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sketerpot comments on Even if you have a nail, not all hammers are the same - Less Wrong
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They do the same kind of thing with ionizing radiation: a lot of organizations assume that the health effects of radiation are completely linear, even far below the range where we've been able to measure, despite the lack of evidence for this (and some evidence suggesting a J-shaped curve). Other organizations refuse to extrapolate to extremely low doses, citing the lack of evidence.
The issue is just way too politicized.
There's a general principle that very small doses of toxins or stresses of any kind - vaccines, radiation, oxidants, poisons, alcohol, heat, cold, exercise - are beneficial, because they provoke the body to a protective overreaction. One of the talks at the 2007 DC conference on cognitive aging even suggested that this is responsible for why people who think more have fewer memory problems as they age.
(This suggests that our bodies are lazy - they could maintain themselves better than they do on every dimension. Or it might be that, if we measured all the responses simultaneously, we'd find that mounting a protective response to radiation made us more vulnerable to infection, alcohol, and all the rest.)
Or maybe it would just require the expenditure of energy.
And yet anabolism and expenditures of energy pretty reliably shorten lifespan. Many of these responses rely on the use of regulatory RNA; and the dicer-mediated siRNA mechanism has been shown to have a limited capacity that degrades when multiple regulatory responses occur simultaneously.
That principle would be hormesis, no?
Be wary of placing too much trust in that logic, that way lies homeopathy.
For the radiation thing there's at least some evidence that humans can adapt to high background radiation but I've never seen any evidence that the reaction ever outweighs the exposure.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11769138
Yep, my impression from what I can remember of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis is that people who believe models other than LNT are privileging the hypothesis.
The fact that this assumption is made so explicit makes it much less problematic than the problem this article is talking about.
I've just read a book by Gwyneth Cravens that talks about this and explains it well:
http://www.amazon.com/Power-Save-World-Nuclear-Energy/dp/B002KAOSLK/
(It's also about Uranium mining, how nuclear power plants work, how risk is mitigated, nuclear waste storage, etc. A good read.)