health « nuclear-news

Two pieces of news re Radiation and Health.

Tony Webb , Feb 26, 2026

1. Today saw release of a report prepared for the US Department of Energy that will, alongside others from US agencies like OSHA, be feeding into the US NRC review of radiation Protection Standards mandated by the Trump Directive (EO 24300) issued in May last year. The NRC draft of revised regulations on Radiation Safety is expected 30 April 2026. The attached report to the US DoE – with particular significance for radiation safety for workers in and populations living close to nuclear power reactors – gives a clear indication of how this process is likely to result in significant weakening of protection standards

In summary it advocates

abandoning the Linear No Threshold and As low as Reasonably Achievable principles that offer some protection at low levels of exposure based on the principle that there is no safe level of exposure
resetting the annual occupational exposure limit to 100 mSv – a doubling of the current US standard of 50mSv and a five-fold increase in the 20mSv annual occupational standard that applies in most other countries including Australia
raising the public exposure limit from 1 mSv to 5 mSv

I think we can expect other US agencies to submit similar reports

2. As previous posts on this issue have noted these proposals to weaken radiation protection for workers and the public come at a time when the evidence is mounting from studies of workers and communities exposed to radiation releases in and from Nuclear power pants for a revision that would tighten the current standards. Today saw the release of a new book by Ian Fairlie – The Dangers of Ionising Radiation: A Scientific Guide to Radiation Risks for Government Agencies, Legal Professionals and Medical Clinicians has just been published (Ethics International Press. 2026) https://ethicspress.com/products/the-dangers-of-ionising-radiation As anticipated this updates much of the earlier work in Ian Fairlie and Cindy Folkers book –

The Scientists Who Alerted Us To The Dangers of Radiation – providing details on the nature of the health risks and the evidence that current standards seriously underestimate these risks – The Ethics Press site provides a link https://eipcontents.s3.eu-north-1.amazonaws.com/master/samples/978-1-83711-586-0.pdf that allows you to read the first 30 pages of the book that provide a summary of what follows – worth a read that will I hope prompt you to order the book and recommend it to people in your networks

March 4, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | radiation | Leave a comment

The hidden health crisis tied to America’s nuclear arsenal: How Native American families suffer the grisly side-effects from uranium mines

The Navajo Nation – a 27,000-square-mile piece of land that overlaps with parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah – has more than 500 abandoned uranium mines that have been identified by the EPA.

‘The government was mining this uranium for the nuclear program, for nuclear weapons, and they put national security and having easy, inexpensive access to uranium ahead of the interests of the health and well-being of the people living there

By JAMES CIRRONE, US NEWS REPORTER, Daily Mail 25th Feb 2026 [Excellent pictures]

Teracita Keyanna’s youngest son was born with a hole in his heart after she spent decades living in a uranium-contaminated Navajo community in New Mexico.

Kravin Keyanna, now 19, spent the first decade of his life dealing with a severely weakened immune system. He constantly got ear infections, his mother said, which led to him having sensitive hearing.

‘We spent a lot of time in the hospital because he was more sickly than most kids,’ Teracita told the Daily Mail. ‘Because of his immune system, they didn’t want to do surgery on him because they were afraid that it was going to cause more harm in the long run.’

After about 11 years, his heart closed up on its own and healed without surgical intervention.

Meanwhile, Teracita’s 11-year-old daughter, Katherine, has continued to develop abnormal tissue growths underneath her top layer of skin near her lymph nodes.

‘She’s had to have them removed. And so she has gone through four different surgeries in five different locations,’ Teracita said. ‘Her first surgery was when she was 3 years old and the latest one was last year at 10 years old.’

Kravin and Katherine spent years of their childhood living on Red Water Pond Road, a Navajo settlement less than two miles away from the New Mexico border. Their family home was sandwiched between three abandoned uranium mines that remain highly toxic to this day.

These mines were part of a Cold War-era uranium boom that helped build America’s nuclear arsenal. Extraordinarily high levels of radiation from hundreds of long-forgotten sites in the Navajo Nation have exposed generations of Native American families to elevated health risks, including cancer and other unknown ailments.

Teracita was born in 1981 and has spent the majority of her life in the Red Water Pond Road community. Uranium ore extraction continued in the area until 1986 at the two nearby mining sites owned by Quivira Mining.

Mining at the United Nuclear Corporation-owned Northeast Church Rock Mine, immediately south of her ancestral home, lasted until 1982.

‘When I was young, nobody ever told me personally about the dangers of uranium,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know that the mines that were near my home were uranium mines. It was like living with a time bomb, and you didn’t even know that it was there.’

Doug Brugge, the chair of the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, said Kravin and Katherine’s conditions cannot be definitively tied to uranium exposure. But he didn’t dismiss the possibility either.

Brugge led a project in the 1990s that interviewed Navajo uranium miners, many of whom developed lung cancer from the radon gas released when cutting into uranium ore.

The effects on them are ‘unequivocally well established,’ Brugge said. The effects on their wives, children and grandchildren are murkier and harder to pin down.

Brugge actually grew up in the Navajo Nation as one of the few white children among his peers. He left with his family when he was 14 and when he returned in his thirties to study the uranium issue, he heard many stories similar to Teracita’s.

‘The thing that has long bothered me is many people told us they didn’t know. They had no idea there was anything hazardous associated with this mining,’ he said. ‘A lot of them didn’t speak English. They had a limited education level. Their access to news and media was fairly limited.’

On top of a lack of communication from authorities about the dangers, Teracita said the mines near her did not have fences or barriers, which meant people and livestock could freely wander into contaminated areas.

n March 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency took soil samples from Church Rock No. 1, the nearest Quivira-owned mine to where Teracita lived.

Exposure to contaminated surface soil at and around the 44-acre site carried an estimated one-in-100 cancer risk — meaning one additional person out of every 100 exposed residents could develop cancer in their lifetime. About 30 families, including Teracita’s, lived near the mine as of 2006, according to the EPA.

Brugge said that level of risk is ‘really high’ and pointed out that the EPA is usually already concerned if it’s at one in 100,000 or one in a million.

Teracita also lived half a mile away from the Church Rock uranium mill, also owned by United Nuclear Corporation. Facilities like this can extract uranium from mined rock to produce a powder called ‘yellowcake’.

This material can later be converted for use as fuel in nuclear power plants or, at higher enrichment levels, in nuclear weapons. The process is not entirely clean, however, as it also produces sandy-looking radioactive waste called ‘mill tailings’.

In 1979, two years before Teracita was born, the Church Rock uranium mill had a catastrophic spill that sent 1,100 tons of mill tailings and 93 million gallons of radioactive wastewater into the Navajo Nation via the Puerco River.

There have not been extensive studies on the extent of the damage caused by this disaster, which to this day is considered the largest accidental release of radioactive material in US history.

While it is unknown how many people were possibly exposed and developed health conditions later in life, children who swam in the river or herded sheep across the water were left with serious burns on their skin.

Teracita said many of her neighbors and friends on Red Water Pond Road have mysteriously developed diabetes or cirrhosis of the liver without excessive drinking or smoking.

