Minnesota’s aging nukes pose national threat

In a review of published studies of 136 nuclear reactor sites in the European Journal of Cancer Care in 2007, elevated leukemia disease rates in children were documented in the US, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Japan, and Canada. This is not a new story.

November 23, 2025 by beyondnuclearinternational, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2025/11/23/minnesotas-aging-nukes-pose-national-threat/

More than electricity, the reactors supply a steady dose of radioactive tritium in drinking water, writes Susu Jeffrey

“Sometimes before I give a speech, I ask the audience to stand up if they or someone in their family has had cancer,” says John LaForge of Nukewatch. “Eighty percent of the audience gets up.”

The Monticello nuclear power reactor is on the Mississippi River about 35-miles northwest of Minneapolis. Xcel’s twin Prairie Island reactors, plus about 50 giant dry casks storing waste reactor fuel, are all in the floodplain of the Mississippi. This waste is sited 44 to 51 miles southeast of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

There are no plans to move the waste off-island because there is no alternative destination. In fact, 34 more concrete encased steel casks are planned. There is no national hot radioactive waste repository. Think of these waste container sites as permanent radioactive waste dumps.

The greater Twin Cities’ 3.7 million people are in the nuclear “shadow” (within 50 miles) of all three nukes. The Mississippi River serves 20 million people with drinking water, way beyond the Minnesota state population of 5.7 million. Minnesota’s aging nukes are a national threat. For approximately the next six generations, radioactive tritium will be a part of the drinking water wherever those molecules wander.

The Monticello nuke was licensed in 1970 for 40 years, and went online in 1971, a year it had two radioactive cesium spills. In 2010, the license was renewed for another 20 years until 2030. Xcel Energy has even been granted an extension for another 20 years until 2050. It is a corporate financial security move not yet approved by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission which holds the final consent. Paperwork is one thing, pipes are another.

In November 2022, a 50-year-old underground pipe leaked 829,000 gallons of tritium-contaminated wastewater that reached the Mississippi River, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Xcel failed to make public the radioactive spill for four months. After a May 15, 2024 public hearing in Monticello where citizens testified “We don’t trust you. You lie,” an NRC executive “clarified” Xcel’s “miscommunication.”

Senior Environmental Project Manager, Stephen J. Koenick admitted some tritium had been measured in the Mississippi. Tritium bonds with water and cannot be separated out. Water obeys gravity running downhill, in the case of Monticello, from the reactor to the Mississippi. The runaway tritium will persist in the environment for ten half-lives or about 123 years.

No telling where Xcel’s radioactive molecules will land. Men have a one in two chance of being diagnosed with cancer during their lifetimes; for women the chance is one in three (National Cancer Institute, 2/9/2022). There is tremendous popular, fear-driven support for the oncology industry.

The good news is that while cancer numbers are up so is the cancer survival rate. However, at nuke weapons, nuke reactors, and the virtually forever waste sites, “accidents” happen along with on-going radioactive decay. Radioactivity cannot be contained. When I was a newspaper reporter in Brevard County, Florida, where Cape Canaveral is located, I learned that nuclear waste cannot be rocketed off into space because it’s too hot, too heavy, and the rockets too faulty.

Nuclear Safety Regulations Changing

Among President Trump’s cost-cutting moves is a weakening of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s exposure standards. Staff would be cut and regulations “revised” virtually cutting off the commission’s independent status. The Monticello nuke was licensed for 40 years and was rubber stamped to work for 80. Octogenarian nukes are considered “safe enough” now by the nuclear/government consortium.

Piecemeal fix-it parts for geriatric machinery or people are a lucrative business. Locating a leaking tritium pipe underground, between buildings, removing and replacing it is a non-negotiable emergency at nuclear reactors with miles and miles of piping. Upkeep expenses figure in utility rate hikes.

Joseph Mangano and Ernest Sternglass did a study of eight downwind US communities in the two years after a nuclear reactor closure. A remarkable 17.4 percent drop in infant mortality was found. “We finally have peer-reviewed accurate data attaching nuclear power reactors to death and injury in the host communities,” New York State Assemblyman Richard Brodsky said of the 2002 report in the Archives of Environmental Health.

Monopoly capitalism or public service?

