In the absence of an objective ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) cost-benefit analysis, future decisions on limiting doses from ionizing radiation to workers and the public from nuclear power operations will be determined in significant part by the relative political strengths of industry and regulators. Under the Trump administration, the industry clearly has the upper hand.
Just as it did with air pollution rules, the Trump administration has now, in effect, set the value of American lives to zero in regulatory protections against nuclear-radiation-caused cancer.
the attacks of the Trump administration on public safety must be exposed.
Worldwide, regulations limiting doses from the radiation emitted by nuclear fissions and decays are based on the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model. This hypothesis posits that, irrespective of whether ionizing radiation comes in a pulse or over years, the additional risk of developing cancer as a result is proportional to the cumulative amount of energy deposited per gram of tissue, with weighting risk factors for radiation type, sex, age, and specific organs.
Since 1975, the US nuclear industry has been required to limit exposures to workers and the public to “as low as reasonably achievable” (ALARA) levels. What the ALARA level should be is determined by cost-benefit analysis in which the costs of dose reductions are compared with the benefits to workers and the public, measured in terms of reduced disease and longer life expectancy.
In May 2025, four months after taking office, the Trump administration challenged this five-decade-old regulatory approach as part of an Executive Order “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission” (NRC). The order claimed the “NRC utilizes safety models that posit there is no safe threshold of radiation exposure and that harm is directly proportional to the amount of exposure,” which corresponds to the linear hypothesis. “Those models lack sound scientific basis,” the Executive Order added, before directing the NRC to “reconsider reliance on the linear no-threshold (LNT) model for radiation exposure and the ‘as low as reasonably achievable’ [ALARA] standard, which is predicated on LNT.”
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission had reviewed exactly this question in 2021 in response to a campaign by advocates of the radiation “hormesis” theory, which posits that low doses of ionizing radiation actually protect against cancer by stimulating the body’s DNA repair mechanism—the exact opposite of ALARA. The NRC rejected that contention, concluding that “the LNT model continues to provide a sound regulatory basis for minimizing the risk of unnecessary radiation exposure to both members of the public and radiation workers.” As a result, the commission maintained the current dose limit requirements contained in its regulations.
But President Donald Trump’s decision to bring independent regulatory agencies under White House control and to fire the NRC’s chairman ended the commission’s resistance. On July 2, 2025, an anonymous NRC spokesperson enthused in a social media post that the Executive Order reforming the NRC “gives us a chance to reconsider our radiation protection framework in support of the whole-of-government effort to safely enable the nation’s use of nuclear power.”
Two weeks later, the NRC hosted a webinar for input on the issue of the LNT hypothesis. The Nuclear Energy Institute—the US nuclear industry’s lobbying organization—recommended that the commission remove ALARA and dose minimization as regulatory requirements. Instead, the institute proposed to establish a “practical threshold”—for instance, 2 rem per year (or 20 milliGray per year for gamma rays) for workers—below which further dose reduction would not be required. (The rem is a unit of effective absorbed radiation in human tissue, equivalent to one roentgen of X-rays. One millirem is one-thousandth of a rem. The Gray measures the absorbed dose, which is the physical amount of radiation energy absorbed by any material or tissue. One Gray corresponds to one Joule per kilogram.)
Advocates of the theory of radiation “hormesis” do not believe the LNT hypothesis. Radiation hormesis is a fringe theory with passionate adherents who are taking advantage of the Trump administration’s skepticism about regulations of all types.
One of the most vocal hormesis advocates is Edward Calabrese, an emeritus professor of toxicology at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He argues that the evidence for the linear no-threshold hypothesis is based on scientific fraud and, therefore, should be replaced with a model that considers the possibility of no risk—and even possible benefits—from ionizing radiation below a certain dose.
Calabrese’s arguments persuaded some recent leaders of the Health Physics Society (HPS), an association of radiation-protection professionals, to host a 22-part, 10-hour video lecture series by Calabrese on the history of the LNT model in 2021-22. John Cardarelli, the HPS president when the videos were produced, summarizes Calabrese’s argument at the end of each video. In the final one, Cardarelli declares his conclusion that the LNT model is “based on flawed research, ideological motives, deliberate misrepresentation of the research record, and political agendas.”
Although the Health Physics Society declares that “the views expressed in these videos are not intended to represent official positions,” it also advertises that its associated credentialing organization, the American Academy of Health Physics, has “preapproved 10 continuing education credits for certified health physicists watching all 22 episodes of this video series.”
Physicist-epidemiologist Jan Beyea published a critique of Calabrese’s allegations in the HPS journal Health Physics, to which both Calabrese and Cardarelli have responded with lengthy rebuttals.
The research and reports Calabrese and his supporters are trying to discredit were done more than 50 years ago. For decades, the largest human population studied for radiation effects was the survivors of the 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, who, depending on their proximity to the ground zeros, were exposed to whole-body doses ranging from near zero to several Gray delivered in a single burst. But the cancer statistics for the Japanese survivors were not good enough to determine with high confidence carcinogenic effects in the dose range relevant for worker radiation protection (in the tens of milliGray per year). Hormesis advocates also argue that cellular mechanisms should be more effective in repairing the damage from low-rate radiation than from a nuclear explosion’s short pulse.
The lack of data on the effect of small low-rate doses left a gap in the epidemiological confirmation of the applicability of LNT estimates of the cancer risks from low doses to radiation workers and to civilian populations exposed to radioactive releases from nuclear accidents. That gap has been partially filled, however, in more recent studies of large populations of individuals who have received low-rate doses of ionizing radiation.
A directly relevant example is the INWORKS study done by an international consortium of researchers on the excess cancer deaths among approximately 310,000 nuclear industry workers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, whose radiation doses were measured and recorded throughout their decades of employment. As of 2012-16, this population had an average age of about 65, and about one third had died, with 28 percent of the deaths being due to “solid” cancers (abnormal masses of tissue arising in organs, glands, or bones), therefore excluding leukemia. Of those deaths, 5,500 to 14,000 were excess cases relative to the rate observed in a control group of 51,000 nuclear workers with near-zero occupational doses.
Figure 1 [on original]shows the rate of excess deaths from solid cancers in this population as a function of cumulative on-the-job dose 10 years before death, assuming that any solid cancer caused within the last decade of life would not have had time to become lethal. The bars show the 90-percent probability range associated with the number of deaths in each dose bin; that is, there is statistically only a 10-percent probability that, with more data, the number of excess deaths would converge outside that range (5 percent chance above and 5 percent below). The solid line is the best linear fit of the data to the LNT model.
By this measure, there are significant excess cancer deaths among nuclear workers down to cumulative doses of 30 milliGray.
Energy Department’s takeover. In addition to bringing the NRC to heel, the Energy Department’s Office of Nuclear Energy has been inviting startups promoting new-design nuclear power reactors to build prototypes on department land, including the 900-square-mile footprint of the Idaho National Laboratory, where they will not be subject to NRC safety requirements.
According to President Trump’s May 23 Executive Order, the NRC will be required “to approve reactor designs that the Defense Department or the Energy Department have tested and that have demonstrated the ability to function safely.”
At most, the startups will only be able to demonstrate that they will not have had a serious accident or a near miss within their first few years of operation before they hope to build their reactors in large numbers across the country and export them abroad. In their efforts to compete with natural gas, photovoltaic, and wind power plants, the nuclear startups are under great economic pressure to cut safety and security requirements currently required by the NRC and other regulators around the world. Costly requirements include containment buildings that prevent the release of radioactivity to the atmosphere in case of a core meltdown accident. Regulations also include requirements that it be possible for the timely evacuation of areas around the reactors where the population could be at risk of high radiation doses from an accident, and robust around-the-clock guard forces to protect nuclear plants against potential sabotage.
