Regulatory agencies are charged with setting limits on hazardous practices and toxic materials in various scenarios.  Let’s examine a few examples and their consequences:

Emissions from combustion of fossil fuels  are known to kill millions of people anually.   There are some  attempts to reduce these, but most people seem to regard the megadeaths as “the price of doing business” (TPODB).  Gas and diesel automobile emissions have been dramatically curtailed over the last few decades, but leaving your car running in a closed garage is still a popular method of suicide.   Oh well, that’s TPODB.

Alcohol, nicotine and opioids  together kill countless people every year, but as a society we like them.  Furthermore, governments fund themselves from huge “sin taxes” on self-destruction, so again that’s TPODB.

Private firearms  kill more than one person in 10,000 every year in the USA, but their private possession is guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the US Constitution and quite profitable for some gun manufacturers… so, TPODB.

Falls cause around two-thirds of all accidental deaths in Canadians aged 65 years and older, while for those under 65, accidental poisonings were the top (nearly 70%) accidental cause of death in Canada.  Oh well…  TPODB!

Radiation releases from nuclear reactors  have killed a total of… well, there’s some disagreement:  the worst ever reactor accident (Chernobyl, 26 April 1986) killed about 30 people outright and about 60 clearly attributable to radiation from the disaster in the subsequent decades; beyond that, estimates range from 4,000 (UN IAEA report) to 200,000 (Greenpeace).  The wild predictive fluctuations arise from the fact that roughly 40% of all people will get cancer in their lifetimes and roughly 20% of all deaths are from cancer; so even the Greenpeace estimate amounts to an assumption that the 200 million or so people exposed to some fallout from Chernobyl would have had their cancer-death probability raised from 20% to 20.1% by that small exposure — a very difficult statistical speculation to prove!   Appeals to the “Precautionary Principle” indicate an exceptional reluctance to apply TPODB to radiation.

Why is that?  How is cancer caused by radiation so much more horrible than cancer caused by coal pollution or car exhaust or smoking or drinking?

This peculiar terror has led to cowardice on the part of regulatory agencies, which employ the “Linear, No Threshold” (LNT) model for dleterious health effects of low-dose radiation to set maximum doses from reactors below the inescapable background radiation levels in our natural environment, leading to the “As Low As Reasonable Achievable” (ALARA) design criteria for reactor designs, which caused the 28 new reactors ordered in the USA in 1974 to all be cancelled; few have been built in the intervening 4 decades.

Meanwhile the world is cooking in greenhouse gases, smoldering in forest fires, being torn apart by hurricanes and drowning in glacial melt — all perfectly acceptable, apparently, as TPODB — while the nuclear power plants (that could supply plentiful, reliable, dispatchable power sufficient to deal with all these consequences of TPODB) are not being built because they might raise our probability of dying of cancer from 20% to 20.001 %.   Meanwhile we smoke, drink, drive gas guzzlers as fast as possible, buy guns, take drugs and walk down concrete steps without a railing because, hey, that’s TPODB!