I’m left in wonderment. There must be something I’m not getting. What else could possibly explain this utter disregard for cold, hard evidence?

It could be irrationality, but irrationality is not normally found in the scientific community. It would be hard for me to totally subscribe to this theory.

I could be missing some information. I would tend to lean toward this one, but I even asked a direct question and the answer flies in the face of this theory.

Perhaps it’s because the masses are so deathly scared of this phenomenon so the scientists just allow ridiculousness to perpetuate because it doesn’t take much doing right now and it keeps ignorant people happy. And it covers their rear ends. This theory is probably the most legitimate.

We’re talking radiation here, where millirem are units measuring the amount of said radiation.

Think about it.

People in the United States absorb about 300 millirem a year from “background radiation” which is simply naturally occurring radiation from the ground or our bodies or the food we eat or the buildings we live in.

The government has a current policy that the general public shouldn’t be exposed to more than an additional 15 millirem a year. Ok, fine, that’s great, if not a little obsessive.

But let’s say there were a dirty bomb exploded in a major city. A dirty bomb is basically a traditional explosive that is laced with radioactive material that would then be blown around the city.

Then are we going to continue this stringent requirement of only 15 millirem a year?

Do you know what amount of radiation has been shown to significantly increase cancer risk? 10,000 millirem. 10000!

Yet there’s a debate about what to do if we faced large-scale, though relatively weak, radiation in a large metro area. Look at the potential cost of cleaning up to the strict current standards. Forget it. Instead, look at that 10,000 figure, give a nice, healthy cushion and set the clean-up standards so that the average person wouldn’t be exposed to more than, say, 2000-5000. That seems more than reasonable to me.

Unless I’m missing something.