By putting the Energy Department, which is pouring billions of dollars into nuclear startups, first in line in safety regulation, the Trump administration has partially undone the 1974 decision of the post-Watergate Congress to separate safety regulation from nuclear power promotion by breaking up the Atomic Energy Commission to create the NRC and Energy Department.
Even before the Trump administration, under political pressure from the nuclear industry through congressional Republicans, the NRC commissioners backed off by majority vote from requiring filtered vents for a set of US reactors designed by General Electric that were clones of the Fukushima-Daiichi reactors 1–3, whose small-volume containments released large amounts of radioactivity due to overpressure after core meltdowns. The NRC also refused to end the practice of dense-packing spent fuel pools to five times their design density despite Fukushima unit 4’s near miss of a potentially much more catastrophic spent-fuel fire because of an undetected water level drop.
The end of ALARA. After it was effectively given much of the responsibility of regulating the US nuclear industry, the Energy Department commissioned a review of the LNT hypothesis by the Idaho National Laboratory, which supports the Office of Nuclear Energy’s mission to promote new types of nuclear power reactors.
INL quickly produced a report, which cited a 2013 comparison by Mohan Doss of the LNT model against the radiation hormesis, as “[p]erhaps most significant for regulatory considerations.” Dr. Doss is a radiologist, not an epidemiologist. His article was published in the journal Dose-Reponse, which was founded in 2003 with Professor Calabrese as its editor-in-chief and focuses on hormesis advocacy. Contrary to what the INL report claims, Dr. Doss’ article is not a meta-analysis but rather an argument for radiation hormesis.
Doss starts by arguing at length that the atomic bomb survivors study would have shown a hormesis effect had it been compared with a control group that had a higher incidence of cancer. Doss even replotted the atomic bomb survivor data to show the result if such a control group were used. In fact, there are appropriate zero-dose control groups for the atomic bomb survivors study, including those who were away from the cities at the time of the bombings. When those control groups have been used in studies, they showed some non-linearity with dose for male cancers, but no hormesis effect.
At the same time, INL referenced but ignored the findings of two actual meta-analyses of low-dose studies: one by the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements and one by an international team of 16 cancer epidemiologists led by Michael Hauptmann and published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute and partly funded by the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, and the Energy Department.
The National Council review concluded that “no alternative dose-response relationship appears more pragmatic or prudent for radiation protection purposes than the LNT model.” Hauptmann and colleagues found that “there is evidence of cancer risks from low-dose ionizing radiation.”
INL’s “reevaluation report” was quickly cited in a memorandum by the Department’s Undersecretaries of Science and Nuclear Security recommending that the Secretary of Energy “eliminate ALARA from all Department of Energy Directives and Regulations,” which he reportedly has done.
In the absence of an objective ALARA cost-benefit analysis, future decisions on limiting doses from ionizing radiation to workers and the public from nuclear power operations will be determined in significant part by the relative political strengths of industry and regulators. Under the Trump administration, the industry clearly has the upper hand.
The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency has recently made a similar decision that it will no longer take into account the health benefits from limiting air pollution. In 2024, the Biden administration announced new limits on fine particulate pollution from coal power plants and other facilities. Those regulations were justified by an estimate that, on average, 77 dollars in health benefits would result from each dollar spent by industry on emission reductions and that the regulations would save 4,500 lives per year.
A climate reporter commented in the New York Times about the Trump administration’s decision to roll back the air-pollution regulation that, for over four decades, “different administrations have used different estimates of the monetary value of a human life in cost-benefit analyses. But until now, no administration has counted it as zero.”
Just as it did with air pollution rules, the Trump administration has now, in effect, set the value of American lives to zero in regulatory protections against nuclear-radiation-caused cancer.
The damage that will result from the evisceration of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will not be immediate and may arguably turn out to be minor on the scale of the damage the Trump administration is doing in other policy areas. But public safety analysts and decision makers must keep track of the dismantlement of regulatory structures that have been built over generations. Hopefully, it will be possible to reconstruct some of them, with improvements where possible. In the meantime, however, the attacks of the Trump administration on public safety must be exposed.
Servicemen exposed to radioactive fallout in cold war weapons testing are using newly declassified documents to fight for a fair compensation scheme
In November 1957, thousands of servicemen on Christmas Island in the South Pacific watched the testing of Britain’s first megaton thermonuclear bomb. Witnesses compared it to seeing the end of the world.
Many viewed the explosion on the island while wearing shorts and short-sleeved shirts, with sunglasses handed out to protect their eyes. Veterans claim they were exposed to needless risk and were the victims of gross negligence. Large numbers later suffered blood disorders and cancers, which they believed were caused by exposure to radioactive fallout. Most were denied war pensions because of ill-health.
By contrast, those involved in the US nuclear testing programme, including the Manhattan Project led by J Robert Oppenheimer, benefited from a $2.6bn no-fault compensation fund. France agreed in 2008 that it would pay compensation to nuclear test veterans who suffered illness linked to radiation exposure.
British veterans now hope the release of thousands of previously classified documents from the Merlin files into the National Archives will help support their near-70-year battle for justice. Some of these newly released documents analysed by The Observer detail risks of radioactive fallout, health monitoring of military personnel and orders for blood samples to be taken from servicemen that could be used for evidence in any subsequent claims for damages.
A newly released independent review of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s 2025 tritium venting raises serious concerns about radiation risks to children and infants and highlights major gaps in LANL’s public reporting and decision-making process.
The review also questions LANL’s decision to proceed with venting despite no measurable pressure buildup in the waste containers — meaning the explosion risk used to justify the releases may not have existed. https://www.ccwnewmexico.org/tritium
On May 14th, 2026, the Communities for Clean Water published the review analyzing two reports LANL released following its controversial September 2025 tritium release operations.
Authored by Dr. Arjun Makhijani, President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (https://ieer.org/), the “Review of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s tritium venting reports – Volume 1 and Volume 2” provides a summary of the tritium venting as well as the data and estimates detailed in the two LANL reports.
1. FTWC Radioactive Air Emissions Summary, Volume 1: Stack Emissions & Off-Site Dose Consequence, LA-UR: 25-31093, November 14, 2025; and
2. FTWC Radioactive Air Emissions Summary, Volume 2: Environmental Sampling & Expanded Plume Modeling, LA-UR: 26-20967, February 17, 2026.
Notably, LANL formally acknowledged for the first time that estimated radiation doses to infants were more than three times higher than doses to adults — a change that came only after sustained public pressure and community participation in public meetings and hearings. Nevertheless, infant doses were not considered during the planning and modeling that took place prior to the tritium releases. LANL stated that infant doses would not be taken into account moving forward.
Kristin Shrader-Frechette: Millions of US children receive X-rays each year, but university physicians recently discovered that radiation doses as low as 1 to 5 millisievert may give these children small, but statistically significant, increased risks of cancer. (A millisievert measures the biological effect of ionizing radiation on human tissue.).
However, the annual allowed public dose from each nuclear facility in the United States is 1 to 5 millisievert. Because even a dose of 1 to 5 millisieverts likely increases cancer risks, and at least 70 percent of US reactors have released radioactivity that violates health standards, should populations near nuclear facilities be tested?
