Hypothesis on radiation is a waste

Blaine Howard isn't surprised. He passed that stage long ago. But he continues to be disappointed at the abject lack of public understanding regarding the danger of things minimally nuclear.

The 73-year-old retired health physicist could only shake his head as he read his Tuesday morning newspaper and noted that the influential Alliance for Unity has registered its official opposition to the transport of nuclear waste into Utah.

Names like Huntsman, Eccles, Ballard and Niederauer are behind the A-for-U, which lends a huge amount of credibility to whatever the group is for or against — even if, as Blaine suggests, in this case it doesn't know what it's talking about.

To cue up the broken record Blaine has been playing for years, it is his opinion, as well as that of any other credentialed health physicists he associates with, that there is no undue public risk in the transport and storing of low levels of radiation — here or anywhere else.

Of the low-level uranium mill tailings in Ohio that stirred up the latest outcry against nuclear waste coming to the Utah desert, Mr. Howard says, "If my children went out and played in it, I wouldn't be concerned that they would be harmed by the radiation."

And yes, he loves his kids.

At the crux of his reasoning is a scientific belief that the linear non-threshold hypothesis is incorrect.

And what is the linear non-threshold hypothesis? In layman's terms, it is the theory that if a lot of radiation is harmful, then lesser amounts are proportionately harmful.

Blaine says that theory is flawed. In fact, he says, there comes a point when radiation turns the corner and actually becomes beneficial.

As the latest example of that, he points to 1,500 apartments constructed in Taiwan in the early 1980s with steel bars that unknowingly exceeded legal radiation levels. More than 10,000 people lived amid this supposed danger for more than 15 years, and the result, instead of a radiation nightmare, is a rate of cancer 96.5 percent lower for the residents of the apartments than for the Taiwanese population at large.

"It appears that the Taiwan Atomic Energy Council, by failing to 'protect' these people from the harmful effects of radiation, allowed them to receive the beneficial effects of radiation," says Blaine.

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