Clearly the Monticello reactor was designed to make money. In November 2024, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison wrote that Xcel has “aggressively” pursued multi-year rate hikes while earning large profits. In 2024 Xcel reported $1.94-billion net earnings, a profit margin up 14% from 2023.

According to Xcel propaganda, the nuke is “the biggest employer and largest local taxpayer” in Monticello, MN, and generates an estimated $550 million in economic activity each year in the region. And like profits, cancer rates are up notably among people under 50 and rising faster among women than men the American Cancer Society reports.

Repeatedly, the Xcel corporation wins its rate hike and re-licensing “asks.” These asks get rewritten and resubmitted until a “compromise” is reached. In 2025, residential customers will pay $5.39 more per month, down from the original ask of $9.89, according to Minnesota Public Radio, which also noted that greater increases are on the horizon for EVs and data center capital improvements.

Cancer

St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital advertises heavily with videos of big-eyed, bald children cancer patients. In a review of published studies of 136 nuclear reactor sites in the European Journal of Cancer Care in 2007, elevated leukemia disease rates in children were documented in the US, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Japan, and Canada. This is not a new story.

The danger of mental retardation of fetuses exposed in the womb was reported in The New York Times (page A1 on 12/20/1989). Tritium crosses the placenta. In addition to the health costs of breathing and ingesting exhausts from nuclear power reactors, there is the problem of what to do with and how to contain its long-lived waste. The nuclear profit god is a once and future terrorist.

The Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Mississippi River is working for the immediate decommissioning of the Monticello nuclear reactor by educating the public on dangers of the nuclear power reactors and safe alternatives. To learn more, visit our website. See our Monticello report “Serial Killers on the Loose: Cancer Death Rates Rising in Reactor Host Communities”.

November 27, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | health, USA | Leave a comment

Department of Energy Seeks to Eliminate Radiation Protections Requiring Controls “As Low As Reasonably Achievable”

21 Nov 25 https://nukewatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/DOE-Seeks-to-Lower-Radiation-Protections-by-Eliminating-ALARA.pdf

Santa Fe, NM – An internal Department of Energy (DOE) memorandum eliminates worker and public radiation protection rules known “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” (ALARA). This fundamental departure from decades of accepted health physics practices is being promoted by senior DOE political appointees with little background in health or radiation control. It is marked as “URGENCY: High” under the auspices of the DOE Deputy Secretary, the Under Secretary for Science, and the Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration. The memorandum awaits the final signature of DOE Secretary Chris Wright.

The memo’s stated goal is to:

“…remove the ALARA principle from all DOE directives and regulations, including DOE Order 458.1, Radiation Protection of the Public and the Environment, NE [Office of Nuclear Energy] Order 458.1, Radiation Protection of the Public, and, upon completion of the rulemaking process, 10 CFR [Code of Federal Regulations] 835, Occupational Radiation Protection.” [1]

It follows the playbook of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which called for:

“Set[ting] clear radiation exposure and protection standards by eliminating ALARA (“as low as reasonably achievable”) as a regulatory principle and setting clear standards according to radiological risk and dose rather than arbitrary objectives.”[2]

Contrary to Project 2025’s assertion that ALARA is just “arbitrary objectives,” the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration declares it to be:

“…the cornerstone principle of radiation safety, emphasizing that radiation exposure should be minimized to the lowest possible levels while still allowing essential tasks to be performed. This principle applies everywhere radiation is present, including medical, industrial, nuclear, and research settings… ALARA is not just a recommendation—it is a legal and ethical requirement in radiation-related industries.”[3]

The elimination of ALARA protections is likely to increase radiation exposures to workers and weaken cleanup standards at contaminated sites where DOE has binding legal requirements with the impacted states (e.g., Los Alamos Lab, NM; Hanford Nuclear Reservation, WA and West Valley Demonstration Project, NY), as well as DOE Legacy Management sites where residual contamination remains after completion of claimed “cleanup” (e.g., Rocky Flats, CO and Weldon Spring, MO).

DOE’s memo purports to remove red tape constraining construction of new nuclear power plants, which inevitably experience huge cost overruns at ratepayers’ expense because of the inherent economic problems with nuclear power. However, because DOE’s primary mission is expanding nuclear weapons production, the elimination of ALARA protections will hit workers and nearby communities by allowing higher worker and public doses.