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 21st May 2026, May 2026
New research finds correlation between disease and living close to a facility
HARVARD GRIFFIN GSAS NEWS, By Kaitlyn Hung, May 19, 2026
uclear power accounts for 18 to 20 percent of electricity generated in the United States. In some places, the share is much greater—over half the energy generated in Illinois, for instance, the country’s sixth-largest state. As demand rises sharply, particularly from AI data centers, the federal government has increased funding, loans, and tax incentives in an effort to increase nuclear capacity, extend operations of existing reactors, and restart retired ones.
Although public support for nuclear energy has surged in recent years, opposition remains strong. The most common reason? Safety concerns. And they may be valid, according to population health scientist Yazan Alwadi, who received his PhD from the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in February 2026, months after receiving a master’s degree in biostatistics in November 2025. Now a post-doctoral researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Alwadi’s work uncovers a link between cancer and proximity to nuclear power plants.
Too Close for Comfort?
In the lab of Petros Koutrakis, Akira Yamaguchi Professor of Environmental Health and Human Habitation at the T.H. Chan School, Alwadi investigated whether living close to nuclear facilities impacts a population’s incidence of developing or dying from cancer. The work was motivated by a call from the Department of Public Health in Plymouth County, Massachusetts. Community members were concerned about rising cancer cases, and some wondered whether Plymouth’s Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station, decommissioned in 2019, might have contributed to the uptick.
“We get emails from families, saying that big percentages of people they know get cancer. But of course, these are anecdotal, so it needs hard science and statistical evidence to see if that actually happens or not,” Alwadi says.
As an environmental epidemiologist, Alwadi decided to investigate. “We wanted to know, are we going to find an association between the proximity to plants and cancer or not?” Alwadi says. Regardless of the outcome, he would share his findings.
Alwadi conducted a longitudinal ecological study, comparing Massachusetts zip codes’ proximity to the seven nuclear facilities in the vicinity of the state with that zip codes’ cancer incidence over time (provided by the state’s cancer registry). He used proximity as a proxy for exposure because it encompasses multiple routes of dispersal, like air and water. “We know that distance is a proxy for most [exposure routes]. It’s not perfect for any one of them, but a proxy for most,” Alwadi says.
Alwadi discovered a strong association between cancer incidence and proximity to plants for populations over 55 years old living within 5 km of a nuclear power plant. For example, women ages 65-74 living two km away from a nuclear power plant had 2-times higher relative risk of cancer, and men in this age group had 1.75-times higher risk.
To determine whether these results were more broadly generalizable to the United States, Alwadi conducted a similar study comparing nuclear power plant proximity to county-level data on cancer mortality from the US Centers for Disease Control. “We felt that doing [the analysis] nationally would give us enough statistical power to depict effects if they truly exist,” says Alwadi. He discovered that the association he observed in Massachusetts held at the national level, too. “We observe the same association, similar values, same decline of risks with distance across different aggregations, zip codes versus counties . . . for cancers of interest.”
Koutrakis says that his advisee’s research is notable because it is the first series of studies to systematically demonstrate associations between residential proximity to nuclear power plants and cancer outcomes across multiple settings using large, population-based datasets. “This work fills a critical gap in the literature by providing large-scale, systematic evidence on a question that has remained unresolved for decades.” …………………………………………….
Importantly, while the study shows a robust association between nuclear plant proximity and cancer, the study’s design cannot determine whether that relationship is causal. “Although these are ecological designs that do not establish causality and are very hard to infer causality from their evidence, the systematic results and the consistency of the findings are exactly what you’d expect to find if a true underlying causal effect existed,” says Alwadi. By systematically demonstrating an association, Alwadi’s discovery provides the impetus for more detailed research to understand the nature of the link between nuclear power plants and cancer. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
………………………………………………… Digging Deeper
Since graduation, Alwadi has continued his work in the Koutrakis lab as a postdoctoral fellow. Today, he tracks the relationship between nuclear facility proximity and cancer within individuals, rather than populations. He says this cohort analysis will provide stronger evidence for the nature of the association by reducing bias and clarifying the temporality of nuclear facility exposure to cancer development.
Ultimately, Alwadi hopes to lead a lab of his own in environmental epidemiology and public health. He’s got a plethora of questions he wants to tackle, so to him, it’s just a matter of time and resources to get the work done. “We see a signal, we keep digging,” he says. https://gsas.harvard.edu/news/does-proximity-nuclear-power-plants-increase-cancer-risk
This national-scale analysis provides new evidence that proximity to nuclear power plants is associated with increased mortality from major cancers in the U.S. The magnitude and consistency of the findings highlight the importance of updated risk assessments, sustained surveillance, and strengthened public health planning for communities living near nuclear facilities.
Nuclear power plants emit low levels of ionizing radiation, an established risk factor for breast, colon, and lung cancers, yet the long-term effects of chronic environmental exposure in U.S. populations remain unclear.
Objective
To evaluate sex- and age-specific associations between proximity to nuclear power plants and mortality from the three most common cancers in the U.S.: breast, colon, and lung cancer.
Methods
We quantified county-level proximity to nuclear power plants using the sum of inverse distances from each residence county’s population-weighted center to all plants within 200 km, updated annually from 2000 to 2020. Cancer-specific mortality data (breast, colon, and lung) from the CDC were analyzed by sex and five age groups (45–54, 55–64, 65–74, 75–84, 85 + ). Relative risks (RRs) were estimated using generalized estimating equations with a Poisson link. Models were adjusted for sociodemographic factors, urbanicity, region, and temporal trends.
Results
Proximity to nuclear power plants was associated with elevated mortality from breast, colon, and lung cancers. From 2000 to 2020, an estimated 39,767 female deaths (95% CI: 9312–69,381), representing 2.01% (95% CI: 0.47–3.50%), and 38,124 male deaths (95% CI: 16,106–59,600), representing 2.33% (95% CI: 0.98–3.64%), were attributable to this proximity. Lung cancer accounted for the largest burden in both sexes, followed by breast and colon cancer in females and colon cancer in males. Mortality risks declined with increasing distance, becoming negligible beyond 50 km.
Significance
This national-scale analysis provides new evidence that proximity to nuclear power plants is associated with increased mortality from major cancers in the U.S. The magnitude and consistency of the findings highlight the importance of updated risk assessments, sustained surveillance, and strengthened public health planning for communities living near nuclear facilities.
Impact
This study provides the first national assessment of sex- and age-specific mortality from breast, colon, and lung cancers in relation to proximity to U.S. nuclear power plants, revealing consistent patterns not previously demonstrated. These findings fill a major gap in environmental epidemiology and underscore the need for cohort studies, refined exposure assessments, and pathway-specific analyses to strengthen causal interpretation. As nuclear power gains momentum in national energy planning, establishing clearer evidence on potential health impacts is increasingly essential for guiding research priorities and public health preparedness.
Changes for worse or better protection for workers and the public is on the international and national political agenda in a number of countries. Trade Union, environment and public health groups around the world are concerned that the USA is considering proposals that would weaken radiation protection standards at a time when the scientific evidence suggests these need to be significantly tightened.
Our concern arises as a result of a Directive (EO 14300) 1 issued in May 2025 by US President Donald Trump requiring the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to review nuclear safety regulations with particular reference to radiation protection of workers and the public. The Directive instructs the NRC to abandon fundamental principles that have formed the basis for radiation protection for much of the past century. These include: the internationally accepted position that there is no threshold or safe level of exposure; that, as a consequence, all exposures should be kept as low as reasonably achievable (ALARA) ; and all exposures to workers and the public be kept below strict annual limits in line with the best evidence of radiation-induced health risks.
