Granite Dells Area - Very High Radon Levels (Chino Valley, Ash Fork: buy, asbestos)

[motormaker]

Lots of radon discussion in the House forum.

https://www.city-data.com/forum/searc...rchid=31470853

[autism360]

"Fear and panic?"

Perhaps a heightened awareness, but not fear and panic. If you want fear and panic, read dr Mercola every day.

Heightened awareness is great but creating incorrect numbers and stats out of thin air without showing your sources to create a false premise is just plain wrong.
Truth is according to the EPA who I quoted in my previous post if you do have a radon problem it is simple and fairly cheap to eliminate the problem.

[DellNec]

Originally Posted by autism360

I find it odd that the same person who tried to create fear and panic about earthquakes in Northern AZ is also is trying to use propaganda again to create fear about radon gas.

Fear and panic? Nobody is panicking here. It's called knowledge and awareness. 95% of the people had no idea about the radon in Granite Dells or that one of the biggest fault lines in Arizona runs through Chino Valley. Bringing it up and talking about it is exciting and a good discussion.

What do you want to talk about that is interesting and insightful for the Prescott area? The weather?

Discussing topics like this keeps the forum alive and makes people aware, as knowledge is power. Talking about the weather and other promotional chamber of commerce stuff is boring and will bring this forum to a screeching halt, just like it was a year or so ago. Back then the Prescott forum had about 1 new post every 3 or 4 weeks. It was pretty much dead.

As always, if you don't like the thread, don't post in it.

[DellNec]

Originally Posted by kdog

Lie #1) Radon aggravates asthma
Lie #2) Radon mitigation systems cost between $2K and $15K
Lie #3) If there is radon present in the soil, then it will be present in the water

None of this has anything to do with the initial cost of a radon mitigation system.

#1 cannot be completely disproved according to the EPA and other research groups. They really don't know at this point conclusively. What they do know is that if you already have an underlying lung issue (smoking, asthma, COPD, etc), radon gas aggravates your lungs that much more.

#2 - As stated before, $2k is about the norm, with your $500 quote being nothing more than a used car sales ploy to get you in the door. The $15k is the extreme high, but that is what is called a "range". Most likely it will fall somewhere in between.

#3 - Is a FACT. If you have radon in the soil, then you will have it in your water well. Therefore you will have to mitigate the foundation air and then mitigate the radon in the water, which compounds the costs:

Basic Information about Radon in Drinking Water | Radon | US EPA
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[motormaker]

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Back to the topic.

Radon: Truth vs. myth

[kdog]

Originally Posted by DellNec

#1 cannot be completely disproved according to the EPA and other research groups. They really don't know at this point conclusively. What they do know is that if you already have an underlying lung issue (smoking, asthma, COPD, etc), radon gas aggravates your lungs that much more.

Cannot be completely disproved? Ha, you're a real hoot. There's NOT A SINGLE CREDIBLE REFERENCE anywhere on the internet that even suggests a correlation between radon and asthma.

#2 - As stated before, $2k is about the norm, with your $500 quote being nothing more than a used car sales ploy to get you in the door. The $15k is the extreme high, but that is what is called a "range". Most likely it will fall somewhere in between.

Oh, is $2K the NORM now? You previously said between $2K and $15K was the norm. Backpeddling, just a bit are we? Well, you're still off by a factor of two. I've given three references now that show the range of Radon system prices and none of them even approach the $2K figure which you call the norm. Go ahead, show us ONE SINGLE REFERENCE to back up your claim. You can't because it's not true. The average price of a radon system is around a grand. We paid $1300 for a rather large installation on our home in NY. You've NEVER had a radon system installed, have you? SO WHERE ARE YOU GETTING YOUR FIGURES??? Go ahead and back up your claim for once. I dare you.

#3 - Is a FACT. If you have radon in the soil, then you will have it in your water well. Therefore you will have to mitigate the foundation air and then mitigate the radon in the water, which compounds the costs:

Basic Information about Radon in Drinking Water | Radon | US EPA

I just LOVE the way you post links to web pages like this without an actual quote thinking people won't call your bluff and read the reference. Sorry, but CityData people are smarter than that. That article says NOTHING about radon being in your water if you find it in your soil. It says NOTHING about it because it's NOT TRUE. Your cheap tricks to fool people on this forum fall flat once again.