Teracita lived on Red Water Pond Road with her family until around 2018, when the EPA offered them financial assistance to move away while the agency cleaned up the mines. Prior to that, she had been exploring economically feasible ways to leave.

‘I was already trying to figure out what we could do for our kids in order to safeguard them further, considering that when I was a kid, nobody safeguarded me,’ she said.

The Department of Energy says there are a total of 4,225 uranium mines across the United States, the vast majority of them abandoned.

The Navajo Nation – a 27,000-square-mile piece of land that overlaps with parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah – has more than 500 abandoned uranium mines that have been identified by the EPA.

This means the Navajo have just over 11 percent of the country’s abandoned mines within their borders, despite making up just 0.8 percent of America’s total landmass.

It is not just the Navajo, who call themselves Diné in their language, who have been disproportionately exposed to the radioactive byproducts of mining operations, most of which ceased in the 1980s.

Although Native American land takes up 5.6 percent of the western US, about 25 percent of uranium mines in this area of the country are located within 6 miles of a reservation, a 2015 study from the Native American Budget & Policy Institute found………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15503365/navajo-kids-health-defects-uranium-exposure-nuclear-weapons.html

March 1, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | health, indigenous issues, USA | Leave a comment

National analysis of cancer mortality and proximity to nuclear power plants in the United States

Nature Communications volume 17, Article number: 1560 (2026) , 23 February 2026 [Excellent graphics and tables]

Abstract

Understanding the potential health implications of living near nuclear power plants is important given the renewed interest in nuclear energy as a low-carbon power source. Here we show that U.S. counties located closer to operational nuclear power plants have higher cancer mortality rates than those farther away.

Using nationwide mortality data from 2000-2018, we assess long-term spatial patterns of cancer mortality in relation to proximity to nuclear facilities while accounting for socioeconomic, demographic, behavioral, environmental, and healthcare factors. Cancer mortality is higher across multiple age groups in both males and females, with the strongest associations among older adults, males aged 65–74 and females aged 55–64. While our findings cannot establish causality, they highlight the need for further research into potential exposure pathways, latency effects, and cancer-specific risks, emphasizing the importance of addressing these potentially substantial but overlooked risks to public health.

…………………………………………………………….Nuclear power plants emit radioactive pollutants that can disperse into the surrounding environment, leading to potential human exposure through inhalation, ingestion, and direct contact. These pollutants can be transported through air, water, and soil, contributing to long-term environmental contamination¹. Populations residing near nuclear power plants may experience low-level chronic exposure to ionizing radiation via environmental release pathways. While our study does not include dosimetry, ionizing radiation is a well-established carcinogen^2,3,4,5,6,7 and thus motivates investigation into proximity-based exposure patterns.

………………………Despite the importance and prevalence of nuclear power plants in the U.S., epidemiologic research regarding their health impacts remains rare. Most U.S. studies have focused on individual plants or limited regions, with only a few national assessments to date – many of which relied on fixed distance cutoffs to classify exposed populations^{8,9,11,12,19,21,22,23,24,25}. These studies often focus on a single facility and its surrounding communities, which restricts their statistical power to detect effects and ability to capture broader exposure patterns. Furthermore, differences in study design, exposure assessment methods, and geographic scope make it difficult to draw generalizable conclusions.

In this work, we assess the association between county-level proximity to nuclear power plants and cancer mortality across the United States from 2000 to 2018. We find that counties located closer to operational nuclear power plants have higher cancer mortality rates, with stronger associations observed among older adults. These associations remain consistent across multiple sensitivity analyses and proximity definitions. The results highlight spatial patterns of cancer risk in relation to nuclear power generation and emphasize the importance of evaluating potential long-term health implications of nuclear energy infrastructure in population-scale studies…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-69285-4

February 27, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | health, Reference, USA | 4 Comments

Proximity to nuclear power plants associated with increased cancer mortality

The study found that U.S. counties located closer to nuclear power plants experienced higher cancer mortality rates, even after accounting for socioeconomic, environmental, and health care factors. The researchers estimated that over the course of the study period, roughly 115,000 cancer deaths across the U.S. (or about 6,400 deaths per year) were attributable to proximity to NPPs.

By Maya Brownstein, February 23, 2026, https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/proximity-to-nuclear-power-plants-associated-with-increased-cancer-mortality/

Boston, MA—U.S. counties located closer to operational nuclear power plants (NPPs) have higher rates of cancer mortality than those located farther away, according to a new study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The study is the first of the 21st century to analyze proximity to NPPs and cancer mortality across all NPPs and every U.S. county. The researchers emphasized that the findings are not enough to establish causality but do highlight the need for further research into nuclear power’s health impacts.

The study was published Feb. 23, 2026, in Nature Communications.

Numerous studies on the potential link between NPPs and cancer have been conducted around the world, with conflicting results. In the U.S., these studies have been rare and limited in their scope, focused on a single NPP and its surrounding community.

To expand the evidence base, the researchers conducted a national assessment of NPPs and cancer mortality between 2000 and 2018 using “continuous proximity.” They used advanced statistical modeling that captured the cumulative impact of all nearby NPPs, rather than just one. The locations and dates of operation of U.S. NPPs—as well as some nearby in Canada—were obtained from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and county-level data on cancer mortality was obtained from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The researchers controlled for potential confounders in each county, including educational attainment, median household income, racial composition, average temperature and relative humidity, smoking prevalence, BMI, and proximity to the nearest hospital.

“Our study suggests that living near a NPP may carry a measurable cancer risk—one that lessens with distance,” said senior author Petros Koutrakis, Akira Yamaguchi Professor of Environmental Health and Human Habitation. “We recommend that more studies be done that address the issue of NPPs and health impacts, particularly at a time when nuclear power is being promoted as a clean solution to climate change.”

The researchers noted that the results are consistent with the results of a similar study they conducted in Massachusetts, which identified elevated cancer incidence among populations living closer to NPPs.

They also noted some limitations to the study, including that it did not incorporate direct radiation measurements and instead assumed equal impact by all NPPs.

Article information

“National Analysis of Cancer Mortality and Proximity to Nuclear Power Plants in the United States,” Yazan Alwadi, Barrak Alahmad, Carolina L. Zilli Vieira, Philip J. Landrigan, David C. Christiani, Eric Garshick, Marco Kaltofen, Brent Coull, Joel Schwartz, John S. Evans, Petros Koutrakis, Nature Communications, February 23, 2026, doi: 10.1038/s41467-026-69285-4

February 26, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | radiation, USA | Leave a comment

Middle-aged women ‘most at risk of cancer’ from nuclear power plants

2.1 per cent of cancers in women aged 55-64 attributable to living near a plant, research shows

Sarah Knapton,Telegraph, Science Editor, 23 February 2026

Middle-aged women are the most at risk from living near power plants, a study suggests.

Researchers at Harvard University found that US counties closer to nuclear plants had higher cancer death rates than those farther away, even after accounting for socioeconomic, environmental and health factors.

The team estimated that 2.1 per cent of cancers in women aged 55-64 were “attributable” to living near a plant, the highest of all age groups and genders.

