[bvw]

Not really, that kind of stuff is on target. If you can understand that you have to use different kinds of sensors to measure radiation, you can also understand that the body in whole, the systems of the body (like the deeper skin layers), the cells and the substructures within the cells all have variant responses to different kinds of radiation and even different dosings over time.

For example, human A is exposed exposed over a year to a daily low dosage of radiation. Human B is exposed to the same total but in bursts with a few hours between them. And Human C gets the whole dosage in one shot. All get the same Rem dosage for a year.

Both human A and human C end up healthy. Human C picks up some radiation-induced problem. Why? Because low dosages over time the body can handle in normal operation, and trauma level dosages cause the body's emergency systems to kick in to repair and limit the damage, but in the middle, the damages are too much over time for the normal metabolism, but too low for the emergency systems to kick in.

[DBrow]

It’s been a long time since the Oak Ridge mouse (and other mammal) experiments. I agree with your concerns.

The BIER reports are based on old data, but they do seem to converge on 1% “excess cancers” above noise for every 10 REM whole-body exposure.

We will NEVER have the data, except by syndromic monitoring. We expose lots of people to the soft xray from CRT’s, for instance, and hope that nothing statistically significant comes up.

My original point, put in energy terms, reads like this: you get exposure to more energy on the actual flight than you get from the scanner, by a factor of hundreds to one.

The scanner dose, or energy, is less than or equal to natural background in most places (20 uR here according to a Ludlum scintillator).