Hormesis is Horse Feces (Linear, No Threshold will have to suffice for now)

One of the most dangerous ideas in White House Executive Order 14300 (Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission May 23, 2025) is the instruction to rewrite radiation protection standards by rejecting the theory of LNT (Linear No Threshold) and the principle of ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable).

This executive order has so emboldened pro-nuclear advocates that they are actively promoting the idea of hormesis -- that "a little radiation" is good for everybody. Even if they're correct, they miss the fact that it's irrelevant: We all get "a little radiation" through natural and man-made sources, and the theory that "a little radiation is good for you" doesn't account for that. Hence, "hormesis" is horse feces.

The following essay was written in 2023 for two activists who were wondering about Hormesis, and when the subject came up again recently, these comments from 2023 turned up, along with several other previous essays and my comments regarding EO-1430, which are linked to below.

-- Ace Hoffman, December 18, 2025

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Don't waste your time on Dr. Calabrese's opinion of Linear, No Threshold (Plus: Two good scientists with better sources to check out instead.)

by Ace and Sharon Hoffman

April 25, 2023 (posted online December 18, 2025)

On the 37th anniversary of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster (April 26, 1986 in Ukraine, April 25 in the USA time zones), one can reflect on the enormous number of lies Russian and Ukraine officials told -- and continue to tell -- to hide the truth about how bad that disaster was.

How many lies have been told in America about the dangers (or rather, the supposed lack thereof) from Low Level Radiation? Who is lying and who is merely misled? Sometimes it can be hard to tell. But in this case, Dr. Calabrese disparages someone we know was a very good man and a very good scientist (as well as a mentor to one of us, over a number of years late in Gofman's life).

We've read a number of Gofman's books and subscribed to his newsletter for many years. He was awesome: Meticulous, brilliant and dedicated to finding the truth. He was fair-minded and highly respected, as witness Gofman's lifelong friendship with one of HIS mentors, Glenn Seaborg, despite their differences on important issues.

Reading the paper by Dr. Edward Calabrese titled "The Gofman-Tamplin Cancer Risk Controversy and Its Impact on the Creation of BEIR I and the Acceptance of LNT" (1) is a waste of time because it does not discuss the scientific facts related to LNT. Linear-no-threshold (LNT) is the theory or assumption that the likelihood of health consequences from something (in this case radiation) is approximately proportional to dose, down to any low dose level above zero.

The severity of health effects (in the case of radiation, effects such as cancer, genetic damage, heart disease or other health effects) generally does not diminish with dose, it is only the likelihood of occurrence that is considered "linear" to absorbed dose. There are usually some statistically significant exceptions, some caveats that should be considered, some apples-to-oranges comparisons that are mistaken for exceptions, and some genuine arguments against LNT in specific cases. However, Calabrese's paper does not discuss these issues in any detail.

Instead the article is an attempt to discredit work done by Dr. John Gofman and Dr. Arthur R. Tamplin in the late-1960s and early 1970s, and an opportunity for Calabrese to promote his own views. Calabrese has long been an opponent of LNT, as his own institution (UMass, Amherst) points out "... Calabrese ... continues ... to question the legitimacy of the linear no threshold (LNT) model for risk assessment for ionizing radiation exposure as adopted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and many others." (2).

Almost all the citations in Calabrese's paper (except those citing Calabrese's own work) predate 1980. As Calabrese acknowledges, Gofman and Tamplin sacrificed their careers in the U.S. nuclear establishment (at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) to influence public policy and support the precautionary principle behind LNT-based regulations. The intervening 50+ years of research shows how much we owe these early scientists who worked for radiation standards based on LNT.

Despite Calabrese's attempts to suggest that alternative theories (which have also been around since the 1950s) are valid, the LNT theory is STILL the best way to model radiation damage as the following resources explain.

In 2012 Ian Fairlie addressed controversy surrounding LNT and looked at both historical and contemporary data, including studies of people receiving medical radiation and medical technicians exposed to radiation in their work. Fairlie considers relationships between low-level radiation dose and response in several categories "... (a) linear, (b) supra-linear, (c) sub-linear, (d) threshold, and (e) hormetic." In his review of studies of leukemia in Chernobyl cleanup workers, Fairlie found "... that these are (a) very large studies with statistically significant results, and (b) at very low doses, even down to background levels. In other words, the usual caveats about the validity of the linear shape of the dose response relationship down to low doses are becoming less and less justified." (3)

