back to average.

This doesn't necessarily imply that radiation hormesis is the only possible explanation, but the easy hand-waves are all basically out. Something weird is happening here and it seems to repeat in different circumstances, too. There is not much to go on other than confounding results and proposed mechanisms as far as I can tell.

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