The evidence used to set current standards was drawn mainly from the studies of cancer rates among the Japanese A-bomb survivors who were exposed to relatively high doses over short time periods. Since then studies of workers in nuclear power facilities exposed to lower doses over long time periods show higher rates of cancer than predicted by the Japanese studies. Rather than indicating any threshold these studies suggest that at low doses the cancer rates are proportionately higher than expected from the Linear No- Threshold model used to set current standards. 2 Worker studies also show elevated rates of cardio-vascular diseases 3 , and increased rates of dementia 4 . In addition, studies on populations around nuclear power plants are now showing higher cancer rates affecting particularly children 5 and the elderly 6 – correlated to how close they lived to these facilities. Despite this mounting evidence that exposure limits should be lowered the likely result of changes in line with the Presidential directive would be to increase the permissible exposure limit for workers and the public to five times the current internationally recommended level.
The US NRC is clearly faced with a dilemma. To adopt the changes demanded by the President would require reversing its 2021 decision that specifically rejected these same proposals 7 . The initial date for publication of the NRC’s draft response for public consultation was 23 February 2026. This was deferred to 30 April and again at short notice to 24 June. One might speculate that despite large scale resignations and lay-offs among NRC staff there remain some with scientific integrity opposing the changes. However the final revision of standards is required by end of November 2026. Given the President’s record for seeking retribution on government representatives or officials who oppose his plans it is hard to see any outcome from the NRC other than a change to weaken the US standards.
There will also likely be pressure on international and national standards agencies to align with changes in the USA. Some push-back can be expected. Already the heads of European standards agencies have issued a statement supporting the LNT and ALARA principles and insisted that exposure standards be set on the basis of the scientific evidence without undue influence. 8 However NRC changes in line with the Trump Presidential Directive will embolden the nuclear power lobby and create pressure for change where there are joint ventures involving US military or industrial interests. These changes are also likely to impede public pressure for review and improvement of current standards.
In Australia, for example, there are a number of joint ventures in uranium and radioactive rare earths and mineral sands mining and the government has already established a separate Naval Nuclear Power Safety Regulator (ANNPSR)to oversee all aspects of construction, operation, maintenance, decommissioning and nuclear waste management under the Australia-UK-US (AUKUS) nuclear submarine program. While these standards are expected to be consistent with those of the current Australian Radiation and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) the pressure for change can come from either agency. Hopefully it will be politically independent science-based pressure to not merely oppose the direction prompted by the US President’s directive but for better standards to protect health of workers and the public where they are routinely exposed to ionising radiation.
The two Diablo Canyon nuclear reactors in San Luis Obispo County CA began operations in 1984 and 1985. They have generated enormous amounts of highly radioactive waste. Most is stored at the site, but some is routinely released into the environment – and into humans through breathing, food, and water. However, no studies on health effects to the local population have been done.
Exposure to radiation is especially harmful to the fetus and infant. This report analyzes trends and current patterns of newborn and infant health in San Luis Obispo County, compared to the state of California. Results show that county rates have shifted from below to above the state:
Infant Deaths. Before Diablo Canyon opened (1968-1984), the county death rate under one year was 16% below the state. Most recently (2010-2024), the county was 1% above the state, including 11% and 23% higher for white non-Hispanics and white Hispanics.
Premature Births. In the earliest period available (1995-1999), the county rate of premature births (<36 weeks gestation) was 21% below the state. Most recently (2020-2024), the rate was 3% above the state (8% and 31% higher for white non-Hispanics and white Hispanics).
Birth Defects. In the period 2016-2024, the county rate of 12 types of birth defects was 114% greater than (more than double) the state, 3rd highest among the 35 largest California counties.
Other Newborn Health Measures. In addition, the county also has higher current (2016-2024) rates of common newborn risk factors, including those requiring assisted ventilation, those with low five-minute Apgar scores (a measure of infant health), and newborns transferred to another facility.
Child Cancer. Child cancer is believed to often be an adverse outcome that began in pregnancy. Early in Diablo Canyon’s operation (1988-1992), county cancer incidence 0-19 was 26% below the state; in the 30 years since then (1993-2022), the county rate was just 2% below the state.
No explanation for these findings is apparent, as risk factors in the county are not elevated. Compared to the state, the county has low rates of minorities, uninsured, foreign born, and languages other than English spoken at home; and similar rates of income, education, and poverty. The county rate of the most common maternal birth risk factors are below the state (overweight/obese mothers, mothers <20 or >35, mothers on WIC or Medicaid, and previous Cesarean section).
Further review of county health patterns is warranted to assess what role exposures to radioactivity from Diablo Canyon has played in these trends. Results should be made available to officials and the public. No major decision on the future of the plant should be made without a thorough understanding of the impact exposures have had on local health………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………https://radiation.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Diablo-Canyon-report-November-2025.pdf
Forty years ago, a nuclear disaster struck Chernobyl. Women from Rivne Nuclear Power Plant were sent to cook for clean-up crews. They faced radiation and health problems. Food meant for workers was often wasted or contaminated. Some food was smuggled out. Decades later, these women fight for promised pensions. Their experiences offer insight into the disaster’s lasting impact.
When Raya heard of a nuclear power plant accident, she turned to Ukraine’s Rivne Nuclear Power Plant close by: “We looked at our gherkin barrels — that’s what we call our power plant chimneys — and we could see there was nothing wrong with them.” But then the truth emerged: The accident was at their sister plant in Chernobyl, 180 miles east, and Raya had to go there to cook.
It has been 40 years since the world’s worst nuclear disaster and so much has been written and filmed about Chernobyl. But Polish writer Witold Szablowski found a little-known story for his book What’s Cooking in the Kremlin, a history of Russia through food. Szablowski knew how, even in the worst disasters, those working to save the situation had to eat, so someone had to cook for them. He found seven women alive, out of a group of 15 sent from Rivne after the disaster.
All the women suffered health issues, though not being in the actual plant spared them a bit. Dosimeters, to measure radiation, were placed at the entrance of the canteen, and when clean-up workers came from the plant, their buzzing became frantic and continuous. “It was a dreadful sound,” recalled Valentina, the head of the group.
Finally, the dosimeters were removed. Why remind people about radiation, when nothing could be done? The countryside around Chernobyl was abandoned. Raya recalled cows “mooing pitifully, because the people had been taken away and there was no one to milk them”. The canteen had also been abandoned. An earlier group of cooks were so terrified, they fled through the forest. That act had probably sealed their death warrants since Chernobyl’s forest was one of the worstaffected areas.
Food shortages were the norm in the latter days of the Soviet Union, but a guilty state ensured Chernobyl’s workers were given the best meats, dairy and fruit from across the country. “There was a whole sea of produce there,” Luba, another cook, recalled. “Little cubes of butter, full-fat cream — it sounds funny, but in those days, under Gorbachev, that was a real delicacy.” Workers had to drink glasses of cream, perhaps in the hope that its calcium would counter the depletion in their bones ..
Yet this food, which would normally have been the stuff of fantasies for people, was mostly wasted. Workers just wanted fruit juices and vodka. “They were burning up Witold. Burning up from inside,” Olga said. It was hard for the cooks to see such food disregarded. By habit, Luba would tell workers to take chocolate and give it to a kid, if they didn’t want it for themselves. Then she realised the food was contaminated by just being there, and no kid should have it.
Inevitably, some food was smuggled out. In Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl , one woman tells her how, in the months of fear afterwards, she only bought the most expensive meats to be safe: “Then we found out it was the expensive salami that they mixed contaminated meat into, thinking, well, since it was expensive, fewer people would buy it.” It is almost grimly comic how quickly the usual compromises and corruptions of life reasserted themselves.