Fairewinds.org links to a video by Ian Goddard which meticulously analyzes all the studies of radiation exposure in the disputed region below 100 millisieverts that were published from approximately 2006 to 2015 and are available at the National Library of Medicine. Goddard then overlays the results to illustrate how LNT fits the data compared to the fit for two other theories: that no effects occur below the 100 millisievert threshold or that doses below that level are beneficial (hormesis). In all cases, Goddard shows that LNT is a much more accurate representation of the data. (4)

In 2016, the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) published a brief explanation of LNT and why radiation standards should continue to be based on LNT. The posting is a summary of a response to an article in Physics Today that contended (as Calabrese does) that LNT is inaccurate. The NRDC article concludes with the following paragraph: "Opponents of the LNT model simply chose to disregard core research and findings in the field of radiation health physics. The LNT model is based on sound science, and it adequately protects people. It is better to acknowledge that the science at present is consistent with the LNT model." (5)

The controversy surrounding Gofman and Tamplin's views about radiation standards has existed since they first shared their findings. For example, in 1970, Physics Today published a letter to the Editor from Freeman J. Dyson and a response from the editor, Henry A. Knoll concerning Gofman's and Tamplin's Senate testimony. Dyson is complaining about a previously published editorial and points out that Gofman and Tamplin are well aware that the data is incomplete “... Gofman and Tamplin's testimony ..., a large part of which is concerned precisely with the statistical impossibility of proving damage in a large population exposed to low-level radiation. Gofman and Tamplin correctly point out that the damage may be real and serious even when it is not statistically demonstrable.” (6)

(1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9987470/

(2) https://www.umass.edu/news/article/new-calabrese-paper-continues-criticism

(3) https://www.ianfairlie.org/news/the-linear-no-threshold-theory-of-radiation-risks/

(4) https://www.fairewinds.org/nuclear-energy-education//radiation-risk-lnt-model-tested

(5) https://www.nrdc.org/bio/bemnet-alemayehu/hold-fast-linear-no-threshold-radiation-protection#:~:text=Linear%20no%2Dthreshold%20(LNT),in%20the%20low%2Ddose%20range.

(6) https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1063/1.3022273?journalCode=pto (This copy of the Letters to the Editor page includes only a portion of Knoll's response, which attempts to reassure readers that there is no need to be concerned about radioactive releases from nuclear power plants.)

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Previous essays and submissions regarding Hormesis:

Comments for Docket ID NRC-2015-0057 "Linear, No Threshold":
https://acehoffman.blogspot.com/2015/09/comments-for-docket-id-nrc-2015-0057.html

Comments on yesterday's NRC hearing on LNT and ALARA (July 16, 2025):
https://acehoffman.blogspot.com/2025/07/comments-on-yesterdays-nrc-hearing-on.html

A slow, agonizing death... (Ace Hoffman's Nuclear News Blog for April 5th, 2011, a few weeks after the start of the Fukushima-Daiichi triple nuclear meltdowns):
https://acehoffman.blogspot.com/2011/04/slow-agonizing-death.html

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Contact information for the author of this newsletter:

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Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, California USA
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Email: ace [at] acehoffman.org
Founder & Owner, The Animated Software Company

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Book review: Return to Fukushima by Thomas A. Bass (released 2025)

Return to Fukushima
Copyright © 2025 by Thomas A. Bass, Professor of English and Journalism

Reviewed by Sharon and Ace Hoffman, December 2025

In researching and writing "Return to Fukushima", Thomas Bass has done the whole world a great service, because people all around the world are living with radiation.

The book paints a vivid picture of how people are attempting to deal with the aftermath of the March 2011 triple meltdown at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. "Return to Fukushima" emphasizes that what happened was unusual but not unexpected: "In industrial engineering, systems with known risks and rates of failure suffer not from accidents but foreseeable events. Given the dangers inherent in the technology, disasters at nuclear power plants are predictable and inevitable. They are not accidents. They are political decisions with disastrous results." (pg. 161)

"Return to Fukushima" obliterates the nuclear industry's myth that everything was okay at the reactor site until the tsunami inundated the backup diesel generators and pumps. According to the late Masao Yoshida, who led the last-ditch efforts to stop the reactors from melting down, extensive damage happened prior to the tsunami. Cooling pipes had been damaged, the site had lost electrical power, and monitors outside the plant were already measuring radiation levels "approaching 12 millisieverts per hour". (pg 124) ("A dose of 10 sieverts will kill you immediately." pg. 38)

Bass visited the area in 2018 and 2022. He interviewed people who had returned to areas the government claims are safe — but which still have highly contaminated "hot" spots — about their efforts to measure radiation and to mitigate its impacts on their lives. He met them in houses filled with soil and water samples and different types of radiation detectors. Bass talked with people tackling the endless task of removing radiation from their houses (endless, because contaminated soil, air, dust etc. keep coming back in), people who live far away from their families as they attempt to reestablish their livelihoods in the contamination zone.