Similarly, 2 per cent of cancers in men aged 65-74 were linked to nuclear plants, the highest age range for males.

Younger people aged 35-44 had the lowest risk, with proximity to nuclear plants accounting for 0.4 per cent of cancers in females and 0.6 per cent in males.

Radiation fears

“Our study suggests that living near a nuclear power plant may carry a measurable cancer risk – one that lessens with distance,” said Dr Petros Koutrakis, the senior author and professor of environmental health and human habitation at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.

“We recommend that more studies be done that address the issue of nuclear power plants and health impacts, particularly at a time when nuclear power is being promoted as a clean solution to climate change.”

Last year, Harvard discovered that people living near the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in Missouri, which processed uranium for the first atomic bomb, had a far higher chance of developing most cancers than those living farther away.

There have been ongoing fears that radiation from power stations can cause cancer, with some evidence showing clusters of leukaemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma near Sellafield in Cumbria, and Dounreay, on the north coast of Scotland.

The Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment was set up in 1985 to investigate.

Although it confirmed the raised rates, it also found that other nearby villages did not show similar increases as might be expected if the plants were to blame.

Investigators theorised that an influx of workers moving to Seascale and Thurso to work in the nuclear industry might have exposed residents to new infections, causing a rise in childhood cancer rates…………………………………………………………… https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/02/23/middle-aged-women-most-at-risk-of-cancer-from-nuclear-power/

February 26, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | women | Leave a comment

Radiation Protection -worker and public health protection standards at risk.

The Military Connection.
For Australian workers and the public, the situation is complicated by and made more
urgent as a result of the Australia, UK, USA (AUKUS) agreement regarding the building and
stationing of nuclear-powered submarines in Australia. We have already seen the creation
of a separate Australian Naval Nuclear Power Standards Regulator (ANNPSR) that will be
responsible for all standards in the construction, operation, maintenance, decommissioning,
and radioactive waste management from the submarines built or stationed here. We can
expect pressure from the USA to have these standards align with those in the USA. As such
the ANNPSR could become a back door for pressuring the current standards agency
ARPANSA to revise and weaken rather than tighten protection standards across the full
range of other occupational and public radiation health risks.

Radiation Protection Standards
For most of the past century national and international standards agencies have regulated
radiation protection based on three fundamental principles.

1 A ”Linear No Threshold ‘ (LNT) model based on scientific evidence that indicates
there is no safe level of exposure. Any dose however small can be the one which can
cause cancer – sometimes taking years to develop – or genetic damage affecting
future generations.

2 That, therefore, all exposures should be kept ‘As Low As Reasonably Achievable’ –
known as the ALARA principle

3 And that exposures to workers and the public should be kept below specified annual limits.

The science behind this protection regime is based on the capacity of ionising radiation to
cause damage at the cellular level in the human body. Radiation striking a cell can either
cause no damage or it may kill the cell outright – in which case, unless too many cells are
killed at once, the body will eliminate the dead cells and function healthily. The problem
comes when the cell is merely damaged, and the natural process of repair is imperfect,
leaving the cell to replicate in this damaged form – which may in some cases lead to the kind
of growth we call a cancer, other long term health or genetic damage. The level of this kind
of damage (known as stochastic) is a hit-and-miss affair – a low level of radiation exposure
doesn’t determine a health effect but as the level of exposure increases, it increases the
probability of the damage.

Current Standards Need Tightening
The limits on exposure have been progressively tightened over the years as estimates of the
cancer risks, mainly drawn from the Life-Span Studies (LSS) of Japanese survivors of the
Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb blasts in 1945, showed progressively higher rates of
this stochastic health damage. Recent evidence from studies of workers in the Nuclear
Industries in France the UK and USA (The INWORKS studies) suggest the worker-exposure
limits need to again be revised – and significantly tightened. In addition, studies on health of
populations living close to nuclear power plants in Europe and the USA show significantly
elevated rates of cancer in both children and the elderly directly related to living distance
from these facilities.

United States Proposals Would Weaken Current Standards
Unfortunately, it appears that the USA is headed in the opposite direction and given the
recent behaviour of the current President, may soon pressure other countries to follow suit.
In May 2025 US President Donald Trump issued a Directive (EO 14300) Instructing the US
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to revise all its regulations – in particular, to revise
those relating to radiation health and safety. He instructed the NRC to abandon the LNT
and ALARA principles and re-set limits on worker and public exposures based on ‘deterministic’ rather than ‘probabilistic’/’stochastic ‘ health outcomes – potentially allowing
much higher levels of exposure.

Exactly how the NRC will respond to these directives is unclear. To comply with the
president’s orders would put the USA in conflict with national and international agencies
such as the International Commission of Radiological Protection (ICRP), the United Nations
Scientific Committee on Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), the US National Academy of
Science’s. Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionising Radiation (the BEIR committee)
and other countries’ national agencies including the Australian Radiation Protection and
Nuclear Standards Agency (ARPANSA) – all of which have recently reaffirmed commitment
to the LN and ARPANSA principles and the current annual limits on worker and public
exposure.

TThe draft of the revised NRC regulations on radiation protection is expected on 30 April
2026 with a 30-day period for comments before the final comprehensive revision of all NRC
regulations is published in November 2026.

An international Campaign
These US proposals have stimulated the beginnings of an international campaign bringing
together trade unions, environment and public health groups and communities concerned
about current and future exposures from mining, industrial, medical, and nuclear radiation
sources. The objectives of this campaign are two-fold:

1 To pressure national and international agencies with responsibility for radiation
protection to publicly repudiate any US regulations that align with the Trump
Directive and resist any pressures from the US to similarly weaken existing national
standards.
2. To build pressure on these national and international agencies to revise and tighten
the standards in line with the best available scientific evidence that the health risks
are greater than those used to set current standards.

The Military Connection
For Australian workers and the public, the situation is complicated by and made more
urgent as a result of the Australia, UK, USA (AUKUS) agreement regarding the building and
stationing of nuclear-powered submarines in Australia. We have already seen the creation
of a separate Australian Naval Nuclear Power Standards Regulator (ANNPSR) that will be
responsible for all standards in the construction, operation, maintenance, decommissioning,
and radioactive waste management from the submarines built or stationed here. We can
expect pressure from the USA to have these standards align with those in the USA. As such
the ANNPSR could become a back door for pressuring the current standards agency
ARPANSA to revise and weaken rather than tighten protection standards across the full
range of other occupational and public radiation health risks.

For further information
For references to the scientific evidence and to be kept informed of developments as this
campaign evolves contact:

Dr Tony Webb,
E-mail: webbt45@icloud.com,

February 21, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | radiation, USA | Leave a comment

Harrowing six final words of nuclear worker as his skin fell off during 83 days of agony

WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT Nuclear plant worker Hisashi Ouchi suffered the highest radiation dose in history after 1999 Japan accident, enduring 83 agonising days before death.

