Scary radiation, the gift that keeps on giving

Tyrants who seek to control others will use fear as the means of control.  There's nothing like injury or death that can concentrate the mind on doing what the tyrant wishes.  If the tyrant wants to hurt you, you can give in or you can fight.  Either way, the risk to yourself is high.  People tend to avoid danger, and thus avoid those situations.  It is a built in device that usually serves us well.  But the tyrant manipulates this to his advantage.  He finds ways to scare people into compliance.  He doesn't have to threaten you personally, he just has to find something to scare you.  One way to scare people is to find a demon like radiation in order to get the people to do what the tyrant wishes.  Today's tyrants do not wish for mankind to have the benefit of nuclear energy, so the radiation is the demon which is being used to frighten people away from a beneficial resource.

Make no mistake, radiation can kill you.  Radiation is energy.  Like all forms of energy, enough of it will kill you.  The thing that makes radiation so scary is that you have no sense to detect it.  You can see a fire, you can feel its heat.  Electricity may be hard to see sometimes, but you know better than to touch a downed power line.  A bolt of lightening is plenty scary though.  Electricity and fire are dangerous, just like radiation can be.  But we understand fire, and we understand electricity.  Thus, it isn't easy to demonize the two forms of energy as something we cannot trust.  Radiation from nuclear energy is easy to demonize because it is hard to understand.

In order to discredit nuclear energy, one thing these tyrants tell us is that even small amounts of radiation can hurt us.  It is said to increase the rate of cancer proportional to the amount of radiation dosage.  There's a fancy term for this, it is called the linear no threshold model.  Basically it says the more radiation the more the threat.  This seems reasonable, but there's a problem with the model.  It doesn't always work that way.  Small amounts of radiation do not seem to be a problem.  An example is a small town in Iran which averages 10 times more than the maximum permissible radiation dose.  You would expect much higher cancer rates, but this is not the case.

In fact, a small amount of radiation may have a beneficial effect.  A phenomenon known as hormesis. This phenomenon is well known and practiced in medicine.  Could there be a radiation hormesis?  If there is, then a lot of regulations will have to be rewritten.  But that would make a lot of tyrants very unhappy.  They won't be able to scare people so easily anymore.

Our nuclear energy policies are misguided.  It may get worse if Bernie Sanders gets the nomination and wins the presidency.  He wants to decommission all nuclear power plants.  Undoubtedly it is due to the fear of radiation.

The fear of radiation has cost us plenty.  If it weren't so out of control, we wouldn't have the problems we have today.  There would be no Al Qaeda.  No ISIS.  No terrorism.  There would be energy independence.  Jobs would be more plentiful.  Yes, and the incidence of cancer may very well be lower than today's.  Radiation could be a benefit to us instead.

All of this is happening because those who do not wish us well have managed to scare us out of using radiation as a resource.  For the tyrants of this world, radiation is the gift that keeps on giving.