Radiation Hazards
- See also: Nuclear_power_reconsidered
One of the primary obstacles to nuclear power is the public's fear of radiation. While ionizing radiation can certainly be dangerous at high doses, because most people have difficulty distinguishing between a little and a lot, this has often been oversimplified to, "The only acceptable amount of radiation is zero!" That goal can never be met, since (for example) all living things are radioactive. A sensible criterion must be based on an understanding of where radiation comes from, what sorts of damage radiation does, and how much radiation it takes to do it.[1]
Figure 1 compares a range of radiation exposures, from the dose received from sleeping next to another human for a night (0.05 Sv) to the usually fatal dose of 4 Sv, a hundred million times greater. Warning: such comparisons can be misleading unless one understands that some are "delivered all at once" and others are "accumulative" over times up to a year. There is great controversy over the latter, since DNA usually "heals" strand-breaks due to free radicals produced by ionizing radiation (see Fig. 2) within hours or days,[2] suggesting that doses may not "accumulate" over longer periods.
