Current regulations are too much stringent?

Like any other pollutant, radioactive materials and radiation are also present in our environment since the formation of earth.

The fear of radiation in everyone’s mind is due to the destruction caused by the effects of explosions of atomic bombs over Japan in 1945. The possible innumerable benefits of radiation in medicine and industry are simply not considered or exploited enough or publicized by the policy makers due to fear of negative reaction by the public. The ghost memories of the bombings and the Chernobyl disaster always remained fresh in the public mind! This is typical “Culture of fear” being promoted by various groups of people (so-called anti-nuclear lobby) with vested interests.

The organizations dealing with radiation protection also promote this culture by accepting the Linear Non-Threshold (LNT) approach for radiation protection and safety. Regulators have not much choice but to formulate regulations to address the acceptable dose limits which are based on the calculated risks assuming much debated LNT approach.

As such, the background radiation levels around us vary quite a bit from place to place and in some places it is of the order of the current dose limits. People are living in those places of high background radiation for ages. No abnormal health issues are observed.

At the Chernobyl accident site, the emergency workers (about 30 workers) who received doses above 4000 mSv have died within a few weeks due to Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS). There were 140 workers who received less than 2000 mSv dose (which is 100 times more than the annual dose limit for radiation workers) and none died. In Fukushima (Japan), 30 workers received doses in the range of 100 and 250 mSv range in a few days and none is expected to die of the radiation exposure. In medical therapy, for the treatment of cancer, thousands of mSv doses are given to kill the cancer tissues.

There was no increased risk of cancer observed amongst the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki whose exposures were below 100 mSv. Animal experiments could not prove the non-threshold theory to induction of cancer by radiation exposure assumed by the radiation protection fraternity.

Once we accept this fact, there is no need to have such stringent regulations for the applications of radiation and radioisotopes. One can save un-justified expenditure of resources, hardship and suffering to the population (based on the lecture given by Prof. Wade Allison, University of Oxford, August 2011).

Let us NOT say NO to the benefits of applications of radiation such as food irradiation, medical / industrial applications, pest control and electricity generation.