AP Exclusive: Japan scientists took utility money

[caraher]

2. Maybe they should have sent them away more...

The real scandal isn't that the utilities paid for their travel, it's that Japan lets their guidelines be set by views other than those of ICRP.

The official stance of the International Commission on Radiological Protection is that the health risks from radiation become zero only with zero exposure. But some of the eight Japanese ICRP members do not subscribe to that view, asserting that low-dose radiation is harmless or the risks are negligible.

I suspect that whether or not the utilities paid to fly Japanese ICRP members to conferences, they were going to bend rules in the wake of Fukushima. Certainly none of the raised exposure limits were set because the science of radiation risk had changed in the wake of the accident.

I'd also imagine plenty of non-Japanese ICRP members who are not utility-funded share the view that there may be a threshold for radiation risk. The mere fact that they hold this view does not really put them out of the scientific mainstream. But it does place them outside the regulatory mainstream that uses the linear no-threshold model to provide a conservative estimate of risk.