[nic_wilson]

The EPA recommends home owners mitigate with radon levels of 4 pCi/L and above, and the EPA recommends home owners mitigate ”consider” mitigation at levels 2-4. Often you will see people post radon results in the 10+ or even 50+ range, which may lead you to think 4 pCi/L is not too bad, but in fact exposure to that level is the equivalent of 8 cigarettes a day or 200 chest X-rays/year.

[Waterluvian]

Given the average level of radon in the air outdoors is 10% of that, being outdoors is 20 chest x-rays per year, eh? That’s almost a cigarette per day being outdoors!

https://www.epa.gov/radon/what-epas-action-level-radon-and-w...

The EPA doesn’t make such creative claims. But the sites that do will also conveniently sell you stuff.

https://radonbegone.com/what-does-your-radon-number-mean/

https://www.nationalradondefense.com/radon-information/radon...

[dmurray]

One cigarette a day doesn't sound that bad for you. 40-a-day smokers exist and while they're unhealthy, they're not universally dying in their fifties, so one fortieth of that effect seems small.

The biggest risk of smoking one cigarette a day is not that it will give you cancer, it's that it will give you nicotine addiction which will lead to smoking twenty a day and getting cancer. Radon exposure doesn't have that effect.

[lostlogin]

Cancer isn’t the only risk though, the 100 other things are pretty bad too. It isn’t ‘just’ that you might die of cancer, it’s the decades of leg ulcers, stroke, heart and lung disease etc.

[dathinab]

yes cancer is only one of the more deadly and more reliably attributable to cigarettes things

there are quite many things made much more likely with smoking which would end very deadly but modern medicine has learned to to move into the non deadly if treated in time area, which doesn't mean it it doesn't leaves you with long lasting side effects...

like most cases in my environment of smokers having "likely smoking caused" issues fall under that category (so far, aging/time tends to let you see more death in your environment and I'm not yet that old)

[jajko]

Those are some powerful claims, do you have any links for that? Generally 2-pack smokers that started early ie in their 20s or even earlier don't live till retirement where I live, but I agree its a small sample and generally such people don't live a healthy life overall.

[dathinab]

> people don't live a healthy life overall.

to some degree that is exactly the thing

by smoking you add a risk

and the more ways you add risk through your live the more likely you will die an early death

it's just basic statistics

and for the same reason you will find someone who does add all the risks but somehow still dies with 90+, if your sample size is large enough and factors complicated enough you are pretty much guaranteed to find some pretty big outliers

but realistically speaking it a pretty bad idea to assume you are such an outlier, but many people tend to ("basically") do exactly that (due to an combination of subconsciously avoiding reality and simply not thinking things through)

[dmurray]

A couple of sources putting the life expectancy cost at 10-20 minutes per cigarette.

Smoking for 40 years that would be 5 months at 1 a day or 17 years at 40 a day.

I think that's all consistent with what you said: 2 packs a day and you usually, but by no means always, don't make it to retirement at ~66. Five months is enough that I'd take some care to avoid it, though.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1117323/

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/dec/30/single-cigar...

[conradev]

It’s very region specific. Just like some regions don’t have many basements, some have a lot of radon:

  Here in Maine about 36.5% of radon test results equal or exceed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) action level of 4 pCi/L, according to the Lung Association’s “State of Lung Cancer” report.

https://www.lung.org/media/press-releases/maine-radon-2024

If you own a basement in Maine, you should probably test it!

[tumult]

The indoor level of radon isn't going to be lower than outdoors. Indoors is either the same or higher than outdoors. Your level of exposure to radon will not go up by going outside. That's your background exposure level, and is already baked into the calculation of how much an effect an elevated exposure to radon in your home will have on you. Radon is a serious thing to consider, especially if your home has a basement. Radon mitigation is not a scam conspiracy.

[Waterluvian]

Like any good scam, they take a legitimate issue for few and sell it to many who don’t need it.

These websites will try to tell you that the average indoor radon level is equivalent to 2.5 cigarettes per day or 66 chest X-rays per year. The EPA doesn’t make that claim though.

[zamadatix]

The EPA already publishes the direct risk levels for a given pCi/L reading. Adding an intermediate step of how many cigarettes per day that is akin to is not giving you any new information (but is likely distracting you from just thinking about the risk level itself).