Radioactivity muddles the alphabet of DNA

[caraher]

19. The sad thing is that there is an actual intelligent scientific debate to be had about LNT

You'd think the handlers for the guest who likes to use "greenie" as an insult would offer much better arguments than this "Is not/Is too" stuff focused on the meaning of "linearity." I could supply some myself, but I'm much more entertained by waiting to see whether the research team eventually feeds them to the keyboard warrior.

The OP is about an interesting piece of computational chemistry. I wouldn't get overly excited about claims to groundbreaking novelty in a university press release announcing the paper (which is the real source for the article). We know there are damage mechanisms and repair mechanisms, but the LNT issue is less about identifying the exact details of one such mechanism (or even whether they've identified a particular kind of damage that might be harder to identify and fix) than about how all the mechanisms interact in a specific dose rate range.

The LNT hypothesis may be wrong. It has also formed the basis for decades of radiation protection policy as a conservative way to manage uncertainty about low-dose radiation effects, and has long guided the engineering practice in the nuclear industry. It's certainly not something dreamed up by anti-nuclear voices to drum up irrational fear of radiation.