Accidents, Tests, and Incidents

The U.S. radium dial painters of the 1920s comprised an early cohort of several thousand workers at increased risk of developing radiation induced cancers. Since the last year of World War II, there have been a variety of other nuclear events, including A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, thousands of underground, underwater, surface, and airborne nuclear weapon tests at various sites throughout the world, gross radioactive contamination of the Russian Mayak nuclear site and associated exposure of residents along the Techa River, the eastern Urals nuclear waste tank explosion in 1957, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident in 1986 in the Ukraine, and Taiwan residential buildings contaminated with ⁶⁰Co. All these activities resulted in exposure of large human populations to low doses of ionizing radiation. These populations have been extensively studied in a myriad of epidemio-logical studies, none of which show increased cancer mortality at low doses, but instead show benefits with less than expected risks from low-dose radiation exposures (Table 4.1) [1–7].

The precautionary principle, an offspring of the LNT, leads to unacceptable societal penalties, as demonstrated in the aftermath of the Chernobyl catastrophe [1].