Edward Easton and Jane Lavender Associate Editor, 18 Feb 2026, https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/harrowing-six-final-words-nuclear-36730407

What You Need to Know

Hisashi Ouchi, a 35‑year‑old nuclear plant worker, survived a 1999 criticality accident that delivered the highest recorded radiation dose to a human, enduring 83 days of severe medical complications before dying of multiple organ failure. A government probe later blamed inadequate supervision, safety culture, and training, leading to negligence charges against six plant officials.

Key points:

On September 30, 1999, a criticality accident at a Japanese nuclear fuel processing plant exposed worker Hisashi Ouchi to an estimated 17,000 millisieverts of radiation.

The dose Ouchi received was about 850 times the annual occupational limit for nuclear workers and roughly 140 times higher than the exposure of residents near Chernobyl.

Ouchi was hospitalized at the University of Tokyo Hospital, where he underwent experimental treatments for 83 days, during which his skin sloughed off, his eyelids fell off, and his digestive system collapsed.

Medical staff administered up to ten blood transfusions daily, and painkillers were reported to be ineffective; Ouchi reportedly said, “I can’t take it anymore. I am not a guinea pig.”

He died on December 21, 1999, and the official cause of death was recorded as multiple organ failure

****************************************************************************************************.

A nuclear facility worker suffered what many consider to be the most agonising death ever recorded after a routine procedure went catastrophically wrong.

Hisashi Ouchi, 35, was exposed to an incomprehensible level of radiation when colleagues accidentally added excessive uranium to a processing vessel, sparking an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction on September 30, 1999.

The unfortunate Ouchi was positioned nearest to the vessel, consequently subjecting him to 17,000 millisieverts of radiation – equivalent to 200,000 X-rays.

The exposure he received was 850 times the safe yearly limit for nuclear facility workers, 140 times greater than what Chernobyl residents experienced after the 1986 catastrophe, and the most severe dose ever documented in human history.

Within seconds and minutes of his exposure, Ouchi became violently sick. Whilst most individuals subjected to such levels would die within days, Ouchi survived, reports the Mirror.

He was taken to hospital alert but in critical condition, as his white blood cell count had been virtually eliminated, leaving him completely without an immune system.

Medical staff moved him to the University of Tokyo Hospital, where they tried various experimental procedures in a frantic bid to preserve his life.

What ensued was 83 days of torment for the nuclear facility worker.

Radiation had completely obliterated Ouchi’s capacity to heal and regenerate cells, causing his skin to gradually slough away, his blood vessels to fail, and his eyelids to fall off.

Fluids seeped relentlessly from his ravaged flesh and accumulated in his lungs, compelling medics to maintain him on life support.

Making his ordeal even more harrowing, his digestive system collapsed entirely, inflicting excruciating agony and causing litres of fluid to drain from his body daily. Despite numerous skin grafts and stem cell treatments, his body remained unable to recover.

Breathing became impossible without mechanical assistance, and nourishment could only be administered via feeding tube.

The agony became so unbearable that, two months into his treatment, Ouchi’s heart ceased beating, yet medical staff chose to revive him.

His wife reportedly held onto hope that he would survive until at least January 1, 2000, so they could welcome the new millennium together.

During lucid moments, he remained fully aware of his deteriorating condition.

According to accounts, Ouchi eventually reached breaking point and spoke six chilling words to hospital staff: “I can’t take it anymore. I am not a guinea pig.”

Medical professionals were compelled to administer up to ten blood transfusions daily merely to sustain his life. Painkillers appeared utterly ineffective, and at one stage, he reportedly pleaded for the treatment to cease.

Ouchi passed away on December 21, 1999, from multiple organ failure, nearly three months following the incident. Multiple organ failure was recorded as the official cause of death.

Four months afterwards, in April 2000, his colleague Shinohara also died from multiple organ failure at the age of 40.

Supervisor Yokokawa, who had been seated at his workstation when the criticality incident unfolded, managed to survive.

A probe by the Japanese government determined that the accident was due to a lack of regulatory supervision, a deficient safety culture, and insufficient training for employees.

Six officials from the company running the plant were subsequently charged with professional negligence and breaches of nuclear safety laws. In 2003, they received suspended prison sentences for their deadly neglect.

February 21, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | health, Japan, Reference | Leave a comment

DNA Mutations Discovered in The Children of Chernobyl Workers

Science Health15 February 2026, By David Nield, https://www.sciencealert.com/dna-mutations-discovered-in-the-children-of-chernobyl-workers

The DNA damage from ionizing radiation (IR) erupting from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 is showing up in the children of those originally exposed, researchers have found – the first time such a transgenerational link has been clearly established.

Previous studies have been inconclusive about whether this genetic damage could be passed from parent to child, but here the researchers – led by a team from the University of Bonn in Germany – looked for something slightly different.

Rather than picking out new DNA mutations in the next generation, they looked for what are known as clustered de novo mutations (cDNMs): two or more mutations in close proximity, found in the children but not the parents. These would be mutations resulting from breaks in the parental DNA caused by radiation exposure.

“We found a significant increase in the cDNM count in offspring of irradiated parents, and a potential association between the dose estimations and the number of cDNMs in the respective offspring,” write the researchers in their published paper.

“Despite uncertainty concerning the precise nature and quantity of the IR involved, the present study is the first to provide evidence for the existence of a transgenerational effect of prolonged paternal exposure to low-dose IR on the human genome.”

The findings are based on whole genome sequencing scans of 130 offspring of Chernobyl cleanup workers, 110 offspring of German military radar operators who were likely exposed to stray radiation, and 1,275 offspring of parents unexposed to radiation, used as controls.

On average, the researchers found 2.65 cDNMs per child in the Chernobyl group, 1.48 per child in the German radar group, and 0.88 per child in the control group. The researchers say those numbers are likely to be overestimates due to noise in the data, but even after making statistical adjustments, the difference was still significant.

What’s more, a higher radiation dose for the parent tended to mean a higher number of clusters in the child. This fits with the idea that radiation creates molecules known as reactive oxygen species, which are able to break DNA strands – breaks which can leave behind the clusters described in this study, if repaired imperfectly.

The good news is that the risk to health should be relatively small: children of exposed parents weren’t found to have any higher risk of disease. This is partly because a lot of the cDNMs likely fall in ‘non-coding’ DNA, rather than in genes that directly encode proteins.

“Given the low overall increase in cDNMs following paternal exposure to ionizing radiation and the low proportion of the genome that is protein coding, the likelihood that a disease occurring in the offspring of exposed parents is triggered by a cDNM is minimal,” the researchers write.

To put this in perspective, we know that older dads are more likely to pass on more DNA mutations to their children. The subsequent risk of disease associated with parental age at the time of conception is higher than the potential risks from radiation exposure examined here, the researchers report.

There are some limitations to note. As the initial radiation exposure happened decades ago, the researchers had to estimate people’s exposure using historical records and decades-old devices.

Participation in the study was also voluntary, which may have introduced some bias, as those who suspected they’d been exposed to radiation may have been more likely to enrol.

Even with those limitations, we now know that with prolonged exposure, ionizing radiation can leave subtle traces in the DNA of the generations to come – emphasizing the need for safety precautions and careful monitoring for those at risk.

