I put up an explanation of one hit theory of tox that grew from junk radiation biophysics and tox.
However, one of our commenters understands things better then me by far.
Tadchem is a hard scientist.
Here he puts up a great commentary, worth your review.
This reminds me a lot of the debunking of the cell phone and high voltage transmissions lines scares that still are around because of the silliness of people who hunt for cancer cluster and such.
In those excellent and memorable debunks, the physicists showed that the electro magnetic forces were not above background and not enough to cause any damage.
Here’s Tadchem–the man is an excellent writer, I need to recruit him to be a contributor.
The human body contains about 10^13 cells, each with about 6 picograms (6×10^-12 g) of DNA.
That makes about 60 grams of DNA per person. About 40% of the weight of the DNA is carbon (about 24 grams) which Avogadro’s number tells us is 2 moles, or about 12×10^23 carbon atoms.
About 1 in 1 trillion (10^12) of those carbon atoms is radioactive carbon-14.
So we have about 1.2×10^12 atoms of radioactive carbon INSIDE OUR DNA.
Half of them (6×10^11) will decay in 5730 years (1.8*10^11 seconds).
That is an average of about 3.3 radioactive decays of carbon-14 in our DNA each second, EVERY ONE OF WHICH has a 100% certainty of causing a DNA mutation.
According to the ‘one hit’ theory, we should all have cancer within moments of our CONCEPTION, and are lucky to be born alive, albeit doomed.
Is that a mind blowing analysis or what. Thanks Tadchem, and anybody out there got the nerve to question the analysis, which shows why one hit no threshold is nonsense even for SCARY RADIATION EXPOSURE.
Damn……