Decades later, Valentina is fighting for the special pensions they were promised. An agent says she’ll arrange it for a thousand dollars — and tells an outraged Valentina that it’s a discount: “She charged those who hadn’t been in Chernobyl several thousand.”
Chernobyl’s 40th anniversary has been marked by articles lamenting how it set back nuclear power for decades. Sam Dumitriu, a British policy analyst, notes with some puzzlement that polls show women are far less likely to support nuc ..
The Scottish Campaign to Resist the Atomic Menace has issued a reminder of the huge human cost of the Chornobyl disaster in Ukraine to mark its 40th anniversary this Sunday, 26th April. Studies indicate a result of the disaster of between 16000 and 40000 fatal cancers. Others claim these estimates are very conservative.(1,2)
Pete Roche of SCRAM said: “The contrast between what happened 40 years ago in Ukraine at the Chornobyl nuclear plant – and the proclamations of today’s nuclear industry that it is not dangerous or dirty – could not be greater. Chornobyl contamination was widespread across Europe and is estimated to result in anything between 16,000 and 40,000 fatal cancers, possibly many more.
“Whilst we haven’t experienced a full meltdown at a UK nuclear plant to date, the industry’s record in the UK is not a clean one. These include the serious 3-day reactor core fire at Windscale in Cumbria in 1957 and other accidental releases of highly radioactive material into the sea and the local environment, and in Scotland the waste shaft explosion at Dounreay in 1977.
“Both Torness and Hunterston power stations in Scotland suffered significant cracking in their graphite reactor cores over time, and there have been numerous shut downs over their years of operation but thankfully did not result in the type of full scale regional emergency at Chornobyl or in Japan at the Fukushima plant in 2011. The inherent danger is there despite nuclear public relations efforts, and the legacy of toxic waste will be with future generations for hundreds of years. 40 years after the disaster, it is still highly vulnerable from the conflict in the region. Wind turbines, hydro plants and solar panels don’t carry these risks.
“After the reprocessing at Sellafield was abandoned, highly radioactive reactor fuel elements will now be stored on UK nuclear sites well into the 2100s. No safe solution has been found other than looking for eventual deep burial at a location yet to be determined, that will need guarded for hundreds if not thousands of years.
“On the positive side of the debate over energy, with Scotland’s huge renewable resources, nuclear is not needed. Scotland can power itself, and export clean, green power to other countries – and combine that with energy storage, flexible green power and an upgraded grid system. The revolution in renewable energy is already well underway and is globally unstoppable. New nuclear power has no place in a clean, green energy system, and certainly not in Scotland.”
A recent Survation poll of 2000 people, indicated that a majority of Scots preferred renewable energy over nuclear to tackle the climate crisis and be most effective at reducing energy bills. It also found that the nuclear industry was the least trusted to ‘tell the truth aboutits products, costs, pollutants and safety record.’ (3)
The campaign group says nuclear is not needed and is an expensive distraction that will do nothing to tackle the climate crisis, calling instead for a 100% renewable energy system to be committed to by the next Scottish Government after the May election.
CAIRO, Egypt, Apr 23 2026 (IPS) – Six weeks into the 2026 Middle East military escalation, UNFPA Arab States Regional Office warns that its impact on 161 million women and girls living in conflict-affected areas across the region remain largely invisible in conflict analysis, humanitarian response, and funding priorities.
“The omission is not merely analytical – it is structural,” the report states. Without sex-disaggregated data and gender perspectives, the international community is conducting incomplete risk assessments, misaligning interventions, and missing critical opportunities for stabilization and peace.
The conflict is projected to cost regional economies $120–194 billion – equivalent to 3.7 to 6 percent of collective GDP. Four million additional people are estimated to be pushed into poverty and 3.64 million jobs may be lost. Women – overrepresented in informal employment – face disproportionate livelihood collapse while shouldering increased unpaid care work.
Supply chain shocks through the Strait of Hormuz threaten to delay lifesaving humanitarian supplies by up to six months. Across Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan, and Yemen, more than 260 health facilities and 14 mobile medical units have already shut down. Food insecurity is intensifying, with documented patterns showing women and girls eat last and least.
The report also highlights a surge in GBV risks driven by hyper-displacement, while sanctions and financial “de-risking” are crippling the ability of women-led organizations to deliver essential services. These organizations—often the first responders in crises—are being cut off from the very funding streams meant to sustain them
UNFPA is calling on national governments, UN agencies, donors, and civil society to:
Integrate gender systematically into all conflict analysis and response frameworks
Protect and fund GBV and sexual and reproductive health services as core, lifesaving interventions.
Finance and empower local women-led organizations, removing barriers to their access and participation.
Ensure women’s leadership in recovery, peacebuilding, and decision-making processes.
“Making women and girls visible is not optional,” the report concludes. “It is fundamental to effective humanitarian action, sustainable recovery, and lasting peace.”
UNFPA is the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency.
By Mike Treen, GPJA, Global Peace and Justice, AOTEAROA, 5 April 26
Since the Cuban revolution triumphed on January 1, 1959, Cuba has initiated a medical revolution as part of the social revolution. As Wikipedia noted:
The new Cuban government stated that universal healthcare would become a priority of state planning. In 1960 revolutionary and physician Che Guevara outlined his aims for the future of Cuban healthcare in an essay entitled On Revolutionary Medicine, stating: “The work that today is entrusted to the Ministry of Health and similar organizations is to provide public health services for the greatest possible number of persons, institute a program of preventive medicine, and orient the public to the performance of hygienic practices.”[15] These aims were hampered almost immediately by an exodus of almost half of Cuba’s physicians to the United States, leaving the country with only 3,000 doctors and 16 professors in the University of Havana’s medical college.
The Cuban leaders ordered new medical schools to be built to train the doctors needed to replace those who left with doctors who adhered less to the mercenary spirit of the leavers. The doctor-resident ratio increased six-fold by the late 1990s. Cuba has three times the rate of the US, UK or New Zealand – 9 per 1000 compared to 2.5 for the US and UK and 3.5 for New Zealand.
By 2012, infant mortality had dropped to 4.8 per 1,000 live births compared to 6 for the US. Life expectancy is one year less that the US (although it exceeded the US briefly during Covid). Cuba’s GDP per capita is one tenth of the US when measured in US dollars.
“Since 1960, some 600,000 Cuban medical professionals have provided free health care in over 180 countries. The government of Cuba has assumed the lion’s share of the cost of its medical internationalism, a huge contribution to the Global South, particularly given the impact of the US blockade and Cuba’s own development challenges. ‘Some will wonder how it is possible that a small country with few resources can carry out a task of this magnitude in fields as decisive as education and health,’ noted Fidel Castro in 2008.”
Cuba has also helped train doctors from across the globe at no cost to the tens of thousands given scholarships. Helen Yaffe writes: “In the 1960s, it began training foreigners in their own countries when suitable facilities were available, or in Cuba when they were not. By 2016, 73,848 foreign students from eighty-five countries had graduated in Cuba while that nation was running twelve medical schools overseas, mostly in Africa, where over 54,000 students were enrolled. In 1999, the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM), the world’s largest medical school, was established in Havana. By 2019, ELAM had graduated 29,000 doctors from 105 countries (including the United States) representing 100 ethnic groups. Half were women, and 75 percent from worker or campesino families.”
There are currently 20,000 Cuban doctors working in 50 countries. The US NPR reported March 24, 2026, that the U.S. also recently passed a law allowing it to impose sanctions on countries that work with Cuban doctors.
