Trump NRC Wants to Weaken Radiation Protections
The Trump Administration’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is attempting to eliminate a fundamental safety principle for radiation exposure which has protected both workers and neighbors of facilities and equipment using radioactive materials for 50 years—a principle which has been adopted as standard practice around the world.
The Push to Abandon ALARA Protections
The principle—now a part of enforceable safety regulations—is known as ALARA (“as low as reasonably achievable”). It works in tandem with numerical maximum-exposure limits to protect human health from the incremental effects of continuing exposure (such as increasing cancer risk). As part of Trump’s drive to quadruple electric generation from nuclear plants, the U.S. Energy Department has already stopped using ALARA, and the NRC hopes to dump it over the next few months.
Technical Rules Mask a Major Public‑Safety Shift
The ongoing Trump Administration drive to weaken and eliminate environmental protections and clean energy efforts has been so broad and egregious that a major retreat in public safety standards like this has thus far largely flown beneath the radar of public concern. That is partly a result of the highly technical nature of radiation exposure measurement and rules.
The National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement, created by Congress to provide independent scientific guidance, has not yet commented on the complex language proposed to implement the change. The Council’s president, Dr. Kathryn Higley, cited as an example of concern that the ALARA approach has helped to keep worker exposure lower than the current standard of maximum exposure in place in the United States, which is two and half times higher than the annual radiation exposure limit recommended by the International Commission on Radiological Protection. However, the NRC is not recommending changing the U.S. limit because they believe it would cost too much.
Major Health Risks to Pad Profits
A July 2 news release from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a nuclear watchdog group, stated, “Elimination of ALARA would be a major blow to decades of good practice in radiation safety in the United States and could result in increased radiation exposures for people working in the nuclear energy, weapons production or waste cleanup industries, among others. The companies in these industries, meanwhile, may choose to save money by cutting corners on radiation shielding or other protection measures.”
“The NRC has correctly reaffirmed the scientific consensus that there is no safe level of ionizing radiation exposure and that the cancer risk is proportional to the dose,” said Dr. Edwin Lyman, the director of nuclear power safety at UCS. “However, in eliminating its use of the ALARA principle, the agency’s sweeping new proposed rule would allow nuclear facility workers and the general public to be exposed to higher levels of cancer-causing radiation just to save the nuclear industry money. Cancer rates are already rising among younger people, and this change can only increase the risk.”
Protect Our Health – Public Comment Period is Open
The NRC developed its current proposal in response to Trump Executive Order 14300, issued in May 2025. The NRC’s proposed rule changes were published July 15 of this year. Public comments can be submitted up to 11:59 p.m. on August 31. (As of August 1, only 153 comments had been submitted.) Public comments can be submitted here.
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