All for the nuke

EVEN before the dust has settled after France's latest "nuclear outrage", the country is about to get embroiled in yet another nuke controversy. The French Academy of Sciences will officially publish a report later this month that will advise the French government to ignore an international recommendation to tighten radiation safety limits for workers and members of the public.

The report, already discussed threadbare, concludes that there is no scientific basis for more than halving the maximum permitted radiation dose as recommended by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (icrp) in 1990. The icrp's new standards -- already adopted by the International Atomic Energy Agency -- have reduced the dose from 50 to 20 millisieverts a year for nuclear workers and from 5 to 1 for the general public.

But French scientists, basing their claim on recent researches in molecular biology conducted by the cea (the French atomic energy agency), find the new limit "difficult to justify". The cea's findings suggest that dna damaged by very low levels of radiation can be repaired easily by cell enzymes. So, there might be a threshold below which radiation could be regarded as safe, argue the scientists.