Cancers occur naturally so you need an exposure model to give you an idea of what to expect, and then compare that to the background of normal cancer. Even assuming that he checked mortality records which I assume he must have, he still had to apply statistical filter to make it meaningful.
Reading the paper, he specifically doesn't care about cause of death, just excess.
Interesting tidbits. Most discussion about dangers of radiation is about cancer. But some stuff I've heard centered around Chernobyl is other types of mortality increase.
Actually no you don’t need any such model. Given the map of exposure areas, one can simply compare with other non exposure areas with similar variables for all other major risks
check out the epa blue book. the conclusions of beir vii point towards linear no threshold for solid cancers and a slightly different curve for leukemia.
Interesting. My view as a dilettante on the sidelines was that LNT was on it's way to being discredited. i.e. along the lines of the last paragraph here: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Linear_no-threshold
I'd be interested to know more about the current balance of thinking on the topic. The optimist in me obviously would prefer a less awful relationship between exposure and mortality but sadly I can't impose my wishes on reality.
