by Steve Milloy, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow and Junkscience.com Founder
As appearing in the Daily Caller
President Trump issued four Executive orders on May 23 to reinvigorate the U.S. nuclear power industry. But it’s really just a single sentence in one of those orders that, if accomplished, would make all the difference.
The Executive order entitled, “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Power Commission” contains this key line: “ In particular, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission shall reconsider reliance on the linear no-threshold (LNT) model for radiation exposure…”
The purpose of the LNT is to relate exposure to radiation with cancer risk. We know that very high exposures to radiation increases cancer risk because of data on the atomic bomb survivors and other highly exposed medical and occupational populations. For example, of the 125,000 or so atomic bomb blast survivors followed by researchers after World War II, there were about 900 “extra” cancers that occurred in the population. That observed cancer incidence, along with biological plausibility of high doses of radiation causing DNA damage, is accepted as persuasive evidence that high doses of radiation increase cancer risk.
But how do you regulate much lower, everyday radiation exposures when the only data point for cancer risk is the ultra-high dose of radiation? That’s where the LNT comes into play. The LNT is not science. It is something called “science policy,” which is a political decision generally made on a precautionary or “better safe than sorry” basis. The LNT decision assumes: (1) Any exposure to radiation above natural background exposures increases cancer risk; and (2) the risk increases in a straight-line fashion to the known point of harm (e.g., the radiation exposure from the atomic blast).