[kdog]

Originally Posted by motormaker

I'm sure there is no confusion on his part. On the other hand "you not so much".

Back to the topic.

Radon: Truth vs. myth

Awesome article, Motormaker. Should be of major interest to anybody following this thread.

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[BriansPerspective]

Originally Posted by DellNec

Yeah, that's the ticket, conspiracy theories. Just like that "arsenic" stuff, it's really not that dangerous. Shoot, Brian here says he drinks 5 gallons of arsenic a day and he is healthy as a horse.

I also think that uranium stuff is not radioactive like the government says it is. The EPA overestimates the stuff to increase funding. I sprinkle uranium on my cereal, it's good stuff.

Let's look at some of the information from the wonderful link provided by Motormaker: Radon: Truth vs. myth

Instead the EPA states:
Exposure in the U.S. cohort is poorly known; cumulative WLM (CWLM) are calculated from measured radon levels for only 10.3 percent of the miners...and guesswork is used for about 53.6 percent of the miners.

That’s right, “guesswork” formed the basis of the majority of the estimates.

The EPA, being a political organization, ignored the science behind the biological effects and used an unsupported assumption that the health effects from the radon could be extrapolated in a linear fashion from the lowest radon concentration in the study (2,720,000 pCi/l-hour) to those levels found in homes.

That's a bit like comparing the US budget to your household budget.

The lowest radon concentration in the BEIR IV study (2,720,000 pCi/l-hour) was typically received by the miners over a five year period. Yet the EPA and NRC take this five year exposure and spread it out over the course of 70 years, and assume that an individual will spend 18 hours per day in their home, 365 days per year for 70 years. They also assume the “home” is situated in an underground mine, and that the occupants smoke cigarettes in their underground home.

This equates to an accumulative radon concentration of about 6 pCi/l in the home.

A later study (referred to as the Cohen Study), which is one of the largest studies, incorporated about 33% of the counties in the U.S. and looked at the issue of the linear, no-threshold dose-risk relationship used by the EPA. In this study, a least squares linear regression of lung cancer rates vs. mean radon levels gave a negative correlation between death and exposure levels. In other words, the higher the radon level in the county, the lower the death rate from lung cancer was for the community. The result was not due to questionable interpretation of shaky statistics; each of the studies showed a negative correlation with slopes of not less than seven standard deviations (and sometimes greater than 10 standard deviations) greater than zero.

In statistical terms, the chance that their hypothesis is wrong is about the same as your chance of being struck down by lightening.

Ongoing studies that employ more realistic models fail to find any evidence that the risk of death from cancer induced by residential radon exposure is even noteworthy.

So, you can see why I'm a little skeptical about radon.

[BriansPerspective]

That said, if you are still concerned about radon here's a easy, inexpensive, home-value-increasing option: Install ceiling fans.

Air Movement Device: Ceiling Fans

This type of a system addresses neither the DP problem nor the radon entry problem, but rather the SLRDs themselves.

Unlike a filtration device, a ceiling fan does not remove the desirable airborne particulates but rather encourages the plate-out of the SLRDs. Since this type of technique can be installed by the homeowner (as a rather attractive addition to a living room or dining room), radon contractors do not have an incentive to disclose this technique to the general public.

Remarkably good reductions (as high as 95%) of SLRDs have been achieved 22 by simply placing a "Casablanca" type ceiling fan in a room. The fan should be capable of complete air movement within the room. Where the desired reduction is on the order of 50%, the ceiling fan alone can correct most of the problems.

Where a reduction of 80% or better is needed, the a ceiling fan in conjunction with a positive-ion generator may correct the problem. The ceiling fan/positive-ion generator combination has been tested in the U.S., Denmark, Finland and Canada 22 with similarly excellent results. The reduction in SLRDs has been consistently as high as 95% and where bronchial doses have been measured 22, the reduction in bronchial dose has been as high as 87%.

[wretched wrench]

If I smoked, I would worry a lot more about radon.