Two pertinent examples are the expanding production of plutonium “pit” bomb cores at the Los Alamos Lab and future pit production at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. At the same time, the independent Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board’s role of nuclear safety oversight is being crippled by the Trump Administration’s refusal to nominate candidates to the Board. Moreover, DOE’s termination of ALARA rules can even downgrade international radiation protection standards because the Department provides staff and training for the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency.

DOE’s high-level memorandum relies heavily upon a recent study by its Idaho National Laboratory.[4] According to the memo, the INL Report concluded:

“The balance of available scientific evidence indicates that annual dose rates of 5,000 mrem or less have not been shown to result in detectable increases in adverse health outcomes across diverse human populations and exposure scenarios. Furthermore, substantial evidence suggests that even 10,000 mrem/year may maintain a reasonable safety margin based on available epidemiological and radiobiological data.”

This is highly debatable (see comments by an independent epidemiologist below). By way of comparison, a standard chest X-ray is around 10 millirem (mrem) and an average annual radiation dose from all sources (including natural) to any one individual in the United States is around 600 mrem.[5] The INL report begins to rationalize public radioactive doses that are up to 16 times higher.

The Idaho National Laboratory is where DOE extracted weapons grade uranium from spent reactor fuel for warhead production, resulting in significant ground water contamination and “temporary” storage of liquid high-level waste now estimated to cost billions of dollars to stabilize. Nevertheless, according to INL Director John Wagner, the Idaho National Laboratory Report specifically recommends:

Eliminating all ALARA requirements and limits below the 5,000 mrem occupational dose limit in order to reduce “unnecessary economic burdens.”
Multiplying five-fold the allowed public radioactive dose limit from 100 mrem per year to 500 mrem per year.
Supporting ongoing research on low-dose radiation effects to “further refine scientific understanding and regulatory approaches.”

Ongoing research on low-dose radiation effects” is aimed at the Linear No-Threshold principle, which maintains that no dose of radiation is safe. Related, ALARA is considered to be the global bedrock of radiation protection for nuclear workers and the public and is widely accepted as best practices by health physics professionals. Historically, more than 10,000 DOE workers have filed compensation claims for their occupational illnesses, which argues for strengthening, not weakening, occupational protection standards.

In parallel with DOE under Trump Executive Orders, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (which oversees the nuclear energy industry) is questioning the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) principle. In recent written comment to the NRC, epidemiologist Joseph Mangano summarized decades of studies supporting LNT. His cited evidence includes:

Studies of low-dose pelvic X-rays to pregnant women in the mid-1950s that concluded that a single X-ray would nearly double the risk of the child dying of cancer or leukemia by age ten.
A 1990 study by the Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR) that concluded that cancers and genetic damage increase with low-level radiation as a linear, non-threshold function of the dose. It included over 900 references that support LNT.
A second BEIR study in 2005 that reiterated the risks of low-dose radiation exposures.
A 2020 systematic review of 26 studies involving 91,000 individuals with solid cancers and 13,000 with leukemia that documented excess risks caused by low dose radiation.
A 2023 study of 309,932 workers at nuclear plants in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States that found 28,089 had died of solid cancers with occupational doses well below Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors. This suggests that the Linear No-Threshold model may actually underestimate the harmful effects of prolonged low radiation doses.[6]

Jay Coghlan, Director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, concluded: “The Trump Administration is pumping taxpayers’ money into the much hyped “nuclear renaissance,” now in its third or fourth failed attempt, while cutting Medicaid for the poor and cutting taxes for the rich. But this time the corporate nuclear titans are being given a leg up by cutting nuclear safety protections for workers and the public, inevitably causing more illnesses. The good news is that fundamental market economics will eventually collapse the nuclear industry. However, one has to ask, at what safety costs to other sectors, such as the expanding production of nuclear weapons for the new arms race?”

November 24, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | radiation, USA | Leave a comment

Trump’s new radiation exposure limits could be ‘catastrophic’ for women and girls.

it has since been widely documented that women and young girls are significantly more vulnerable to radiation harm than men—in some cases by as much as a ten-fold difference………… Those most impacted by weaker exposure standards will be young girls under five years old

By Lesley M. M. Blume, Chloe Shrager | November 14, 2025, https://thebulletin.org/2025/11/trumps-new-radiation-exposure-limits-could-be-catastrophic-for-women-and-girls/

In a May executive order, aimed at ushering in what he described as an “American nuclear renaissance,” President Donald Trump declared moot the science underpinning decades-old radiation exposure standards set by the federal government. Executive Order 14300 directed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to conduct a “wholesale revision” of half-a-century of guidance and regulations. In doing so, it considers throwing out the foundational model used by the government to determine exposure limits, and investigates the possibility of loosening the standard on what is considered a “safe” level of radiation exposure for the general public. In a statement to the Bulletin, NRC spokesperson Scott Burnell confirmed that the NRC is reconsidering the standards long relied upon to guide exposure limits.