“The countries that have broken off these contracts are afraid. They are afraid of retaliation by the United States,” says William LeoGrande, a professor of government in the School of Public Affairs at American University. “This is typical of Donald Trump’s foreign policy, which is based essentially on coercive diplomacy: ‘Do it our way, or else.’ So: ‘Get rid of the Cuban doctors, or else.’ ”
Sanctions deepened in 2019 by US President Trump
The deepening of sanctions since 2019 has resulted in the first deterioration of health statistics in Cuba ever. Even during the very difficult period in the early 1990s when the Soviet Unon collapsed and Cuba lost 90% of its trade partners and GDP declined 25%, they were able to maintain progress on health care. That is not the case today. The fuel blockade has resulted in blackouts that prevent medical institutions from functioning. Infant mortality is increasing. Life expectancy is declining.
Cuba’s downward spiral accelerated in January, after the U.S. capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro choked off oil from Cuba’s main benefactor. (As Science went to press, the U.S. signaled it would allow a Russian tanker full of crude oil to reach Cuba this week.) The U.S. government hopes the crisis will finally dislodge the island’s Communist regime. “I do believe I will have the honor of taking Cuba,” U.S. President Donald Trump told journalists this month. Cuba’s science is collateral damage. “There’s an effort to degrade everything Cuba has achieved in education and science, and send us back to the Stone Age,” says Mitchell Valdés Sosa, director of the Cuban Neurosciences Center.
Nationwide electricity blackouts lasting 20 or more hours a day are forcing doctors to triage care and putting lives at risk. At the Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital in Havana, “we receive the most complex neurosurgical cases in the country,” says neurosurgeon Marlon Manuel Ortiz Machín. “Surgeries must not stop; it’s sometimes a patient’s last chance.” Yet he’s been “caught in the dark” during complex operations. “All you can do is pray until the generator comes back on.”
Gail Reed, a volunteer for the U.S. nonprofit MEDICC who was in Havana last week, fears Cuba’s medical system is on the brink of collapse. “Hospitals are running out of supplies. It’s heartbreaking and unconscionable,” she says. With Cuba’s infant mortality rate rising, MEDICC is “trying to protect women with high-risk pregnancies” by installing solar panels in maternity homes, Reed says.
“We’re seeing malnourishment, people losing weight,” says Angela Garcia, executive director of Global Links, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit. Flying into Havana last month, she says, “the first thing I noticed was an acrid odor”—from burning mounds of trash that has gone uncollected because of fuel shortages.
Damage to Cuba’s vaunted biotech sector could have an outsize impact on health and the economy. The 51 enterprises that make up BioCubaFarma, a government entity, produce scores of drugs, vaccines, and reagents, many of which are exported to 77 countries. One high-profile compound is CIMAvax-EGF, an immunotherapy against lung cancer that had positive results in early clinical trials in the U.S., done in partnership with the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York.…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Cuba’s role fighting the Ebola crisis………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Cuba’s role in training doctors for Timor Leste and many Pacific Islands
Unknown to most of us in this part of the world, Cuba is also providing doctors and training locals in most of the Pacific Island states in a special medical school in Cuba, The Latin American School of Medicine. The Australian Development Policy Centre blog reported in February 2012: (https://devpolicy.org/cuba-in-the-pacific-more-than-rum-and-coke-2-20120224/):………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Cuba has also run a programme over the last two decades that has cured millions of people of functional blindness. It is very similar to great programme established by the late New Zealand doctor Professor Fred Hollows who was a renowned New Zealand-born eye surgeon who dedicated his life to restoring sight. A good socialist himself, he was horrified at the neglect that Aboriginal Australians in particur were forced to endure. The Fred Hollows Foundation NZ continues his legacy by fighting to end avoidable blindness in the Pacific region, training local eye care specialists, and conducting thousands of sight-restoring surgeries.
Set in motion on July 8, 2004, Operation Miracle took shape within the context of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – otherwise known as ALBA – which Cuba and Venezuela established that year also.
In 2019, Cuba was itself hit by the Covid crisis and had to invent three vaccines to treat itself and achieved the same 90% effectiveness as the Western drugs they were not allowed to get. Cuba has also developed advanced medical sciences and hundreds of patented drugs that we can’t access. This includes treatments for Dementia, Cancer, and Polio that would be very welcome in our own communities which suffer significantly from these ailments. My own brother has dementia and look at what Cuba has achieved here. U.S. Citizens in Cuba for New Breakthrough Alzheimer’s Treatment
But the lockdowns saw a collapse in tourism to Cuba, which was their main foreign currency earner. The newly elected US President Trump also imposed new extreme sanctions, which were maintained by President Biden despite promises to remove them during the election period. When Trump returned in 2025, Cuba was subjected to a renewed and even more extreme embargo from the US empire (including fuel). This has led to very harsh conditions in Cuba and a collapse in their ability to deliver the same medical internationalism as before, including for the Pacific.
Working people worldwide need to take our own lessons from the Ebola, Covid, and similar health crises facing the world. Public health should be promoted and available to everyone on Earth. Ebola and Covid demonstrated that neglect of the Earth and its people anywhere will ultimately be a threat to human survival everywhere. Putting profits before people is a dead end, literally. The monopoly control over drugs and other aspects of medical research by the drug companies needs to be broken. Finding an alternative way of running this world which puts people and the planet before profit also must involve defending Cuba and its revolutionary example.
The world owes a giant debt to Cuba. The Nuestra America solidarity convoys are an example of what needs to be done until Cuba is free of all threats. What we can be sure of is that Cuba will not surrender despite the hardship they face. Hundreds of thousands will fight if invaded. Cuba’s most famous singer, 79-year-old Silvio Rodriguez, volunteered to fight and demanded an AK47 which was delivered by the Cuban President. This week, fuel has arrived on a Russian ship despite threats. More will come as the world increasingly wins its freedom from the US empire and its domination. That empire is declining and nations are asserting their independence as best they can. Some (like Cuba, Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Venezuela) are fighting for their survival and we must fight side by side with them for the future of humanity and the planet. The empire’s alternative is permanent war and economic collapse. Peace with justice comes when we defeat that empire once and for all. https://gpja.org.nz/2026/04/05/cuba-has-saved-millions-of-lives-across-the-world-we-must-fight-for-its-survival-as-a-duty-to-humanity/
“…………………………………………………………………………………… The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, built by General Electric (GE) in the mid-1960s, was designed to withstand natural disasters, but its creators never foresaw an earthquake like that. When the plant’s sensors detected the quake, its reactors automatically shut down. That emergency shutdown (or scram) halted its fission process, triggering backup power to keep cold seawater flowing through the reactors and spent-fuel containers to prevent overheating. Things at Fukushima were going according to plan until that massive tsunami battered the plant, washing away transmission towers and damaging electrical systems. There were backup generators in the basement, but those, too, had been inundated by waves of seawater, and an already bad situation was about to get far worse.
A power outage at a nuclear power plant is known as a “station blackout.” As you might imagine, it’s one of the worst scenarios any nuclear facility could possibly experience. If all electricity is lost, that means water is no longer being pumped into the reactor’s scalding-hot core to cool it down. And if that core isn’t constantly being cooled, one thing is certain: disaster will ensue. The fission process itself may be complicated, but that’s basic physics. To make matters worse, there were three operatingreactors at Fukushima Daiichi. Luckily, three others had already been shut down for maintenance. If power wasn’t restored in short order, that would mean that all three of Fukushima’s reactors were in very big trouble.
