I know. I bet the radio-quackery people don't, though :-).

I'm an architect, so I often deal with councils, and I love making a mockery of certain inner-western Sydney yuppified councils with 'Nuclear-Free-Zone' signs everywhere. I always ask for written permission from the council to not use smoke detector in our buildings, then have fun watching council droids go cross-eyed and squirm when you tell them SDs have got Americium in them. I have one in a packet I bring to meetings, as they almost never believe you until they see the trefoil on the packaging. The reactions you get sometimes are hilarious - people jumping out of chairs and backing away, sometimes running out of the room. A building inspector usually turns up to calm things down.

I've also had the same councils reject a pre-school (where one was badly needed, btw) because of high-tension powerlines a few hundred metres away. Ever tried to explain the Inverse-Square rule to a council droid?

It's like swapping your Dalwhinnie for ebola-infested cold tea. :(

I'm most of the way through my Ph.D. in the subject, and I can tell you that my first rad. bio. class focused on the Linear Quadratic model for tissue damage due to ionizing radiation. The weights on the linear and quadratic part of the equation are different for each type of tissue, but it is also accepted that there are tissues which have a threshold for damage due to ionizing radiation. One such example would be the lens which will not suffer any risk of developing cataracts until a fairly high dose.

Additionally, strong evidence for the LQ model as the standard model for cell kill due to ionizing radiation is the effect of using fractionated and hyperfractionated prescriptions in Radiation Oncology. If the damage done were truly linear with dose delivered, we could kill all of the tumor all at once with one big dose and no greater ill effects than fractionating it; however, we know this not to be true!

The hormesis effect has not been clearly demonstrated for radiation, but there is a good chance that it may exist; however, it is much safer to avoid any of the no-threshold negative stochastic effects of radiation of which were are certain.

Just my thoughts...

I went to Uni with a fellow who majored in nuclear physics... in his spare time he developed a simple design for a device using a large industrial press that, he figured, would have been able to achieve about half the output of Fat-Man. It was basically the same as clapping together two subcritical pieces but instead of using his hands he wanted to use a 50-60 ton press with a tungsten ram and sleeve to hold the half-spheres. The whole thing would be surrounded by a water jacket (the desigen actually called for a number of fish tanks - the presence of fish in them was an optional item) to act as a poor mans neutron reflector. Luckily he didn't have ready access to any large indutsrial presses. This same fellow later gave himself a rather nasty radiation burn on his hand... but would never own up to how it happened.