Each place, plant, or animal that has been contaminated presents a different -- often impossible -- challenge. For example, in a rice paddy, farmers must remove contaminated soil and water without destroying the vital underground drainage systems. Similarly, farmers must decide between cutting down trees or living with new radiation beneath the trees whenever it rains. The people living near Fukushima-Daiichi and other contaminated areas worldwide try to solve these problems with limited information and resources, and with limited success.

Prior to the meltdowns, generations of people in the area harvested crops, raised livestock, and fished for highly prized seafood. Now, fishers incomes have fallen dramatically, despite partial government subsidies that pay them NOT to fish most of the time. Fish in the rivers near the reactors are also more radioactive than might be expected by measuring the surrounding levels, because the radiation bioaccumulates in moss on the bottom of those rivers.

Farmers attempting to restart their lives there face many problems. A couple of inches of topsoil was scraped from hundreds of square kilometers of farmland, bagged into millions of one-ton plastic bags, and hauled away to reduce local radiation levels. The heavy plastic is already deteriorating (of course).

Without the topsoil it is difficult to grow crops, and inevitably many of those crops are still too radioactive to legally offer for sale in Japan (although in some cases the crops may be sold in other countries, including the United States). One woman runs a produce market where every item is labeled with its radioactive burden. (She probably does NOT use the slogan "get it while it's hot"!)

Attempts to pretend that Fukushima has been "cleaned up" include officially determining that soil scraped off playgrounds downwind may simply be buried in other locations, and that vast quantities of contaminated water have been, and will be, diluted and dumped into the Pacific Ocean for the next hundred years or more. Incinerating radioactive debris leaves an ash pile that is often more radioactive, per kilogram, than the original debris. Radioactive smoke from these fires spreads radioactivity around Japan and around the world.

None of this redistribution of radioactive materials eliminates ANY radioactivity that has been and continues to be released. The molten blobs continue to fission under the reactors, just as Chernobyl's "elephant's foot" is still fissioning nearly twenty years after that "accident."

In addition to the personal stories that make up the bulk of this concise book, Bass somehow manages to cover much of the history of nuclear power, the different ways internal and external radiation affect living organisms, the impossibility of removing tritium from contaminated water, the nuclear industry's plans for "new" reactors which are actually based on old (and failed) technology, and many other topics.

Bass's book makes clear how much of a gamble nuclear power really is. Accidents will continue to happen, spoiling the home we live in permanently.

That is not the option society should choose.

"Return to Fukushima" is a quick and compelling read, and is highly recommended. It will disturb you, but if you are ever the victim of a future nuclear accident, it will help to have read this book.

Sharon and Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA

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Thomas Bass also gave an excellent presentation at NEIS Night With the Experts on October 30, 2025 (recording available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seOEIkjpIbk). His presentation covers some of the important research from his book, and the Q&A delves more deeply into many aspects of nuclear power disasters in general and Fukushima-Daiichi in particular.

During his NEIS presentation, Bass pointed out that nearly 15 years after the accident, the spent fuel pools still have not been unloaded and nobody knows exactly where the melted cores are. Fukushima is an ongoing disaster that the Japanese government and the nuclear industry worldwide refuse to acknowledge. Japan is doing everything possible to avoid building a sarcophagus at Fukushima-Daiichi and the word "meltdown" is forbidden.

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Additional comments: Challenges of Tracking Radiation Damage

Let's consider what it means to be among the worst "industrial disasters" in history, nearly all of which are nuclear — except one:

Wikipedia lists Bhopal as the "worst" industrial disaster: A Union-Carbide tank leaked poison gas (methyl isocyanate) in Bhopal, India in 1984. The Union-Carbide disaster is now estimated to have killed 22,000 people according to Amnesty International. Many more were permanently harmed, but there is no way of knowing the exact amount of harm done by that one event.

Radiation deaths -- other than from acute radiation poisoning -- can take years or decades to present themselves and harm or kill their victims, and there is never any certainty about the cause. According to the most widely accepted estimation of radiation damage (known as LNT or Linear, No Threshold), ANY dose can cause cancer, and the likelihood roughly corresponds to the dose. Of course, just as not all cigarette smokers get lung cancer and not all non-smokers don't, the same amount of radiation poisoning might cause a cancer to start that day for one person, and twenty years later or never in their lifetime for someone else. Even if it starts that day, it may not be noticed... until it's too late.

