In the late 1940s, the Rockefeller Foundation, burdened by its guilt for the role it played in the Manhattan Project, funded Hermann Muller’s advocacy for linear dose-response from fruit-fly mutation studies. A future Nobel Prize laureate, Muller, proposed a Linear Non-Threshold model that claimed that, regardless of the amount, radiation exposure caused cumulative genetic damage. Even as unpublished laboratory evidence from Ernst Caspari’s controlled experiments directly contradicted this, the 1956 Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation Genetics Panel, orchestrated by the Rockefeller Foundation, ensured that LNT entered regulatory doctrine before credible dissent could organise.
But all life on earth has evolved awash in radiation.
Data from Hibakusha survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been tracked across decades, and the data shows as clear as day statistically negligible increases in solid cancer mortality below 100 millisieverts of acute exposure. The other 3 reactors at Chornobyl in Pripyat remained intact and operational for 13 years.
There is no statistically significant increase in solid cancer incidence among the engineers and scientists who kept the plant open for 13 years after what has been called a “disaster.”
Radiation safety concerns
Carcinogenesis has a 20-year latency. By now, the hundreds of thousands of excess cancers predicted by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) near Chornobyl should be obvious. Looking at the data, however the we can confidently say that it was safer to live near Chornobyl on the night of the accident, in Kerala, India, and Yangjiang, China, than it was to drive on a Kenyan road in December last year.
In all these places, people experience background radiation levels that are multiple times greater than the global average. Factoring in everything, the death toll from nuclear power’s worst accident remains exactly 41. In December alone in 2025, Kenya lost double that number from accidents.
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Homa Hills, across the bay from sites where we will build our first set of nuclear reactors in Siaya, is a local example of why radiophobia doesn’t compute. The occupational dose limit for workers in nuclear plants is a fraction of what those living in the vicinity of the hills are exposed to. Should we wake up tomorrow with the proposed nuclear plant already constructed right there next to the hill, doing its share by supplying the vast amounts of electricity our nation needs to extinguish energy poverty, the biggest source of radiation would not be the nuclear plant.
It would be the hills that generation upon generation of people have lived next to.
Nuclear Energy circus
LNT’s adoption produced professions charged with monitoring and documenting exposures that posed no measurable hazard. The regulatory burden they collectively imposed increased construction costs 10 fold within a decade, entirely through compliance overhead. Nuclear power has transformed from being “too cheap to meter” to the circus we are seeing at Hinkley Point C, as the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR), with its unnecessary 4-fold redundancies in safety features no one asked for, has turned into a bottomless abyss Europe insists on pouring all its money into.
The Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) for nuclear power is thus a bureaucratic artefact that presents nuclear as more expensive, rarely accounts for the proportion attributable to regulatory requirements predicated on a fictitious radiation model from a disgraced scientist
Looking for the absurdities that followed the wholesale adoption of LNT, the 2 and 6 millisieverts from 20 intercontinental flights per year add up to roughly 1 additional millisievert. This exceeds the annual occupational exposure for most nuclear plant workers. Under strict LNT logic, a flight from Nairobi to Kisumu poses measurable carcinogenic risks that require regulatory oversight. Yet aviation is excluded from classification as radiation work even under the frameworks of the International Labour Organization and the International Civil Aviation Organization.
Corrupt Nobel Prize Laureates
Adjusting the duration, proximity to the source of the exposure, and shielding are the only ways radiation workers are kept safe. Aviation cannot afford to plaster lead panels on an aircraft fuselage or shorten the shifts for in-flight attendants. Lead is heavy, and doubling the crew, guided by the As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA) principle, doubles operational costs. It is far cheaper to ignore LNT, but this reveals LNT for less of a biological law hard-coded by the laws of Physics that are consistent in our corner of the universe and more of a product of corrupt Nobel Prize Laureates whose lack of integrity 70 years ago condemned billions to the electricity destitution we see around us.
Also Read: Load Shedding Debate: It Is Energy Poverty That Kills, Not Coal or Nuclear Plants
Either LNT is valid, in which case even cabin crew are radiation workers needed to conform, or LNT is wrong, in which case the entire regulatory edifice requires reconstitution. Unlike science fiction-inspired extrapolated curve backed by zero evidence, Sigmoid No Threshold (SNT) aligns with cellular repair biology (Hormesis). SNT shortens licensing timelines and permits honest discourse about radiation. A millisievert per microsecond from a nuclear bomb is not identical to a millisievert per decade in Homa Bay County.
Analytical integrity is the precondition to achieving the Silicon Savanah’s dream of equipping its young and urbanised population with the electricity they need to “reach Singapore.” The author is a director at the Nuclear Power and Energy Agency (NuPEA).
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