A DOE spokesman said its radiation standards are “consistent with Gold Standard Science … with an emphasis on protecting people and the environment while avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy.”
The department has already decided to abandon the long-standing radiation protection principle known as “ALARA” — the “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” standard — that directs anyone handling radioactive materials to minimize exposure.
It often pushes exposure well below the legal limit. Many experts agreed that the ALARA principle was sometimes applied too strictly, but the move to abolish it entirely was opposed by many prominent radiation health experts.
Sources familiar with the discussions said it was an open question whether the agencies would actually change the legal limits for radiation exposure.
Internal DOE documents arguing for the change in dosage guidelines refer to a report prepared at the Idaho National Laboratory, compiled with the help of AI assistant Claude. “It’s really weird,” said Kathryn Higley, president of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, which studies radiation safety in Congress. “They get the science fundamentally wrong.”
John Wagner, director of the Idaho National Laboratory and lead author of the report, acknowledged to ProPublica that there is a heated scientific debate about changing the radiation exposure rules. “We acknowledge that respected experts interpret aspects of this literature differently,” he said. His analysis was not the final word, he said, but was “intended to inform the debate”.
Measuring the effects of radiation levels at very low doses is difficult, so the US has historically taken a cautious note. Raising the dose limits could push the US out of line with international standards.
For his part, Cohen told the nuclear industry that he sees his job as making sure the government is “no longer a hindrance” to them.
In June, he overturned the notion of companies putting money into a fund for workplace accidents. “Put yourself in the shoes of one of these startups,” he said. “They raise hundreds of millions of dollars to do that. And then they have to go to their VCs and their board and say, listen, guys, do we actually need a few hundred million more dollars to put into the trust fund?”
He also suggested that regulators should not worry about preparing for 100-year events — disasters that have a roughly 1 percent chance of occurring but could be catastrophic for nuclear facilities.
“When SpaceX started building rockets, they were waiting for the first ones to explode,” he said.
This story originally appeared on ProPublica.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Read the original story here. register for Big Story newsletter to get stories like this in your inbox.
Pratheek Rebala and Kirsten Berg contributed to the research.