We would later learn that no one — not at TEPCO, GE, or among Japanese regulators — had ever considered the possibility that all the reactors might lose electricity at once. They had only drawn up plans for one reactor to go down, in which case the others could keep the plant running. But all of them offline, and every generator out of commission? There was no precedent or playbook for that.
The nuclear industry has a reasonably polite name for a disaster like the one that was rocking Fukushima. They refer to it as a “beyond design-basis accident” because no single nuclear plant design can account for every possible problem it might encounter in its lifetime. The fact that there’s a term for this should make you anxious.
Meltdowns and Fallout
Over the next several days, the emergency at Fukushima Daiichi only worsened. Every effort to restore power to its reactors hit a dead end. On-site radiation-detection equipment, which would have triggered warnings and guided evacuation efforts for those in danger, was no longer functioning. Plans to pump water into the reactors to cool them had faltered. Their cores kept overheating, and the boiling pools of spent fuel were at risk of drying out, potentially triggering a massive fire that would release extreme amounts of radiation.
Within three days, following a series of fires, hydrogen explosions, and panic among those aware of what was happening, Fukushima’s Units 1, 2, and 3 experienced full-scale core meltdowns. Over 150,000 people within an 18-mile radius had already been forced to evacuate, and radiation plumes would take two weeks to spread across the northern hemisphere, although the Japanese government wouldn’t admit publicly that any meltdown had occurred until June 2011, three months later.
The only good news for the 13 million people living 150 miles south in Tokyo was that, during and immediately after the meltdowns, prevailing winds carried much of Fukushima’s radioactive material away from the smoldering reactors and out to sea. It’s estimated that 80% of the fallout from Fukushima ended up in the ocean, meaning most of it headed east rather than toward population centers to the south and west. The other fortunate news was that the spent fuel containers had somehow survived it all. If their water levels in the pools had been drained, far more radiation would have been released.
But Tokyo wasn’t completely spared. After years of research, scientists discovered that cesium-rich microparticles had blanketed the greater Tokyo area, an unpopular discovery that drew backlash and threats of academic censorship. Areas around the Fukushima exclusion zones recorded the highest radiation levels. Japanese government officials continually downplayed the dangers of the accident and were reluctant to even classify the event as a Level 7 nuclear disaster, the highest rating on the International Nuclear Event Scale, which would have placed it on a par with the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Japanese officials have also failed to conduct long-term epidemiological studies that would include baseline measurements of cancer rates, which has cast doubt on thyroid screenings that found troubling incidents of cancer far higher than researchers expected.
Radioactive Fish
Prior to the earthquake, the ocean’s cesium-137 levels near Fukushima were 2 Becquerels (a unit of radioactivity) per cubic meter, well below the recommended drinking water threshold of 10,000 Becquerels. Just after March 11, 2011, cesium-137 levels there spiked to fifty million before decreasing as sea currents dispersed the radioactive particles away from the coast. The ocean, however, had been poisoned.
In the years that followed the Fukushima nuclear disaster, researchers documented a frightening, yet predictable trend. Radioactive isotopes in seawater were taken up by marine plants (phytoplankton), which then moved up the food chain into tiny marine animals (zooplankton) and, eventually, to fish.
Cesium-137 consumed by fish can reside in their bodies for months, while Strontium-90 remains in their bones for years. If humans then eat such fish, they will also be exposed to those radioactive particles. The more contaminated fish they eat, the greater the radioactive buildup will be.
In 2023, over a decade after the incident, radiation levels remained sky-high in black rockfish caught off the Fukushima coast. Other bottom-dwelling species have been found to be laden with radioactivity, too, including eel and rock trout. Further concerns have been raised about the treated radioactive water that TEPCO continued to release into the ocean, prompting China to suspend seafood imports from Japan. Aside from those findings, there have been very few studies examining the effects of Fukushima’s radiation on ecosystems or on the people of Japan.
“Japan has clamped down on scientific efforts to study the nuclear catastrophe,” claims pediatrician Alex Rosen of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. “There is hardly any literature, any publicized research, on the health effects on humans, and those that are published come from a small group of researchers at Fukushima Medical University.”
Recognizing such levels of radiation, even if confined to the waters near Fukushima, would cast the country’s nuclear industry as a significant threat — not only to Japan but globally. Any admission that Fukushima’s radiation is linked to increased cancer rates would raise broader concerns about nuclear power’s future viability. Radiation exposure is cumulative and, although Fukushima didn’t immediately cause mass casualties, it wasn’t a benign accident either. It took decades before it was accepted that Chernobyl had caused tens of thousands of excess cancer deaths. It may take even longer to completely understand Fukushima’s full effects. In the meantime, the still ongoing cleanup of the burned-out facilities may cost as much as 80 trillion yen ($500 billion).
It’s been 15 years since Fukushima’s reactors experienced those meltdowns and we still don’t fully understand their long-term repercussions. Nuclear power advocates will argue that Fukushima wasn’t a serious incident and that nuclear technology is still safe. They’ll minimize radiation threats, remain optimistic that new reactor designs will never falter, dismiss the fact that there’s simply no permanent solution for radioactive waste, and overlook the inseparable connection between nuclear power and atomic weapons. After all, among other things, we’ll undoubtedly need nuclear energy to help power the artificial intelligence craze, right?………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. With nine nuclear-armed nations and roughly 12,000 nuclear warheads on this planet, worries about nuclear war are unavoidable. However, the danger of a nuclear disaster at a seemingly “peaceful” nuclear facility is often ignored. The future of atomic energy remains uncertain, but it is our duty to eliminate this hazardous energy source before another Fukushima triggers a war-like catastrophe all its own.mhttps://scheerpost.com/2026/03/20/searching-for-solace-in-a-nuclearized-world/
When a hypothesis is at odds with data, you don’t discard the data – you modify the hypothesis.
Medical data trump hypothetical estimates of “radiation doses” that are disconnected from reality, not measured nor even measurable.
Internal exposures to alpha emitters like plutonium and pure beta emitters like tritium and carbon-14 are notoriously difficult to measure, especially when it comes to pregnant women and their developing fetuses.Too often, medical data have been mistrusted or even discarded because the estimated radiation doses were “too low” to account for the harmful effects recorded
This happened in the aftermath of the TMI nuclear accident, for example, and following the German KiKK study that found significantly increased leukaemia in children under 5 within 5 kilometres of any one of Germany’s then-operating 17 nuclear power reactors.All 17 reactors are now shut down, as Germany has completely phased out of nuclear power.
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‘Robust and consistent’ signal: Cancer mortality rates higher near nuclear power plants
By Mark Leiser, Fact checked by Heather Bile, Healio, March 16, 2026
[from Hematology/Oncology News Today]
Key Takeaways
An analysis of every U.S. county showed higher cancer mortality rates in those located closer to nuclear power plants.
The findings cannot prove causality but warrant further investigation, researchers concluded.
U.S. counties located closer to nuclear power plants have higher cancer mortality rates than those located farther away, results of a national analysis showed.
The study — which accounted for environmental, socioeconomic and other factors — yielded results that remained consistent through multiple sensitivity analyses.
During the 19 year study period, researchers estimated that 115,586 cancer deaths nationwide could be attributed to nuclear power plant proximity.
Data derived from Alwadi A, et al. Nat Commun. 2026;doi:10.1038/s41467-026-69285-4.
