nuclear-news

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been soliciting public comment on the idea since June, and has extended the period for comments through Thursday. Through Monday, about 380 comments had been submitted…….

 current NRC regulations — that any exposure to ionizing radiation, the kind that can damage or alter human cells, is potentially unsafe. The gospel: Thou shalt fear all radiation.

With that in mind, current NRC regulations limit public exposure to radiation from power plants to 100 millirem a year. (Another measure of ionizing radiation dosage is millisieverts, or mSv. One mSv is the same as 100 millirem.) The idea is to limit radiation releases from nuclear plants to zero, of course, but very small amounts of radiation sometimes escape into the air or groundwater.

The average American is exposed to about 600 millirem a year from other sources such as radon and other naturally occurring materials, medical procedures and cosmic particles and rays.

The legal limit for nuclear power plant workers is 5,000 millirem a year, though higher doses are allowed in some circumstances…….The suggested new rules would make the limit for the general public the same as for workers — that is, 50 times higher than it is now. Fifty.

The suggested changes were advanced earlier this year in three petitions filed with the NRCby outside advocates for radiation hormesis…..You can read a great deal about this if you like. A good start would be this CounterPunch piece……

Anyone interested may submit comments online through the end of Thursday. The suggested rules are not a fait accompli; NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said the agency will weigh the comments that are submitted, plus a great deal of other information, before deciding whether to draft actual proposed changes to the rules.

I’d never heard of hormesis until a reader alerted me to this issue on Monday. I know it’s not fair to conflate nuclear power and nuclear weapons, but the whole thing makes me think of the subtitle of Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant dark comedy about accidental nuclear war — How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/local/blogs/environment/2015/11/17/more-radiation-exposure/75889896/