Yup, Japan has them too, and some have been nuclear industry funding recipients.
One of them says that the linear, no threshold model is a "tool" and possibly not scientifically sound.
It may not be, but he needs to provide evidence to convince others, and he obviously hasn't.
I don't know what work he's done on salamanders or other animals, but it's sure is early to declare that there are no harmful effects.
It's pretty simple really, let's work with a comparison to global warming. The smallest unit of carbon dioxide is the molecule CO2. That molecule traps heat within its vibrational quantum state. If I add one extra molecule to my room and I don't see the temperature change on my thermometer, that's because my thermometer can't measure that small change in heat. It's a detection problem.
The smallest unit of ionizing radiation is the photon (or a particle like the beta). That photon can ionize DNA both directly and indirectly. So with one photon there is a non-zero risk of DNA being damaged. DNA can also repair itself, but it doesn't do so perfectly (otherwise we wouldn't be here). So there is a non-zero risk of DNA mis-repair. There can be no threshold.
When we try to measure the degree (ha!) of cancer risk increase by studying humans exposed to various radiation levels we run into the thermometer effect described above. It takes lots of CO2 to influence the thermometer and it takes lots of photons to observe a statistically significant increase in cancer, but each molecule of CO2 and each photon contribute to the overall endpoint.
Sometimes we have to pool across many studies to see an effect.
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