If there’s no safe dose, then why aren’t we all dead already?
There is no safe dose means that risk is proportional to exposure. Expose yourself to a little dose and increase your risk of cancer/leukemia etc. a little in proportion. Do this long term then small increases above background are compounded daily. And it’s necessary to factor in all vectors of exposure: external sources like medical xrays, dental xrays and air travel (above background exposure) and internal sources air/water food. And you need to stay perfectly healthy during exposure - that’s why people undergoing radiation treatments avoid exposing themselves to flu etc. Also, note that the young, elderly and female are more sensitive to radiation damage then the rest of the population.
A general response to irradiation is immune suppression - so someone who would have been expected to recovery from a disease might not because their immune system was busy repairing radiation damage.
Who is indifferent to increasing their risk for early dementia, cardiac death, leukemia and “a host of other illnesses and syndromes” cited by the literature? What industry should get the green light for increasing the cancer/leukemia risk world wide and do so for the forseeable future because of their incompetence?
“If there’s no safe dose,”
The government and most rad health outfits use a linear, no threshold model for risk. That means that any amount of radiation carries some risk.
It scales linearly. BIER VI calculated one excess cancer death in a population of 100 exposed to 10 REM whole body, out of a background of 42 (statistically 42 out of 100 will die of cancer, expose the 100 to 10 REM and the cancer deaths become 43, everyone else dies from other causes). So in a linear model 10 REM has roughly a 1% risk, and 1 REM a .1% risk, and so forth on down to zero. But every exposure including background carries SOME risk, so they say “no safe dose” and push the concept of ALARA, keep all doses as low as reasonably attainable.
The model also assumes that, since there is no threshold, it is possible that a tiny dose could start a fatal cancer in a susceptible person, and this includes background radiation.
Some papers suggest a benefit to health from small radiation doses. This is pretty controversial. it’s called Radiation Hormesis. The “official” rad health policies do not recognize that, though.