“The potential of transmission of radiation-induced genetic alterations to the next generation is of particular concern for parents who may have been exposed to higher doses of IR and potentially for longer periods of time than considered safe,” write the researchers.

The research has been published in Scientific Reports.

February 19, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | health, Reference, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Shrimp with a side of cancer? Radioactive contamination is real.

by Kimberly Roberson, opinion contributor – 01/18/26,
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/5692924-fda-radioactive-shrimp-threat/

The specter of radioactivity in food just reared its head again, with another shipment of imported shrimp recalled for possible Cesium-137 contamination.

The MAHA Commission 2025 report unfotunately ignored radioactivity as a possible cause of rising cancer and chronic illness. But even leaving aside nuclear accidents, studies show living near nuclear plants elevates cancer risk. Nuclear reactors generate radioactive waste and ionizing radiation, which get into the environment, contaminating air, water, soil and food.

Harmful isotopes like Cesium-137 aren’t natural; they’re made only in reactors, but persist in the environment and food for centuries. Decades after Chernobyl, for instance, researchers found Cesium-137 in meat from domestic and game animals in Poland, and in food and children’s bodies in Belarus, which caused pediatric cardiovascular disease.

Cesium-137 has a 30-year half-life but remains dangerous for 300 years, especially when ingested or inhaled. It lodges in soft tissues inside the body, irradiating cells and increasing cancer risk, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even very low doses have been shown to cause cancer, renal pathology and other damage.

This summer, the Food and Drug Administration issued multiple health hazard warnings about Cesium-137 detected in imported Indonesian shrimp, triggering massive recalls and worried coverage in mainstream outlets like “Martha Stewart Living.” Consumer Reports found evidence a wide swath of Indonesia’s land may be contaminated.

U.S. Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-L.) and John Kennedy (R-La.) then launched an inquiry, asking grocery chains how they will keep radioactive shrimp off their shelves. Kennedy said that eating Cesium-137-laced shrimp “will kill you. Even if doesn’t turn you into the alien from ‘Alien,’ I guarantee you’ll grow another ear.” Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) wrote to President Trump, calling radioactive shrimp a “significant public health threat” and asking him to pause all shrimp imports.

“Alien” shrimp penetrated public consciousness, but the radioactivity problem is much bigger. The FDA recently found radioactive cloves, and Malta customs officials found radioactive clothing, both contaminated with Cesium-137. The World Customs Organization launched “Operation Stingray” to intercept nuclear and radioactive materials, seizing 51 shipments in just three weeks.

Such action is overdue. Long before so-called “forever chemicals” or microplastics were recognized as health threats, watchdog groups were flagging the threat of radioactivity in food, especially after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. A 2013 FDA Citizen Petition demanded tighter regulation and lower allowable radioactivity levels. My organization has collected 1,600 comments and thousands of companion signatures.

Fears about radioactive fish surged in 2023 as Fukushima resumed dumping radioactive water into the Pacific. The FDA downplayed them, claiming “Cs-137 is readily excreted and does not accumulate in seafood.” But that’s a misdirection. The point is, it accumulates in our bodies when we ingest it, even in tiny amounts, according to the International Commission on Radiological Protection.

Health advocacy groups recently pointed this out in a joint letter, exhorting Kennedy and federal officials to “finally address the impact of radiation contamination of U.S. food on the trajectory of cancer and chronic illness by setting and enforcing much safer levels for Americans.” In its reply FDA demurred, calling it “unlikely that a fish exposed to significant levels of radionuclides near the [Fukushima] reactor could travel to U.S. waters and be caught and harvested.”

Yet we see evidence of consumer goods contaminated with radioactivity all around us. Instead of downplaying the problem, the FDA should tighten and enforce protective standards.

The Indonesian shrimp flagged as a health hazard had 68 becquerels of Cesium-137. The FDA’s “derived intervention level” — more of a guideline than an enforceable standard — is about 20 times higher, at 1,200 becquerels.

No level of Cesium-137 or other harmful radioactive isotopes is safe, yet Trump’s recent executive orders raise exposure limits and depart from the longstanding linear no-threshold model of radiation safety. Advocates warned the public health consequences would be severe, with women, children and fetuses worst impacted.

The standard should be, if Cesium-137 or other isotopes of concern are detectable in food items, they ought to be pulled off shelves, or at the very least labeled with warnings so consumers can make an informed decision. Unfortunately, that’s not the system we have. The importance of humility and transparency are among the lessons of Chernobyl and Fukushima, but the Trump administration is ignoring them in an explosion of hubris.

That’s nothing new; it’s deep in the nuclear culture. That 2011 International Commission on Radiological Protection report states, “There may be situations where a sustainable agricultural economy is not possible without placing contaminated food on the market. As such foods will be subject to market forces, this will necessitate an effective communication strategy to overcome the negative reactions from consumers outside the contaminated areas.”

But a communications strategy designed to soft-pedal radioactive contamination of food won’t make America healthy. Only setting and enforcing science-based standards will.

Kimberly Roberson is director of the Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network, a project of the National Institute for Science, Law and Public Policy.

February 16, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | radiation, USA | Leave a comment

Residential proximity to nuclear power plants and cancer incidence in Massachusetts, USA (2000–2018)

18 December 2025, Springer Nature, Volume 24, article number 92, (2025)

“………………………………………. Results

Proximity to plants significantly increased cancer incidence, with risk declining by distance. At 2 km, females showed RRs of 1.52 (95% CI: 1.20–1.94) for ages 55–64, 2.00 (1.59–2.52) for 65–74, and 2.53 (1.98–3.22) for 75 + . Males showed RRs of 1.97 (1.57–2.48), 1.75 (1.42–2.16), and 1.63 (1.29–2.06), respectively. Cancer site-specific analyses showed significant associations for lung, prostate, breast, colorectal, bladder, melanoma, leukemia, thyroid, uterine, kidney, laryngeal, pancreatic, oral, esophageal, and Hodgkin lymphoma, with variation by sex and age. We estimated 10,815 female and 9,803 male cancer cases attributable to proximity, corresponding to attributable fractions of 4.1% (95% CI: 2.4–5.7%) and 3.5% (95% CI: 1.8–5.2%).

Conclusions

Residential proximity to nuclear plants in Massachusetts is associated with elevated cancer risks, particularly among older adults, underscoring the need for continued epidemiologic monitoring amid renewed interest in nuclear energy. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12940-025-01248-6

February 11, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | radiation, Reference, USA | Leave a comment

Finland detects small amount of radioactivity, sees no health impact

Armen Press 30th Jan 2026, original at https://armenpress.am/en/article/1240847

Small amounts of radioactive substances have been detected in air samples in Finland though there was no risk to public health, Reuters reported citing the country’s nuclear safety watchdog.

“The concentrations were very low and posed no risk to people or the environment,” the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK) said in a statement, according to Reuters.

According to the report, STUK said that the radioactive substances did not originate from Finnish nuclear power plants, though it did not offer an explanation for their detection.

“In many cases, the source of the radioactive substances cannot be identified,” the agency said.

Finland, Sweden, Russia and the wider region have a number of nuclear power reactors.

