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. (RELATED: STEVE MILLOY: Senate Should Ignore The Parliamentarian On Electric Vehicles)
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).
Conceptually, the use of the LNT overcomes the gaps and uncertainties in scientific understanding of the actual change in cancer risk with increasing dose. It is a political, not a scientific, decision. But this latter point is generally ignored by regulatory agencies who like to present their regulations as based on science.
Because its details and limitations are easy to ignore, the LNT has tremendous potential for political weaponization. The LNT has been used by anti-nuclear leftists for about 70 years, first by anti-nuclear weapons activists to end above-ground nuclear tests in the 1950s and then by anti-nuclear power plan activists to slow the development of nuclear power plants. The latter activism has been ironic as those same environmental activists who claim to be existentially worried about greenhouse gas emissions from coal and gas plants oppose nuclear plants that emit no such gases.
The history of the LNT is fascinating. It dates back to the mid-1920s when scientists hypothesized that evolution was driven by natural background radiation causing DNA to slowly mutate, causing gradual physical changes that over time amounted to what is thought of as evolution.
Although the evolution hypothesis was debunked in the 1930s, its failure dove-tailed with the common use of radiation in medical treatment at that time and with the Manhattan Project during World War II. Both of these uses of radiation required safety standards for physicians, patients and nuclear workers. The failed hypothesis morphed into use of the LNT for radiation safety purposes. This was most strongly advocated by American geneticist Herman Mueller, who in 1946 won the Nobel prize in medicine for his radiation research that began with his faulty evolution research in the 1920s. But here’s where the story takes an even more bizarre twist.
A month before Mueller’s acceptance of the Nobel prize, he learned in private correspondence from a colleague that, based on the colleague’s new research, the LNT was scientifically invalid. But Mueller kept the information secret and accepted the prestigious award anyway, delivering his Nobel lecture touting the LNT. This entire fascinating story can be viewed in greater detail in a highly recommended 22-part video series produced by the Heath Physics Society and featuring the University of Massachusetts-Amherst’s Dr. Ed Calabrese, whose decades of incredible sleuthing on the origins of the LNT produced much of the story presented here.
Although the LNT has never been scientifically validated, it has become widely used for radiation and chemical cancer risk assessments by regulatory agencies. The Environmental Protection Agency, which sets radiation protection standards, adopted the LNT in the 1970s and has since refused to reconsider it. EPA staff considers the LNT to be “set in stone.”
But it is the very use of the LNT that has needlessly scared the public about the safety of nuclear plants and made them essentially too expensive to build in the US. Before the LNT was weaponized by anti-nuclear activists, the first US nuclear power plant took a little more than three years to build in the mid-1950s. It remained in safe service for 31 years. The most recent US nuclear plant (finished in 2024) took about 18 years to build and was billions of dollars over budget.
Nuclear power should have a future in the US. About 70% of France’s and 20% of America’s electricity is safely generated by nuclear power. Much of America’s Navy is powered by shipboard nuclear reactors. There have been nuclear mishaps: Three Mile Island (1979, no harm caused); Chernobyl (1986, faulty maintenance leading to worker radiation poisoning deaths and possibly 5,000 treatable thyroid cancers in children); and Fukushima (2011, faulty design leading to about 20 worker radiation injuries and cancers). But even with these tragic, albeit easily preventable accidents, nuclear power has a strong track record of safety – one that can only be built on by getting rid of the junk science-based LNT.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer, publishes JunkScience.com and is on X @JunkScience.
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