Now, some radiology and policy experts are sounding alarm bells, calling the directive a dangerous departure from a respected framework that has been followed and consistently reinforced by scientific review for generations. They warn that under some circumstances, the effects of the possible new limits could range from “undeniably homicidal” to “catastrophic” for those living close to nuclear operations and beyond.

“It’s an attack on the science and the policy behind radiation protection of people and the environment that has been in place for decades,” says radiologist Kimberly Applegate, a former chair of the radiological protection in medicine committee of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) and a current council and scientific committee member of the National Council on Radiation Protection (NCRP)—two regulatory bodies that make radiation safety recommendations to the NRC. According to Applegate, current government sources have told her and other experts that the most conservative proposed change would raise the current limit on the amount of radiation that a member of the general public can be exposed to by five times. That would be a standard “far out of the international norms,” she says, and could significantly raise cancer rates among those living nearby. The NRC spokesperson did not respond to a question from the Bulletin about specific new exposure limits being considered.

Kathryn Higley, president of the NCRP, warns that a five-fold increase in radiation dose exposure would look like “potentially causing cancers in populations that you might not expect to see within a couple of decades.”

“There are many things that Executive Order does, but one thing that’s really important is that it reduces the amount of public input that will be allowed,” says Diane D’Arrigo, the Radioactive Waste Project Director at the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a nonprofit group critical of the nuclear energy industry. In a statement to the Bulletin, the NRC said that once its standards reassessment process is completed, the NRC will publish its proposed rules in the Federal Register for public comment.* The NRC spokesperson did not respond to questions about when the proposed new standards would be made public and whether or how the general public would be further alerted to the changes.

Once the proposed policy change hits the Federal Register, the final decision will likely follow in a few days without advertising a period for public input, Applegate adds.

“I’m not sure I know why the loosening is needed,” says Peter Crane, who served as the NRC’s Counsel for Special Projects for nearly 25 years, starting in 1975. “I think it’s ideologically driven.” He points out that the probable loosening of the standards is set to coincide with increased pressure to greenlight new nuclear plants and could weaken emergency preparedness in case of leaks or other accidents: “I think it’s playing with fire.” (The NRC’s Office of Public Affairs did not respond to questions about the rationale for loosening the standards and the timing of the reconsideration.)

Possible shorter timelines for building nuclear power plants, coinciding with weakened radiation exposure standards, could spell disaster, warn other experts. It would be “undeniably homicidal” of the NRC to loosen current US exposure standards even slightly, adds Mary Olson, a biologist who has researched the effects of radiation for over 40 years and published a peer-reviewed study titled “Disproportionate impact of radiation and radiation regulation” in 2019. Olson cites NRC equations that found that the current exposure standards result in 3.5 fatal cancers per 1,000 people exposed for their lifetimes by living near a nuclear facility; a five-fold rate increase in allowable radiation exposure could therefore result in a little over 17.5 cancers per 1,000 people. Expressed another way, that means “one in 57 people getting fatal cancer from year in, year out exposure to an NRC facility,” she says.

The NRC’s Office of Public Affairs did not respond to questions about whether the NRC could guarantee the current level of safety for the general public or nuclear workers if adopting looser radiation exposure standards, and about whether new protections would be put into place.

Are women and children more vulnerable? According to Olson, increased radiation exposure could be even more “catastrophic” for women and children. Exposure standards have long been determined by studies on how radiation affects the “reference man,” defined by the ICRP as a white male “between 20-30 years of age, weighing around 70 kilograms [155 pounds].”

But Applegate, Olson, and other experts say that it has since been widely documented that women and young girls are significantly more vulnerable to radiation harm than men—in some cases by as much as a ten-fold difference, according to Olson’s 2019 study. Olson and Applegate cite another 2006 review assessing and summarizing 60 years of health data on the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings; the study showed that women are one-and-a-half to two times as likely to develop cancer from the same one-time radiation dose as men.