February 4, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Finland, radiation | Leave a comment

The long half-life of France’s nuclear tests in Polynesia

Only in the years since the programme ended has the true impact come to light. While the French military measured radiation levels after each explosion, the data was kept secret until victims’ associations won a legal battle to have it partially declassified in 2013.

“Every family in French Polynesia has a lot of cancer. It’s just not one. Some have, as we say, cocktails of cancer,”

Thirty years ago this week, on an island in the South Pacific, France conducted its final nuclear test – ending a programme that exposed thousands of people to radiation over decades. The islands of French Polynesia are still living with the fallout.

31/01/2026 By:Jessica Phelan, https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20260131-the-long-half-life-of-france-s-nuclear-tests-in-polynesia

“It started with my grandmother. She had thyroid cancer during the Nineties. Then her first child, my auntie, had thyroid cancer too.”

Hinamoeura Morgant-Cross was a child in Tahiti when France last exploded a nuclear bomb. She has few memories of the years when her home was a testing ground, but they have changed the course of her life.

“My mum had thyroid problems… And also, my sister had thyroid problems. She has to take medication for the rest of her life. My auntie also got breast cancer a few years ago.

“And I have had chronic myeloid leukaemia since I was 24 years old.”

France tested nuclear weapons in Polynesia for 30 years. The explosions started in 1966, after France had already tested several bombs in the Algerian Sahara.

After Algeria claimed independence, France moved the tests to its colony in the South Pacific. They continued until 27 January 1996 – more than three years after the United States’ final test, four since the United Kingdom’s and five since the Soviet Union’s.

France chose two uninhabited atolls as its test sites, Moruroa and Fangataufa, which between them took the impact of 193 explosions – the biggest around 200 times more powerful than the bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima.

At least 41 took place in the open air, before tests were moved underground in 1975. Mushroom clouds drifted over the ocean, carrying radiation to populated islands – including Tahiti, more than 1,200 kilometres away.

“Around 20 boxes” of documents out of thousands were released in that first batch, according to Patrice Bouveret of the Observatoire des Armements, a Lyon-based campaign group that helped make them public. But the information was enough for journalists and researchers to map a far broader pattern of exposure than France had ever publicly acknowledged.

One 1974 test alone exposed an estimated 110,000 people to more than the annual “safe” dose of radiation, according to a 2021 investigation led by public-interest newsroom Disclose.

The revelations pushed French President Emmanuel Macron to order the opening of all archives – with the exception of details that might suggest how to build a nuclear device. Tens of thousands of documents have since been released and continue to lay bare the gap between what French authorities knew about the risks, and what they told those most affected.

‘Cocktails of cancer’

“Every family in French Polynesia has a lot of cancer. It’s just not one. Some have, as we say, cocktails of cancer,” says Morgant-Cross, today a member of the French Polynesian parliament and an anti-nuclear campaigner.

“But it’s hard for them to think that it can be related to the nuclear tests because of the decades of French propaganda saying that French nuclear tests are clean.”

Visiting Tahiti in September 1966, president Charles de Gaulle declared that all precautions had been taken to ensure the tests would “not cause any inconvenience whatsoever to the dear people of Polynesia”.

Nearly three decades later, president Jacques Chirac – who ordered France’s final nuclear tests in 1995-96, reversing a moratorium that had halted the programme since 1992 – was still insisting that they had “strictly no ecological consequences”.

For years, Polynesians were told their lifestyle and eating habits were to blame for health problems, according to Morgant-Cross. She only made the connection between her family’s history of cancer and the nuclear tests, she says, when she met survivors in other countries.

Seeing the list of diseases that research has linked to radiation exposure, she realised the thyroid cancer that afflicted her relatives, as well as her own rare form of leukaemia, were among them.

“These aren’t illnesses that show up immediately after an explosion,” says Bouveret. “It’s not like a week later you get sick. They develop a long time afterwards.”

In 2023, France’s National Institute of Health and Medical Research, Inserm, used declassified military data to estimate how much radiation thyroid cancer patients had been exposed to and calculate what role it played. Researchers said nuclear tests “are most likely responsible for a small increase in the incidence of thyroid cancers in French Polynesia” – though they warned the estimated doses were probably inaccurate.

The difficulty of proving harm to health has been a barrier to compensation. France introduced a law in 2010 allowing victims to claim reparations from the state, but the criteria to qualify – which include demonstrating exposure to a certain level of radiation – have proved hard to meet.

Only 1,026 people had successfully claimed by the end of 2024, Bouveret says – 607 in mainland France, 417 from Polynesia and two from Algeria. “It’s ridiculous when you consider the number of people who have been impacted by these diseases.”

A bill to reform the law is before the French parliament. It would also bind the state to cover the costs of treating illnesses caused by radiation – estimated at some €855 million, and currently borne by French Polynesian social security.

A society upended

The broader consequences of France’s nuclear tests are even harder to quantify.

The programme kicked off massive construction, drawing islanders to help build military bases and research stations. Many stayed to work at the new sites, concentrating the population and shifting labour away from traditional fishing and farming.

Corals were flattened to make way for ships, which may have contributed to a dramatic rise in ciguatera – a type of food poisoning caused by eating fish sickened by toxins from plankton found on damaged reefs.

“They really poisoned our main food,” says Morgant-Cross. “We eat fish from breakfast to dinner.” Today the archipelago is largely dependent on food shipped in from elsewhere, and like other parts of overseas France, suffers from high cost of living.

As de Gaulle promised, the nuclear programme brought economic opportunities – but they depended on jobs and money provided by the French state, binding Polynesia ever more tightly to France.

Bouveret believes that helped stymie the archipelago’s aspirations to independence. Now, given the costs of caring for nuclear victims and containing the lingering radiation on Moruroa and Fangataufa, he says separating from France looks “extremely difficult”.

For Morgant-Cross, the first step is to “decolonise minds” and help Polynesians fathom the damage done. While she was at school in the 1990s, she recalls, children were still taught “we should be grateful” for the nuclear tests.

Things have changed since then, but confronting the past remains difficult – and not only for the generation who remember when speaking out could cost people their jobs or lead to arrest.

“As a mother of two boys, I really hope that they don’t have the burden of this issue like myself,” she says.

“I felt some trauma, but without understanding where it came from. And I understood with my grandmother, when I saw the fear in her eyes… I saw how guilty she felt because of the leukaemia that I have. She felt that if she had protested more, maybe I would not be sick today.

“It’s really traumatic for our people.”

Listen to a version of this story on the Spotlight on France podcast, episode 139.

February 3, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | health, OCEANIA | Leave a comment

They poisoned us’: grappling with deadly impact of nuclear testing

January 22, 2026 , https://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/they-poisoned-us-grappling-with-deadly-impact-of-nuclear-testing/news-story/47a9334cf6d82b20618d0b882b4c8408

Nuclear weapons testing has affected every single human on the planet, causing at least four million premature deaths from cancer and other diseases over time, according to a new report delving into the deadly legacy.

More than 2,400 nuclear devices were detonated in tests conducted worldwide between 1945 and 2017.