There are also many confounding factors that can affect who gets sick or dies. These factors include age, gender, health, whether or not the person smokes, environmental factors, the specific radioactive isotopes, and whether the radiation exposure is internal or external. People also move from one unhealthy environment to another, and no environment is perfectly healthy. Tracking people for a whole lifetime after an exposure is difficult at best.

The nuclear industry doesn't want to take ANY of this into account! So in their view, the Chernobyl accident caused ONLY deaths from doses known to be quickly and inevitably fatal: High radiation doses cause nausea, vomiting, breakdown of body functions, and death. From Chernobyl, the nuclear industry counts only those "prompt" or near-prompt fatalities, numbering in the dozens, and that's it. Latent cancers? Can't prove the cause because thousands of other factors confound any attempt to definitely assign any particular outcome for any particular patient to any particular source. And statistical data? Takes decades to collect when it's even possible, and inevitably is full of natural human errors.

The nuclear industry and the governments that permit/finance/encourage them all thrive in all this confusion.

Independent scientists have tried to do a better job of estimating the real death toll from Chernobyl and other nuclear disasters. Many independent estimates for Chernobyl are MUCH higher than Bhopal -- 35,000 deaths, for example or even a million or more -- and these are NOT "wild speculation" -- they are uncovering data that authorities INTENTIONALLY never considered! In America and around the world, official epidemiological studies of health effects from nuclear disasters are diligently avoided, year after year.

After Bhopal and Chernobyl, the March 2011 triple nuclear meltdown at Fukushima-Daiichi is often considered the next worst industrial accident in history... but who's to say for sure, with so many unknowns and so little careful research? There are many other contenders, but most of the necessary information about them is unavailable to assess the size of the damage: Mayak, Windscale, Hanford (to name a few) all have multiple cumulative problems...

-- Sharon and Ace Hoffman

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Contact information for the author of this newsletter:

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Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, California USA
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Email: ace [at] acehoffman.org
Founder & Owner, The Animated Software Company

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To the California Central Coast Water Board: Shut Diablo Canyon!

To: NPDES Unit, Central Coast Water Board
895 Aerovista Place, Suite 101
San Luis Obispo, CA 93401

December 8, 2025

I am writing to oppose any further extension or relicensing of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Waste Generating Station (inappropriately known as DCNPP).

Every day, every operating nuclear reactor creates about 250 pounds of new high-level nuclear waste. This newly-created, extremely toxic waste is most radioactive when it is first removed from the reactor. Because it is so radioactive, it must be left in a cooling pool for five years or more before being moved to dry storage. And then what?

Even 100,000 years from now the waste will still be highly toxic, as well as containing components for nuclear bombs, which can be extracted and used by some future (unfortunate) civilization. We are providing humanity with the methods of our own destruction.

Meanwhile, we are providing California with a ready-made potential disaster. Push a wrong button, have a major part fail, suffer unthinkable sabotage... or just wait for an earthquake and/or tsunami.

There is no place on earth, and CERTAINLY not in California, to store the waste. And after 80+ years of making nuclear waste nationally and nearly as long in California, there is still no safe storage, no safe transport method, and no long-term storage plan to handle the growing piles of nuclear waste.

When first removed from a nuclear reactor, spent nuclear fuel is millions of times more toxic than it was before it was placed in the reactor just a few years earlier. Nuclear reactors manufacture toxic waste. As a way to produce electricity, there is nothing more expensive or more dangerous than nuclear power.

Conversely, there is none cheaper or safer than solar and wind power, and the rest of the world knows it, and is going gung-ho on truly clean energy. Jobs, energy security, and safety all come together.

Offshore wind and rooftop solar, aqueduct solar, parking lot solar and a variety of energy storage methods can easily replace DCNPP's unreliable and expensive electricity.

For off-peak times, there is a wide variety of options: Pumped water storage, lifted weight storage, underground vapor pressure storage, battery storage, spinning weight energy storage... an endless variety of options and more becoming available every year.

But back to the problem: DCNPP and the waste it produces.

Fortunately, most of the radioactive waste that is produced does not get out -- if everything goes as planned. However, accidents, sabotage, carelessness, abandonment, war... could all cause a massive unplanned radioactive release.

As long as it operates, about 2000 Curies of tritium is released every year at Diablo Canyon (1000 Curies per reactor per year). Tritium is extremely toxic -- its Relative Biological Effectiveness (RBE) is generally considered to be about 2, but there is a lot of evidence suggesting its RBE should be 3 or 4 (or even 5).

