Low-dose study finds no effects

[FBaggins]

3. This is hardly the first with the same implications.

Here's a recent example

Berkeley Lab Researchers Find Evidence Suggesting Risk May Not Be Proportional to Dose at Low Dose Levels

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), through a combination of time-lapse live imaging and mathematical modeling of a special line of human breast cells, have found evidence to suggest that for low dose levels of ionizing radiation, cancer risks may not be directly proportional to dose. This contradicts the standard model for predicting biological damage from ionizing radiation – the linear-no-threshold hypothesis or LNT – which holds that risk is directly proportional to dose at all levels of irradiation.

“Our data show that at lower doses of ionizing radiation, DNA repair mechanisms work much better than at higher doses,” says Mina Bissell, a world-renowned breast cancer researcher with Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division. “This non-linear DNA damage response casts doubt on the general assumption that any amount of ionizing radiation is harmful and additive.”

Bissell was part of a study led by Sylvain Costes, a biophysicist also with Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division, in which DNA damage response to low dose radiation was characterized simultaneously across both time and dose levels. This was done by measuring the number of RIF, for “radiation induced foci,” which are aggregations of proteins that repair double strand breaks, meaning the DNA double helix is completely severed

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2011/12/20/low-dose-radiation/

The real study though is real life. There are plenty of areas around the globe where ongoing radiation exposure is significantly higher than others...and the difference between the two is larger than the dose rates commonly debated here. So all a researcher would need to do is compare cancer rates among long-time residents of these areas and show a statistical significance.