Of the nine countries known to possess nuclear weapons — Russia, the United States, China, France, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea — only Pyongyang has conducted nuclear tests since the 1990s.

But a new report from the Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA) humanitarian organisation, provided exclusively to AFP, details how the effects of past tests are still being felt worldwide.

“They poisoned us,” Hinamoeura Cross, a 37-year-old Tahitian parliamentarian who was aged seven when France detonated its last nuclear explosion near her home in French Polynesia in 1996.

Seventeen years later, she was diagnosed with leukaemia, in a family where her grandmother, mother and aunt already suffered from thyroid cancer.

The explosions are known to have caused enduring and widespread harm to human health, societies and ecosystems.

But the NPA report details over 304 pages how an ongoing culture of secrecy, along with lacking international engagement and a dearth of data, have left many affected communities scrambling for answers.

“Past nuclear testing continues to kill today,” said NPA chief Raymond Johansen, voicing hope the report would “strengthen the resolve to prevent nuclear weapons from ever being tested or used again”.

– ‘Very dangerous’ –

The issue has gained fresh relevance after US President Donald Trump’s suggestion last November that Washington could resume nuclear testing, accusing Russia and China of already doing so — charges they rejected.

“This is very, very, very dangerous,” warned Ivana Hughes, a Columbia University chemistry lecturer and head of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, who contributed to the NPA report.

“The nuclear testing period shows us that the consequences are extremely long-lasting and very serious,” she told AFP.

The heaviest burden of past tests has fallen on communities living near test sites, today located in 15 different countries, including many former colonies of nuclear-armed states.

Survivors there continue to face elevated rates of illness, congenital anomalies and trauma.

The impact is also felt globally.

“Every person alive today carries radioactive isotopes from atmospheric testing in their bones,” report co-author and University of South Carolina anthropology professor Magdalena Stawkowski told AFP.

– Millions of early deaths –

Hundreds of thousands of people around the globe are known to have already died from illnesses linked to past nuclear test detonations, the report highlighted.

It pointed to strong scientific evidence connecting radiation exposure to DNA damage, cancer, cardiovascular disease and genetic effects, even at low doses.

“The risks that radiation poses are really much greater than previously thought,” report co-author Tilman Ruff told AFP.

The atmospheric tests alone, which were conducted up to 1980, are expected over time to cause at least two million excess cancer deaths, he said.

And “the same number of additional early deaths (are expected) from heart attacks and strokes”, said Ruff, a Melbourne University public health fellow and co-founder of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize.

Ionising radiation, or particles that can snap DNA bonds in cells and turn them cancerous, is “intensely biologically harmful”, he said.

“There is no level below which there are no effects”.

The risks are not uniform, with foetuses and young children most affected, and girls and women 52-percent more susceptible to the cancer-inducing effects of radiation than boys and men.

Culture of secrecy –

The NPA report documented a persistent culture of secrecy among states that had tested nuclear weapons.

In Kiribati, for instance, studies by Britain and the United States on health and environmental impacts remain classified, preventing victims from learning what was done to them.

And in Algeria, the precise sites where France buried radioactive waste after its tests there remain undisclosed, the report said.

None of the nuclear-armed states has ever apologised for the tests, and even in cases where they eventually acknowledged damage, the report said compensation schemes have tended to “function more to limit liability than to help victims in good faith”.

Local communities, meanwhile, frequently lack adequate healthcare and health screening, as well as basic risk education — leaving people unaware of the dangers or how to protect themselves.

“The harm is underestimated, it’s under-communicated, and it’s under-addressed,” Stawkowski said.

– ‘Guinea pigs’ –

When Cross was diagnosed with leukaemia aged 24, she did not immediately blame the nuclear explosions in French Polynesia decades earlier.

“France’s propaganda was very powerful,” she told AFP, adding that in school she had only learned about the tests’ positive economic impact for France’s South Pacific islands and atolls.

She was later “shocked” to discover that rather than a handful of harmless “tests”, France conducted 193 explosions in French Polynesia between 1966 and 1996.

The biggest was around 200 times more powerful than the bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

“These weren’t just tests. They were real bombs,” she said, charging that her people had been treated as “guinea pigs” for decades.

– ‘Trauma’ –

Other communities near test sites have also borne a heavy burden.

Hughes pointed to the impact of the United States’ 15-megaton Bravo test at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands on March 1, 1954 — “equivalent to 1,000 Hiroshima bombs — an absolute monstrosity”.

It vaporised one island and exposed thousands nearby to radioactive fallout.

Rongelap, about 120 kilometres (75 miles) from Bikini, saw “vaporised coral atoll mixed in with radioactive isotopes falling onto the island from the sky, with the children thinking it was snow”, Hughes said.

The report criticised the “minimal” international response to the problem.

It especially highlighted the nuclear-armed states’ responsibility to scale up efforts to assess needs, assist victims and clean up contaminated environments.

“We want to understand what happened to us,” Cross said.

“We want to heal from this trauma.”

January 26, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | health, weapons and war | Leave a comment

President Trump’s radical attack on radiation safety.

By Daniel Hirsch, Haakon Williams, Cameron Kuta | October 15, 2025, https://thebulletin.org/2025/10/president-trumps-radical-attack-on-radiation-safety/?variant=B&utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Trump%20s%20attack%20on%20radiation%20safety&utm_campaign=20251009%20Thursday%20Newsletter%20%28Copy%29

In May, President Donald Trump issued a series of executive orders that, in part, require the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to consider dramatically weakening its radiation protection standard. If federal radiation limits are gutted in the manner urged by the president, the new standard could allow four out of five people exposed over a 70-year lifetime to develop a cancer they would not otherwise get.

Contesting the scientific consensus. Section 5(b) of the executive order—formally titled “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission”—directs the NRC to issue a proposed “wholesale revision of its regulations and guidance documents,” including reconsideration of the agency’s “reliance on the linear no-threshold (LNT) model for radiation exposure.” The LNT model maintains that risk from radiation exposure is proportional to the dose: Even a tiny amount of radiation causes some small but real increased risk of cancer, and that risk goes up linearly as the dose increases.

While most Americans have doubtless never heard of the LNT model, it has been the bedrock of radiation exposure risk analysis for decades and forms the basis of public health protection from radiation. The LNT model is scientifically robust, supported by the longstanding and repeatedly affirmed determinations on low-dose radiation by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, virtually all international scientific bodies, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the NRC itself.

Despite the LNT model’s long track record and the well-established body of scientific evidence upon which it is built, President Trump has unilaterally issued a presidential finding that this scientific consensus is wrong. His order could lead to LNT’s complete abandonment in a matter of months, posing a serious increase in the amount of radiation that industries and government agencies would be allowed to inflict upon the public.

If the NRC goes along with Trump’s assertion, the weakening of radiation protection standards would likely be extreme. Advocates of abandoning LNT have often asserted that low-dose radiation is harmless or even beneficial, and therefore, that the public health radiation limits should be hugely increased. In 2015, three petitions for rulemaking to the NRC proposed doing away with the LNT model and increasing allowable radiation exposures for everyone—including children and pregnant women—to 10 rem. (The Roentgen equivalent man (rem) is a unit of effective absorbed radiation in human tissue, equivalent to one roentgen of X-rays. One rem is equal to 0.01 Sievert in the international system of units.)