It would be very costly for DCNPP if they had to cut their tritium releases to half or a third, to meet a tighter standard. But it would be appropriate.

Tritium is often called a "low energy beta emitter" as if that makes it safe. However, the statement is both true and misleading at the same time. This fact was explained to me by nuclear physicist Marion Fulk, who was Lawrence Livermore National Labs tritium expert for many decades. What is misleading is that the emitted beta particle is a fast-moving charged particle with the same charge as an electron. (It becomes an electron as it slows to "terrestrial" speeds.) When ANY beta particle is near the speed of light, because it is a charged particle (or "ray" as some experts refer to it), it is moving too fast to have any effect on the other charged particles it passes.

Hence, ALL beta emissions, whether "low energy" or "high energy" do about the same amount of damage, except a higher-energy beta particle does its damage a microscopic distance further away from the source than a low-energy beta particle.

All beta particles are thousands of times more powerful than ANY chemical bond in our bodies, hence, tritium -- and all beta emitters -- are extremely hazardous when inside the body, especially if absorbed into (as part of) the body. Since tritium is usually part of a water molecule (as either HTO or T2O) it might be found just about anywhere in the body. Tritium has a half-life of about 12.3 years.

There is virtually NO natural tritium in the environment, especially below the top few feet of water. The tritium U.S. nuclear reactors release adversely affects fish, plant life, whales, seals, dolphins and people swimming nearby.

However, a greater concern even than the daily releases of tritium and other radionuclides (such as radioactive noble gasses, as well as smaller quantities of radioactive cesium, strontium, etc.) is the possibility of an accident.

I know the Water Board is going to claim they are "forbidden to rule on safety issues" but that's NOT the actual situation. You don't have to "rule on safety" to decide that ANY risk of an accident at DCNPP is too great. And besides: Many of the NRC's "safety assessments" are BASED ENTIRELY on very rough estimates of everything from the work ethics of steam generator assemblers in Japan to the usefulness of "coupons" to indicate the embrittlement of the reactor.

In fact, some data for the NRC's safety estimates, such are their earthquake estimates for DCNPP, are provided by California's own experts, who admit the estimates could be far off.

So you don't have to accept that those guesses "prove" that the reactor WON'T melt down if you extend the license of this decrepit, decaying rust-bucket for half-again its planned lifespan just because the utility wants you to and the craziest Federal government in history wants you to!

You can do the right thing for California instead.

Nuclear power has always had a triad of unsolvable problems: It is ridiculously expensive, frequently unreliable, and always incredibly risky.

All three problems have been a constant of the nuclear industry since its inception.

Regarding cost, the start of nuclear power included the bizarre claim that its electricity would soon be "too cheap to meter." It never was and never will be. How is it going? California has by far the most expensive electric rates in the country, in large part because of Diablo Canyon, especially considering that its owner (PG&E) made sure that solar rooftops cannot provide electricity for their local area when they have excess power, a vital framework for a statewide successful clean energy solution.

Nuclear energy is far from "too cheap to meter" but nevertheless a lot of its costs are hidden by government subsidies, a government-mandated insurance cap (California citizens will pay all uninsured costs of a catastrophe, plus suffer the health effects) and perhaps most of all, by the federal government's promise to take the waste (a broken promise thus far, after more than 60 years).

That broken promise makes the risk stay in California -- possibly forever. Certainly for many decades to come, and probably more than a century. Can we really afford to make more? Can we afford the risk?

The good news is that if we do stop making more nuclear waste in California, the potential size of any possible accident reduces significantly over time, especially in the first few decades after we stop.

The bad news is that even though the potential release size goes down by several orders of magnitude during the first century or so, there will still be enormous risk even after thousands and thousands of years.

The more waste we make, and the more recently we've made it, the greater the risk. That's why the sooner we close DCNPP, the better.

Any accident at Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant is bound to poison the ocean: The ocean we love. The ocean we swim in. The ocean that makes California so nice and so valuable.

Ace Hoffman, [...] Carlsbad, California USA (images and link (below) in online version only)

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This article is interesting, timely, and extremely relevant:

The Ancient Birds of Santa Barbara and Beyond

Some Birds Live Surprisingly Long Lives

Author; Image By Hugh Ranson, Member of the Santa Barbara Audubon Society

Tue Dec 09, 2025 | 9:35am

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Contact information for the author of this newsletter:

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Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, California USA
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Email: ace [at] acehoffman.org
Founder & Owner, The Animated Software Company

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