© Wade Allison 2009


Radiation and Reason

A clear and positive scientific account of the effect of radiation on life

"I very much agree with the conclusions of this book, and am very pleased to see them presented in a style that makes them accessible to the general reader." - Sir Eric Ash, FRS

"If Professor Allison´s well-documented arguments are right – and if people can be persuaded to examine them! – his book gives us a little more hope of confronting the problems posed by both dwindling fossil fuel reserves and the release of their waste products into the atmosphere." - Michael Frayn, playwright and author

“Wade Allison narrates the history and nature of nuclear radiation, culminating in an attack on the obsessive safety levels governing nuclear energy. The world is in the grip of a prejudice from which nothing seems able to free it. At least this book tries.” - Simon Jenkins, The Guardian 8 Jan 2010

For more than half a century the view that radiation represents an extreme hazard has been accepted. This book challenges that view by facing the question How dangerous is ionising radiation? Briefly the answer is that radiation is about a thousand times less hazardous than suggested by current safety standards.

For many this will come as a surprise and then quickly raise a second question Why are people so worried about radiation? This is the out-of-date result of Cold War politics combined with a concern about radiation that was appropriate in an earlier age when the scientific understanding was limited.

In the book these answers are explained in accessible language and related directly to modern scientific evidence and understanding, for instance the high levels of radiation used to the benefit of health in every major hospital.

Four facts illustrate the need for a new understanding.

  1. The radiation levels in the nuclear waste storage hall at Sellafield, UK are so low that anyone would have to stay there for a million hours to receive the same dose that any patient on a course of radiotherapy treatment receives to their healthy tissue in a single day.
  2. The radiation dose experienced by the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs caused 0.6% to die of radiation-induced cancer between 1950 and 2000, that is about 1/20 of the chance of dying of cancer anyway and less than the chance of being killed on US highways in that period.
  3. The wildlife at Chernobyl today is reported to be thriving, despite being radioactive.
  4. The mortality of UK radiation workers before age 85 from all cancers is 15-20% lower than comparable groups.

The case for a complete change in attitude towards radiation safety is unrelated to the effects of climate change. But the realisation that radiation and nuclear energy are much safer than is usually supposed is of extreme importance to the current discussion of alternatives to fossil fuels and their relative costs.

Professor Wade Allison is a nuclear and medical physicist at the University of Oxford