One petition to the NRC went so far as to ask, “Why deprive the public of the benefits of low-dose radiation?” The NRC strongly rejected the petitions in 2021, citing the conclusions of numerous scientific bodies that “[c]onvincing evidence has not yet demonstrated the existence of a threshold.

Low-level, or “low-dose,” radiation is generally defined as a dose range of 10 rem and below. However, “low dose” is something of a misnomer, as 10 rem is still relatively high. Even when doses are low, they nonetheless cause substantial harm when spread across a large population over time, especially for sensitive groups like children.

Raising radiation exposure limits. If President Trump’s executive order results in a new public radiation exposure limit of around 10 rem—the level LNT opponents often advocate—the increased health risks would be extraordinary. Longstanding radiation protection limits for members of the public are in the range of 10 to 100 millirem (0.01 to 0.1 rem) per year. A 10-rem limit would increase allowed exposures to radiation by factors of 100 to 1000—and so would increase the risk of cancer.

A single chest X-ray is about 2 millirem (0.002 rem) of radiation exposure. An annual limit of 10 rem would correspond to a person receiving a dose equivalent to 5,000 chest X-rays each year, from conception to death. Current official radiation risk estimates—adopted by EPA from the National Academies’ BEIR VII study on the health risks from exposure to low levels of ionizing radiation—indicate that receiving 10 rem per year over a 70-year lifetime would result in about four out of every five people exposed getting a cancer they would not get otherwise.

Despite what opponents of the LNT model claim, there is no threshold at 10 rem below which there is no measurable health harm. A substantial body of scientific work has demonstrated significant negative health impacts well below 10 rem. Beginning in the 1950s, pioneering Oxford researcher Alice Stewart demonstrated that a single fetal X-ray with a dose of 200 millirem (0.2 rem) was associated with a measurable increase in the risk of that child dying of cancer. The radiation establishment fought Stewart’s findings vigorously, but her research has long since been vindicated.

More recently, a major study covering an international cohort of over 300,000 nuclear facility workers has found that annual doses well below 1 rem create measurable increases in the risk of developing a variety of cancers, and that, as NRC put it, “even tiny doses slightly boost the risk of leukemia.” A second massive study of nearly one million European children found that those who received a CT scan, at an average dose of 800 millirem (0.8 rem), suffered a measurable increase in their risk of getting cancer.

Standards already weak. Radiation protection standards should be tightened, not weakened. The US government has a long history of underestimating radiation risks. The more scientists have learned about low-dose radiation, the more their estimates of the risk per unit dose have tended to increase. Yet the NRC has not updated in step with the science.

The NRC protection limit for workers of 5 rem per year was set in the early 1960s and has not changed since, despite decades of increasing official estimates of radiation risk. The current best estimate, from the National Academies’ BEIR VII, indicates that one out of every five workers receiving the NRC’s allowable dose each year from ages 18 to 65 would develop a cancer.

NRC’s radiation exposure limits for the public have not been updated in 35 years. Despite a requirement to employ EPA’s more conservative radiation risk standards, the NRC has long ignored it and instead continues to use 100 millirem per year—100 times lower than what Trump’s executive order could lead to. Current risk figures from the National Academies and the EPA indicate that 70 years of exposure at that level would result in nearly one in 100 people getting cancer from that exposure. That is 100 to 10,000 times higher than the EPA’s acceptable risk range. As the former director of EPA’s Office of Radiation and Indoor Air said years ago, “To put it bluntly, radiation should not be treated as a privileged pollutant. You and I should not be exposed to higher risks from radiation sites than we should be from sites which had contained any other environmental pollutant.”

The NRC held a webinar in July to gather public feedback on implementing President Trump’s executive order on abolishing the LNT model. Many presenters—including representatives from the National Council on Radiation Protection and the Union of Concerned Scientists—gave a vigorous defense of the LNT model, as did many of the comments from the public. Yet the NRC, despite itself having strongly reaffirmed this standard only 4 years ago, seemed to minimize low-dose radiation risks and suggested that all radiation cancer risk models be treated equally (including the long-discredited view that low-dose radiation has health benefits). More concerning, the NRC has put its thumb on the scale, giving special treatment to LNT opposition by posting among the general meeting materials a link to one presenter’s paper, which suggests that an annual dose of 10 rem is acceptably safe.

At a time when radiation protection should be strengthened, President Trump has directed action to weaken it markedly. If the NRC implements the executive order, the potential outcome would be a new, deeply flawed radiation standard as much as a thousand times weaker than the current standard, resulting in a massive increase in radiation-related health hazards across the American population.

January 25, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | radiation, Reference, Reference archives | Leave a comment

Loosening radiation exposure rules won’t speed up nuclear energy production.

Relaxing radiation safety standards could place women and children at higher risks of health issues

By Katy Huff, 24 Jan 26, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/weaker-radiation-limits-will-not-help-nuclear-energy/

Get an x-ray, and you get a small dose of radiation to visualize your bones and body structures to help you medically. Buy a smoke detector, you’re inviting a tiny source of radiation, americium-241, into your home to keep you safe. But we don’t just take on that radiation heedlessly. Until perhaps now.

The U.S. regulates the amount of radiation people are exposed to using something called the linear no-threshold model, which says that every additional dose of ionizing radiation, however small, adds a small risk to health. It’s a simple equation that describes the relationship between dose and risk. For decades it has anchored radiation dose limits for both the public and radiation workers. But by February 23, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is expected to overhaul its regulations, potentially retiring this risk model, per a May executive order by President Donald Trump.

Why loosen this protection? Supposedly to spur nuclear energy production. The administration says that this risk model is too cautious, leading to costly conservatism in reactor design, staffing redundancies and stringency in licensing. The executive order promises that lifting it will accelerate nuclear reactor licensing while lowering the costs of providing nuclear energy to the grid.

As a nuclear energy advocate and former Department of Energy official, I want to see more nuclear energy on the grid soon. But loosening the protections of the linear no-threshold (LNT) model is not supported by current research. Some experts warn that relaxing it could especially place women and children at higher risk of damage from radiation.

The LNT model is based on the idea that exposure to any amount of radiation proportionally increases health risks, including the risk of cancer. From data on high radiation exposures, scientists extrapolate, or predict, what might happen if people are exposed to lower levels of radiation. At low doses, however, it becomes difficult to distinguish the health effects of radiation from the other environmental and lifestyle factors that can affect health. That uncertainty is why regulators rely on a cautious approach like the LNT model, and also why some people question its use.

People are willing to accept the radiation risks inherent in medicine, industry and energy because they trust that standards have been set by credible experts relying on evidence who err on the side of caution and protecting human health. Weakening regulations without new evidence would do the opposite. The last time the question of raising the public dose limit came up, the NRC said no—there wasn’t enough evidence. We must urge the NRC’s current commissioners to demand evidence and heed science over political agenda.

January 24, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | radiation | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries Next Entries »