We all know that building a nuclear power plant is difficult due to massive government overregulation. But an even bigger impediment to building more plants is the antiquated view of how radiation affects the human body and why our safety measures are a matter of massive overkill.
"The regulatory ratchet that makes nuclear unaffordable can be summarized in a single acronym: ALARA," wrote Alex Chalmers in Works in Progress last May. The acronym stands for "as low as reasonably achievable," which refers to exposure to "ionizing" radiation like CT scans, X-rays, and the radioactive isotopes of elements used in nuclear power plants.
Indeed, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) rules, there is no "safe" threshold for exposure to ionizing radiation. The NRC "assumes any amount of radiation—even minuscule—increases cancer risk in direct proportion to the dose," writes Reason's Ronald Bailey. This has forced companies to spend huge amounts of money creating totally unnecessary precautions.
A July report from Idaho National Laboratory (INL) challenges the NRC model for radiation exposure, claiming that it's "biologically unwarranted," according to Bailey.
No matter where they live, Americans are exposed to about 620 millirems of radiation yearly. About half that exposure comes from natural sources such as soil, rocks, radon gas, and cosmic rays, and the other half from medical scans like X-rays.
"For comparison, living within a few miles of a nuclear power plant exposes someone to a radiation dose of 0.1 millirem per year, a chest X-ray is about 2 millirems, and an abdomen and pelvis C.T. scan is about 770 millirems," writes Bailey. The NRC has set the current radiation exposure limit to 100 millirems per year.
Yet hundreds of millions of dollars are wasted on building in precautions that aren't necessary because the science we use to base those exposure limits is flawed.
The Idaho researchers' review of the epidemiological literature found many contradictory results marred by significant methodological flaws. Overall, they conclude that "studies have generally not demonstrated statistically significant adverse health effects at doses below 10,000 millirems delivered at low dose rates, despite decades of research."
Biological studies also show robust cellular repair mechanisms that counteract damage from low doses of radiation. That means harmful effects typically appear only above certain dose thresholds. The Health Physics Society similarly concludes that "below levels of about 100 mSv [10,000 millirems] above background from all sources combined, the observed radiation effects in people are not statistically different from zero."
One of the most damaging effects of radiation can be altering our DNA. As it turns out, this, too, was exaggerated and oversold as a bigger threat than it actually was.
"In 1927, Herman Muller, a researcher at Columbia University, published a breakthrough finding on the connection between radiation and genetic changes: fruit fly sperm cells treated with X-rays had a 15,000 percent higher mutation rate than untreated controls," writes Chalmers.
Muller created the Linear No Threshold (LNT) hypothesis, the theory of how every body responds to ionizing radiation.
Critically, the hypothesis holds that any amount of ionizing radiation increases cancer risk, and that the harm is cumulative, meaning that multiple small doses over time carry the same risk as a single large dose of the same total magnitude.
In other areas of our lives, this assumption would obviously be wrong. For example, the cumulative harm model applied to alcohol would say that drinking a glass of wine once a day for a hundred days is equivalent to drinking one hundred glasses of wine in a single day. Or that a jogger who ran a mile a day for a month was putting her body under greater strain than one who ran a marathon in a day. We recognise that the human body is capable of repairing damage and stress done to it over time.
But the Linear No Threshold assumption is the orthodoxy in international radiation protection, and its implications in ALARA regulations are among the most significant contributors to nuclear energy’s unaffordability in most of the developed world. But these assumptions are not just counterintuitive: they may be unscientific.
The Idaho lab recommends dumping the current approach in favor of total annual exposure limits of 5,000 millirems for occupational workers and 500 for the public.
The INL says that switching to this higher exposure limit "could dramatically improve the cost-competitiveness of nuclear energy, expand access to nuclear-medicine procedures, enhance industrial applications of nuclear technologies, benefit environmental remediation of former nuclear sites, and improve management and disposal of commercial nuclear wastes."
The NRC are dinosaurs looking up at the sky while the Chicxulub meteor approaches Earth. They are frozen in time, unable to move, while massive changes to the industry are on the horizon.
There is no doubt that the U.S. must embrace a nuclear future. However, that future is under threat from a bureaucracy trained to see any change as dangerous and any innovation as suspect.
