The Four "Facts" Of Dr. Wade Allison

From the blog Atomic Insights, I learned of a physicist named Wade Allison who is preaching the need for a new understanding of radiation safety. 

Why?  He mentions 4 facts.  Let's dig in:

1. The radiation levels in the nuclear waste storage hall at Sellafield, UK are so low that anyone would have to stay there for a million hours to receive the same dose that any patient on a course of radiotherapy treatment receives to their healthy tissue in a single day.

I'm not sure what the point is here.  Perhaps the Sellafield waste contains non-gamma emitting nuclides and so the dose rates are low.  Perhaps the storage arrangement is such that the dose rates from gamma emitters have been shielded.  Clearly, there's a difference between accepting a new, later developing cancer risk in order to treat an existing cancer (radiotherapy) compared to just accepting an increased cancer risk (high radiation levels at a storage facility).

Just because I willingly go to surgery to resolve a medical problem doesn't mean I want to suffer many small cuts in other circumstances.

This isn't an argument for a new understanding of radiation safety...it's an argument that we currently understand radiation safety.

    2. The radiation dose experienced by the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs caused  0.6%  to die of radiation-induced cancer between 1950 and 2000, that is about 1/20 of the chance of dying of cancer anyway and less than the chance of being killed on US highways in that period.

I'm not sure where the 0.6% came from.  According to the RERF (the people conducting the study) there was an exposed group of 94,000 and 1,900 got excess cancer (solid cancer) or died from leukemia.  This is an excess of 2%. 

It is this data that is largely the basis for current radiation safety practices.  And we've known how small the risk is relative to the other risks which Allison points out.

I don't see how this second point lends itself to the need for a new understanding....it's an argument that we currently understand radiation safety.


3.  The wildlife at Chernobyl today is reported to be thriving, despite being radioactive.

This just shows that radioactivity is less detrimental to wildlife than human civilization.  The same outcome would be expected for low levels of mercury, asbestos, etc.   Human civilization comes at the expense of wildlife.

This point has no relevance to our understanding of radiation safety at all.


4.  The mortality of UK radiation workers before age 85 from all cancers is 15-20% lower than comparable groups.

This is a well-known effect in epidemiology called the "healthy worker effect".  Here's a 1999 article which describes it, but it was known long before then.

This point suggests that Dr. Allison might need remedial training in epidemiology.

In summary, it seems that Dr. Allison doesn't understand the flow from epidemiological results (from the A-bomb studies he mentioned) to a regulatory framework (radiation safety as currently practised). 

He thinks we need a new understanding, but it seems the one in need of a new understanding is him.