Among hundreds of Trump White House executive orders, EO No. 14300 directs the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to weaken its long-standing radiation rule, “Standards for Protection Against Radiation.”
The EO calls for setting a radiation exposure “threshold” or level below which exposure would “not count” or would be considered never to have occurred.
The EO’s exposure rules could be 5-100 times less protective than current law, and will likely be based on the archaic “Reference Man,” the grossly outdated radiation risk model. Reference Man represents a young adult male. The standard ignores and denies the greater impacts of a given radiation exposure to the fetus, to infants, to children, and to women.
The EO would impact people in thousands of communities surrounding the 94 operating nuclear reactors in the United States by allowing exposure to more radiation from routine offsite emissions: from reactors; from nuclear weapons facilities; from nuclear material transport systems; and from nuclear waste sites.
Vested interests in the nuclear industry want to save money by attacking the basis of NRC regulation, the “Linear No Threshold” or LNT risk model.
Decades of published peer-reviewed research support the LNT model, including the National Academy of Sciences report “Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation, VII Phase 2” (BEIR VII), and many studies of nuclear industry workers.
One industry-sponsored “Petition for Rulemaking” to the NRC in 2015 triggered a formal review of the LNT model. The NRC soundly rejected the Petition in 2021. And the NRC re-affirmed the scientific basis and global consensus that no radiation exposure is so small that it carries no risk of harmful effects. Well-documented findings show that even exposures so small that they cannot be measured may, sometimes, result in fatal cancer. Reducing the risk to zero requires zero radiation exposure.
NRC Rulemaking is scheduled to issue its new rule June 8, 2026, marking the start of a 30-day Public Comment Period. Make sure to send a comment demanding more, not less, protection against radiation.
More information, including details and material for making comments to the NRC, is here: www.radiationproject.org/online; and here: www.nirs.org/radiation
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