In light of increased attention on nuclear power as a low-carbon energy alternative, more research into its potential effects on public health is warranted, according to Yazan Alwadi, PhD, postdoctoral research fellow in the department of environmental health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“We want to be very clear that we cannot prove causality. However, the signal we observed is very robust and consistent, and it is surprising it has not been shown before,” Alwadi told Healio. “In my opinion, we have all the evidence we need to justify going to the next level of investigation.”
Impact of ‘normal operation’
A majority of studies that examined the effects of routine operation assessed cancer incidence or mortality in a specific region located near one or two plants. The limited setting reduces the statistical power to detect effects, he said.
Alwadi and colleagues launched their study after local public health officials in Plymouth County, Massachusetts — where the now-closed Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station is located — asked them to evaluate what they considered concerning cancer patterns in the region.
“Rather than focusing on a single county, we felt it was scientifically stronger to conduct a national analysis,” Alwadi said.
The researchers used U.S. Energy Information Administration records to identify the locations and operational dates of all nuclear power plants located within 200 km — about 124 miles — from the center of any U.S. county. They obtained county-level cancer mortality data from the CDC, focusing on the period between 2000 and 2018.
Alwadi and colleagues employed what they described as a “spatially resolved, inverse distance-weighted proximity metric.”
They used statistical modeling to calculate cumulative effects of multiple nearby nuclear power plants on people aged 35 years or older, controlling for potential confounders — such as BMI, smoking prevalence, household income and educational attainment — in each county.
A positive association
The results revealed a positive association between proximity to nuclear power plants and cancer mortality.
Investigators estimated 115,586 cancer deaths (95% CI, 56,964-173,326) during the 19-year study period — or approximately 6,400 per year across the country — could be attributed to nuclear power plant proximity.
For men and women in most age groups, results showed considerably higher relative risks when equivalent plant distance was 50 km or less, with risk curves beginning to plateau with greater distance.
Relative risk estimates were lowest among the 35-to-44 age group for both women and men, then began to increase with age.
Investigators estimated 115,586 cancer deaths (95% CI, 56,964-173,326) during the 19-year study period — or approximately 6,400 per year across the country — could be attributed to nuclear power plant proximity.
For men and women in most age groups, results showed considerably higher relative risks when equivalent plant distance was 50 km or less, with risk curves beginning to plateau with greater distance.
Relative risk estimates were lowest among the 35-to-44 age group for both women and men, then began to increase with age.
Among women, those aged 55 to 64 years exhibited the highest relative risk (RR = 1.19), with 2.1% (95% CI, 1.3%-2.9%) of cancer deaths in that age group attributable to nuclear power plant proximity.
Among men, those aged 65 to 74 years had the highest relative risk (RR = 1.2), with an estimated 2% (95% CI, 1.2%-2.7%) of cancer deaths in that age group attributable to nuclear power plant proximity.
Overall results showed the highest attributable cancer mortality burden among individuals aged 65 to 84 years. Researchers estimated 4,266 deaths (95% CI, 3,000-9,112) per year among those aged 65 or older to be attributable to proximity to nuclear power plants.
Among women, those aged 55 to 64 years exhibited the highest relative risk (RR = 1.19), with 2.1% (95% CI, 1.3%-2.9%) of cancer deaths in that age group attributable to nuclear power plant proximity.
Among men, those aged 65 to 74 years had the highest relative risk (RR = 1.2), with an estimated 2% (95% CI, 1.2%-2.7%) of cancer deaths in that age group attributable to nuclear power plant proximity.
Overall results showed the highest attributable cancer mortality burden among individuals aged 65 to 84 years. Researchers estimated 4,266 deaths (95% CI, 3,000-9,112) per year among those aged 65 or older to be attributable to proximity to nuclear power plants.
The associations between proximity and cancer mortality persisted in multiple sensitivity analyses, Alwadi said. In one, researchers adjusted the distance from nuclear power plants to county centers, changing by increments of 10 km until it reached a 100-km radius. In another, investigators varied the average proximity window across five intervals, ranging from 2 years to 20 years.
The consistency of the results demonstrate that they “are not driven by arbitrary choices in model variables or parameters,” the researchers wrote.
The investigators acknowledged study limitations.
The analysis assumed equal impact of all nuclear power plants rather than incorporating direct radiation measurements, and it assessed all malignancies combined even though radiation sensitivities and latency periods vary by cancer type.
Also, the standard formula investigators used to calculate attributable fraction assumes a causal relationship between the outcome and exposure without accounting for potential exposure misclassification or residual confounding.
‘We need to dig deeper’
The study is the first to the authors’ knowledge that uses a continuous proximity metric to examine nuclear power plant proximity and cancer mortality on a national level.
The use of 19 years of national cancer mortality data and a 10-year average nuclear power plant proximity window allowed for a “robust temporal assessment” of proximity’s long-term effects, the researchers wrote.
However, the findings have been the subject of some public criticism.
The Breakthrough Institute — a California-based research center that seeks to identify technological solutions to environmental challenges — published a post on its website challenging the accuracy of the paper, as well as another that Alwadi’s research group previously published that showed an association between residential proximity to nuclear power plants and elevated cancer incidence among people in Massachusetts.
The Breakthrough Institute — a California-based research center that seeks to identify technological solutions to environmental challenges — published a post on its website challenging the accuracy of the paper, as well as another that Alwadi’s research group previously published that showed an association between residential proximity to nuclear power plants and elevated cancer incidence among people in Massachusetts.
“The two papers make the fundamental mistake of confusing correlation with causation,” the online post reads.
The post authors point to the lack of a control group in the Massachusetts state-level analysis and use of “an improperly sampled group” in the national study. Distance from a nuclear plant is not a substitute measure of radiation dose, they argued, noting factors such as wind direction, shielding or monitored emissions had not been taken into account. Researchers also could not demonstrate that people who live nearby receive “any incremental dose beyond natural background radiation,” they added.
Consequently, the research is “fundamentally dangerous” and increases public health risks by “fueling efforts” to close existing nuclear plants and prevent new ones from coming online, the post authors wrote, suggesting this would compound the health risks associated with fossil-fueled electricity generation.
Alwadi said he is aware of the criticisms but believes many of them result from “lack of knowledge of statistics or epidemiology.”
Many of the concerns expressed in the online post already have been acknowledged by researchers in the manuscript as study limitations or addressed in sensitivity analyses performed to answer questions raised by peer reviewers prior to publication, Alwadi said. The methodology “has been put through the wringer and checked step by step,” he added.
“Anyone can write what they want on their own website,” Alwadi said. “If they have a legitimate criticism, they can submit it to the journal. If the editors determine it is valid, we would have to respond to it. We haven’t received anything like that.
“We have, however, received emails from so many people asking to collaborate with us or to investigate this more closely in specific regions,” Alwadi added. “People are very interested in this. They want to know if there is an effect. We want to know, too.”
Alwadi and colleagues are continuing to analyze additional datasets and perform cohort analyses. They have hypotheses that they hope will serve as the foundation for exposure pathway-specific analyses. Alwadi also emphasized the need for additional research into latency effects and impacts on risks for specific malignancies.
“The best data we get comes from randomized clinical trials, but that design is not applicable to the study of environmental exposures,” Alwadi said.
“Epidemiological studies progress in stages. If you find a signal, you keep going. We certainly did not want to see an effect, but we observed a systematic association that is robust to sensitivity analyses and observed across multiple datasets and geographic aggregations.
“We acknowledge that does not establish causality,” he added. “But what if you lived in a town and noticed that everybody who drank from a specific well got sick? If you didn’t know the exact mechanism, would you still drink from that well or would you investigate it? That’s all we’re saying. We need to dig deeper.”
nuclear-news 