[dmwood]

The INWORKS study and reports are among the best there are. What's new about this report is that error bars for low doses are much smaller, presumably due to more stringent dose quality requirements and better dosimeters, which became available only well after may nuclear processing plants came online. For high cumulative dose, there are fewer workers exposed, so error bars are of necessity large. This paper reports excess relative cancer death RATES rather than excess relative death RISKS (of course very similar) Error bars crossing reference lines are not uncommon at low doses in this biz, and have been attributed to "radiation hormesis", a BENEFICIAL or protective effect of ionizing radiation exposure at "low doses", currently believed to be somewhat more than background radiation exposures. Such hormesis naturally implies serious corrections to the "linear, no threshold" picture almost universally used in radiation dose/response.

The figure at https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Radiobiology-and-Radia... shows hormetic response (ERR<0).

So the new results make it more difficult to defend radiation hormesis if the ERR vs. dose is STEEPER at low doses than at larger doses.