Viewpoint : Opposing expanding nuclear energy production Here what left - wing junk science looks like

geneticliteracyproject.org · Feb 26, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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If you want to know why progress on nuclear energy was so halting during the Biden years, despite the administration’s support for the technology, Katy Huff’s recent Scientific American essay is as good a guide as any. Huff was Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy at the Department of Energy during the Biden Administration and is a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Illinois. Her essay takes aim at President Trump’s executive order last May directing the Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission to reconsider the use of the controversial Linear No Threshold (LNT) radiological health model to set standards for public and occupational exposure to radiation. LNT is the primary dose-response model that regulators use to determine how much allowable radiation exposure is acceptable from nuclear energy, nuclear medicine, and many other applications that involve some necessary or potential risk of radiation exposure. It is controversial because it assumes that the relationship between exposure to high doses of ionizing radiation and cancer incidence, which is well established, can be extrapolated to cancer risk at very low doses, which is unproven. Pursuant to last year’s executive orders, a number of outlets reported in January that DOE was abandoning the ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable) standard, the long-standing regulatory approach to limiting low dose exposure to radiation that requires additional measures to reduce potential exposure whenever possible, even when the dose is already extremely low. DOE is also expected to raise the maximum annual dose of radiation that the public can be exposed to as part of its New Reactor Pilot Program at Idaho National Laboratory, although those standards have not yet been formally released. This month, the NRC may endorse those standards as part of a sweeping revamp of its rules and regulations. With those latter rule changes pending, Huff has published a scathing critique of the reset, arguing that in the absence of new research proving that there are no negative health effects at low doses, and extensive public input into any proposed new standard, changing the NRC’s health standards “effectively demands that NRC’s decision-making be political rather than scientific” and is hence “unethical.” Huff insists that she is defending science over politics. But her position is, in fact, no less political than that of the Trump administration and far more extreme. She argues for a strict precautionary approach to radiological health risk while insisting that any change to this approach requires new research to falsify a hypothesis (LNT) that is both unproven and likely unfalsifiable. Meanwhile, she obfuscates the actual consequences of changes to public dose standards, which are minimal even accepting the LNT hypothesis, and claims, without evidence, that doing so will result in the loss of public confidence in nuclear energy. Each of these claims is dubious, reflecting long-standing norms that have informed nuclear policy-making and regulation. Taken together, those norms have not only hampered nuclear energy but have likely also resulted in significantly higher overall public health burden from America’s energy system, rather than reducing it. The current reconsideration of LNT-based regulations for low dose exposure to radiation and ALARA are long overdue. A Tale of Two Backgrounds At the crux of the controversy around the LNT model are two biophysical factors that confound efforts to establish an epidemiological relationship between exposure to low doses of ionizing radiation and negative health effects. The first is that humans are constantly being exposed to significant population-level radiation: from the sun, other natural sources such as radon, and anthropogenic sources such as X-rays and CT scans. Cumulatively, these sources of radiation exposure substantially exceed the doses that both the public and workers in the nuclear industry are exposed to from normal operations of nuclear plants and even from many potential accidents in which radiological material might escape containment. The second biophysical factor is that the background rate of cancer incidence and mortality in all human populations is high. In rich countries where most people survive childhood diseases, infections, food borne illnesses, and other traumas and maladies that historically accounted for a large share of human mortality, about 40% of the population will get some form of cancer over the course of their lifetime and about 20% will ultimately die from it. Most cancer incidence is attributable to lifestyle, genetic factors, and random mutations as cells reproduce. A small percentage of cancers are caused by environmental pollutants of any sort. An even smaller percentage of that small percentage could conceivably be caused by exposure to radiation emanating from nuclear reactors. Together, these two background factors massively confound any effort to reliably estimate what effect exposure to low doses of radiation has on public health. Everybody is exposed to background radiation that is significantly higher than low dose exposures that they might be exposed to from nuclear reactors. And large numbers of people will die from cancers caused by other factors. As a result, even when tracking very large populations exposed to low doses of radiation over a very long time period, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to identify a statistically significant increase in cancer incidence or mortality above the background rate experienced by populations that have not been exposed to excess low dose radiation. Huff argues that more research is required before negative health effects from low dose exposures can be ruled out, arguing for a proposed National Academy study to attempt to resolve the question. But as Breakthrough’s Adam Stein and PJ Seel note in a recent Bulletin of Atomic Scientists article, there is little reason to think that more research of this sort is likely to resolve basic epidemiological questions. So Huff is arguing a double standard, insisting that the current health standards are justified by this uncertainty but that changing them requires certainty in the form of new research proving a negative—that no health effects exist from low dose exposures that can’t actually be observed epidemiologically. Huff claims that this position is scientific, not political. But that claim is plainly absurd. Science simply can’t resolve the uncertainty about radiological health effects at low dose exposures. The decision to regulate low dose effects that are unavoidably speculative is no less political than the decision not to do so. Huff prefers a more precautionary approach than the Trump administration. But that is a conflict over social and political values, not science.Subscribe Low Doses, Low Stakes One of the ironies about the “angels on a pinhead” debate about LNT’s validity at low doses is that even granting that LNT is valid, the public health stakes associated with low dose exposures that might conceivably result from either nuclear operations or most plausible accident scenarios are very low. Imagine two representative samples of 10,000 Americans, a control group that is not exposed to any additional radiation from nuclear energy and a test group that is exposed to an acute dose of 100 millisieverts (mSv), the threshold below which it is likely impossible to detect any statistically significant increase in cancer incidence or mortality from radiation exposure. In the control group, which has not been exposed to any additional radiation, we would expect around 4000 people to contract cancer at some point in their lifetime and about 2000 people to die from it. Among the test group, we would expect around a 1% increase in cancer mortality, or around 2100 total cancer deaths among our sample of 10,000 people, Keep in mind that all 10,000 people in both groups will die from something, many of them will die from cancer, and many other drivers of both all-cause mortality and cancer mortality are far greater factors. Nonetheless, a 1% increase in cancer mortality is not insignificant. But it’s also important to understand that 100 mSv is actually a very high, and indeed unprecedented, dose in the context of civilian nuclear energy, about ten times greater than the average cumulative dose that people living in the areas contaminated by the Chernobyl accident were exposed to over the subsequent twenty years, three times greater than the dose that people evacuated from the exclusion zone in very close proximity to the Chernobyl plant were exposed to, and twice the dose that people who illegally moved back into the exclusion zone in the years following the accident were exposed to. These exposures occurred in the aftermath of an accident that was, by far, the worst in the history of civilian nuclear energy—stemming from an obviously dangerous design prone to runaway reactions, built with no containment system, and operated by a negligent, totalitarian government. The result was a meltdown and radioactive fire that burned openly for three weeks. Even so, the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation concluded in 2008 that other than a handful of deaths associated with plant staff and emergency workers who received very high doses responding to the accident and 6000 preventable thyroid cancers (Soviet authorities chose not distribute iodine tablets in hopes that the world wouldn’t learn about the accident), “there has been no persuasive evidence of any other health effect in the general population that can be attributed to radiation exposure.” No other civilian nuclear accident has ever been remotely comparable. Despite the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that crippled the plant, the Fukushima accident, occurring at reactors with multiple containment systems that all operating commercial reactors today feature, released about 10% as much