Young girls are seven times more at risk, they say. Those most impacted by weaker exposure standards will be young girls under five years old, Olson says. Her 2024 study of the A-bomb bomb survivor data for the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, titled “Gender and Ionizing Radiation,” found that they face twice the risk as boys of the same age, and have four to five times the risk of developing cancer later in life than a woman exposed in adulthood.

“Protections of the public from environmental poisons and dangerous materials have to be focused on those who will be most harmed, not average harmed,” Olson says. “That’s where the protection should be.”

Infants are especially vulnerable to radiation harm, says Rebecca Smith-Bindman, a radiologist and epidemiologist who is the lead author of a just-released major study in the New England Journal of Medicine documenting the relationship between medical imaging (such as X-rays and CT scans) and cancer risk for children and adolescents; more than 3.7 million children born between 1996 and 2016 participated and have been tracked. Smith-Bindman contests the idea that women are overall more vulnerable to cancer than men, saying that “in general, maybe women are a little bit more sensitive, …[but] women and men have different susceptibilities to different cancer types,” with women being more vulnerable to lung and breast cancers, among other types. But it is “absolutely true that children are more susceptible,” she adds. With children under the age of one, “the risks are markedly elevated.” While these findings are sobering, she points out that with medical imaging, “there’s a trade-off…it helps you make diagnoses; it might save your life. It’s very different from nuclear power or other sources of radiation where there’s no benefit to the patient or the population. It’s just a harm.”

“We’ve known for decades that pregnancy is [also] more impacted” by radiation exposure, says Cindy Folkers, radiation and health hazard specialist at Beyond Nuclear, a nonprofit anti-nuclear power and weapons organization. “Radiation does its damage to cells, and so when you have a pregnancy, you have very few cells that will be developing into various parts of the human body: the skeleton, the organs, the brain,” and exposing those cells to radiation during pregnancy can impact the embryo’s health, she says. Smith-Bindman and her team are also studying the impact of radiation exposure on pregnancy, and while their results are not yet in, “we do know that exposures during pregnancy are harmful,” she says, “and that they result in elevated cancer risks in the offspring of those patients.”

For children, lifetime cancer risk will be increased not only because of the “sensitivity and vulnerability of developing tissues, but also partly [because] they would be living longer under a different radiation protection framework,” adds David Richardson, a UC Irvine professor who studies occupational safety hazards.

Several experts noted the irony that these changes are being mandated by the same administration that is also overseeing a policy of “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA), an effort being spearheaded by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “In terms of general [public] knowledge, I think there has not been very large coverage or acceptance of the idea that radiation affects different people differently on the basis of both age and biological sex,” says Olson. “But we now have enough reviews, enough literature to say that the biological sex difference is there. I don’t think MAHA mothers know this because it’s been underreported, [and] they would be concerned if they knew it.”

The NRC’s Office of Public Affairs did not respond to questions about concerns being raised by radiologists and epidemiologists about possible health consequences—especially for children—as a result of increased radiation exposure.

Continue reading →

November 18, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | radiation, Reference, Women | Leave a comment

Health Care Workers Spoke Out for Their Peers in Gaza. Then Came Backlash.

Medical institutions are silencing their staff and impeding efforts to build solidarity with medical workers in Gaza.

By Marianne Dhenin , Truthout, November 17, 2025

handra Hassan, an associate professor of surgery at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) College of Medicine, spent three weeks in Gaza in January 2024, treating patients who had survived tank shelling, drone strikes, and sniper fire amid Israel’s ongoing genocide. When Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis came under siege, Hassan and the MedGlobal doctors he was serving with were forced to flee. “We were evacuated when they bombed just across the street from the hospital [and] tanks were rolling in,” Hassan told Truth

When Hassan returned home to Chicago, he was eager to share his experiences and advocate for an end to Israel’s assault on Gaza, which has killed an estimated 68,000 Palestinians since October 2023. Among the dead are over 1,500 health care workers, including doctors and nurses Hassan worked alongside.

But instead of being welcomed like he had been after previous missions to conflict zones in Ukraine and Syria, Hassan soon found himself on the receiving end of a doxxing and harassment campaign. StopAntisemitism, a pro-Israel group that doxxes people it accuses of antisemitism, shared screenshots of some of Hassan’s LinkedIn posts to its X account. Hassan said his employer received around 1,500 emailed complaints the day StopAntisemitism posted his information.

