A 2025-07-12 WSJ article called the Linear No Threshold (LNT) radiation the model, the model that assumes "there is no safe level of exposure to radiation". LNT makes no such claim. LNT converts a dose rate profile into a cancer incidence prediction. That's it. LNT like many other possible models predicts a positive cancer incidence for any dose rate profile whose cumulative dose is positive. //
A far better definition of LNT is: the model that assumes radiation damage to our DNA is unrepairable. Harm just keeps building up. Therefore, the only thing that counts is total dose. How quickly or slowly that dose is incurred is irrelevant.
The no repair assumption was proposed about 100 years ago, at a time when we knew nothing about DNA. We did not even know it existed. We now know a providential Nature has equipped us with a remarkably effective DNA repair system. She had to do this to protect our DNA from our own oxygen based metabolism which produces double strand breaks of the DNA helix at least 25,000 times more rapidly than average background radiation. This repair system can be overwhelmed if the dose rate is high enough; but such dose rates will almost never be encountered by the public in a nuclear power plant release.
LNT denies well established, indisputable biology. In 2018 [2015], Nobel prizes were awarded to three scientists that have been in the forefront of figuring out just how the repair processes work.