“I was speaking up for the human rights of Palestinians [because] it’s like, you’re witnessing another genocide, you need to talk about it,” Hassan told Truthout. But StopAntisemitism “put my picture, and they wrote that I’m [an] antisemite.”

Hassan is one of more than 15 health care workers in eight states who told Truthout they faced silencing, harassment, or workplace retaliation for Palestine-related speech, including giving a talk on health issues in Palestine, endorsing statements condemning the killing of health care workers in Gaza, or wearing a keffiyeh or other symbols of Palestine solidarity at work. Many said they felt that their hospitals, clinics, or professional societies had become increasingly hostile working environments since October 2023.

The experiences that health care workers shared suggest that organized campaigns of complaints and harassment from pro-Israel groups against health care workers have intensified, and that anti-Palestinian racism is entrenched across health care institutions nationwide. In a 2024 survey, the Institute for the Understanding of Anti-Palestinian Racism (IUAPR) also found widespread anti-Palestinian racism in health care: More than half of the 387 health care provider respondents “reported experiencing silencing, exclusion, harassment, physical threat or harm, or defamation while advocating for Gaza and/or Palestinian human rights.” Half said they were “afraid to speak out.”

Many of those who spoke to Truthout shared that fear and expressed concerns for their patients and profession: “The reality on the ground is that racism is running unchecked throughout our medical institutions, and as a result, health care workers don’t have the training they need, accountability is not happening at the level of the medical institutions, and our communities are not being served,” Asfia Qaadir, a psychiatrist specialized in trauma-informed care for BIPOC youth, told Truthout. “Racism is about erasure, and ultimately, our patients are paying the price.”

A Pattern of Censorship……………………………..

https://truthout.org/articles/these-health-care-workers-spoke-out-for-their-peers-in-gaza-then-came-backlash/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=5511502921-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2025_11_17_10_28&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-5511502921-650192793

November 18, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | employment, health, USA | Leave a comment

Non Government Organisations Warn that Recent Executive Orders Would Harm Public Health, Disproportionately Impacting Women and Children

“Young men like the Reference Man are harmed by radiation, but they’re more resistant to harm than are women and children. Radiation causes cancer in women at twice the rate of adult men, while the same exposure in early childhood, will, across their lifetimes, produce seven times more cancer in young females, and four times more in young males.”

Asheville, North Carolina – November 14, https://www.radiationproject.org/blog/ngos-warn-that-recent-executive-orders-would-harm-public-health-disproportionately-impacting-women-and-children?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=6917d62bc4477007efdd4b63&ss_email_id=6917db9d43e3de1cada92627&ss_campaign_name=Welcome+to+GRIP%E2%80%99s+NEW+Blog&ss_campaign_sent_date=2025-11-15T01%3A47%3A30Z

Over forty citizen’s sector organizations including the national nonprofit Physicians for Social Responsibility have sent a joint letter to federal officials warning of public health consequences of a series of executive orders by President Trump which direct the NRC to dramatically weaken Standards for Protection Against Radiation in the US federal code. The letter points out sharply disproportionate impacts on women and children from weakening existing radiation exposure standards and calls for strengthening them.

The letter is posted here. It was spearheaded by the nonprofit Generational Radiation Impact Project (GRIP) and sent to US Nuclear Regulatory Commissioners, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Surgeon General Denise Hinton, and other key elected and appointed officials.

Recent Trump executive orders direct the NRC to “reconsider” the linear no-threshold (LNT) model. The joint letter argues that this “would undermine public trust by falsely claiming that the NRC’s radiation risk models lack scientific basis, despite decades of peer-reviewed evidence and international consensus.” The widely accepted LNT model has no limit “below regulatory concern,” i.e. no level below which radiation exposure can be treated as negligible or zero-risk. Where applied, LNT takes account of proportional cancer and health risks of all tiny exposures no matter how small.

Trump executive orders direct the NRC to undertake new rulemaking and “wholesale revision” of existing radiation regulations, which would likely lead to the NRC abandoning LNT and raising allowable exposure limits.

But past NRC opposition to such changes stands to be reversed by the Trump executive orders. If federal radiation regulations were weakened to permit exposures of 10 Rems a year, scientists estimate that over a 70-year lifetime, four out of five people would develop cancer they would not otherwise get.

Today’s joint letter stresses that health damage would not be evenly distributed across the population, but would disproportionately affect women and children, who are biologically more susceptible to ionizing radiation than men. And an article published today in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists cites several lines of evidence “that women and young girls are significantly more vulnerable to radiation harm than men—in some cases by as much as a ten-fold difference” and that “infants are especially vulnerable to radiation harm.”

A July 2025 Idaho National Laboratory report commissioned by the Department of Energy recommended loosening the public radiation standard fivefold to 500 millirems. In 2021 the NRC roundly rejected a petition to raise allowable radiation exposures for all Americans, including children and pregnant women, to 10 Rems a year, 100 times the current limit.

“[NRC] bases its risk assessments on Reference Man, a model that represents a young adult male and fails to reflect the greater impacts to infants, children, and women—pregnant or not,” the joint letter states. “Newer research has shown that external radiation harms children more than adults and female bodies more than male bodies. Research on internal exposures…has not yet been sufficiently analyzed to discover if there are broad age-based or male/female differences in impact…. Existing standards should therefore be strengthened to account for these life-stage and gender disparities…not weakened. Radiation causes infertility, loss of pregnancy, birth complications and defects, as well as solid tumor cancer, leukemia, non-cancer outcomes including cardiovascular disease, increased incidence of autoimmune disease and ongoing new findings.”

In cases where cancer, heart disease, and vascular degradation including stroke are caused by radiation, they are documented at higher rates in women than in men, according to 2024 UNIDIR report Gender and Ionizing Radiation.

The joint letter urges the NRC to “to stand up to the Executive Order’s marching orders to ‘promote’ nuclear power—a mission outside its legal regulatory mandate,” and adopt “stronger, science-based radiation protections….Contemporary research shows that radiation’s impact is far greater on females, children, and fetuses—the most at-risk postnatal group being girls from birth to age five. A truly protective framework would replace Reference Man with a lifecycle model.”

“All US radiation regulations and most radiation risk assessments are based on outcomes for the Reference Man,” said Mary Olson, CEO of GRIP, the organization which spearheaded the joint letter, and co-author of Gender and Ionizing Radiation. “Young men like the Reference Man are harmed by radiation, but they’re more resistant to harm than are women and children. Radiation causes cancer in women at twice the rate of adult men, while the same exposure in early childhood, will, across their lifetimes, produce seven times more cancer in young females, and four times more in young males.”

“We know that exposure to radiation causes disproportionate harm from both cancer and non-cancer related disease outcomes over the course of the lifetime to women and especially to little girls, but radiation is dangerous for everyone,” said Amanda M. Nichols, Ph.D., lead author of Gender and Ionizing Radiation. “[President Trump’s] executive order will allow the industry to relax the current standards for radiological protection, which are already far from adequate. This will have detrimental health consequences for humans and for our shared environments and puts us all at higher risk for negative health consequences. “

“Living near nuclear power facilities doubles the risk of leukemia in children; and radiation is also associated with numerous reproductive harms including infertility, stillbirths and birth defects.,” said Cindy Folkers, Radiation and Health Hazard Specialist with the NGO Beyond Nuclear, a signatory to the joint letter. “Exposing people to more radiation, as this order would do if implemented, would be tantamount to legitimizing their suffering as the price of nuclear expansion.”

November 17, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | radiation, USA | Leave a comment

NFLAs welcome Remembrance Day award of medal to nuke test ‘Sniffers’, but fight not over as groundcrews exposed to radiation remain forgotten.

11th November 2025, https://www.nuclearpolicy.info/news/nflas-welcome-remembrance-day-award-of-medal-to-nuke-test-sniffers-but-fight-not-over-as-groundcrews-exposed-to-radiation-remain-forgotten/

The NFLAs have welcomed the Remembrance Day announcement that the Government has agreed to award the Nuclear Test Medal to gallant RAF aircrew of 27 and 543 Squadrons and sailors aboard the Royal Fleet
Auxiliary vessel Sir Percivale who passed through French and Chinese atmospheric nuclear tests in the Far East to carry out air sampling.

British personnel were ordered to fly or sail through the radioactive clouds of over 40 atomic and nuclear atmospheric tests carried out by China and France.

11th November 2025

NFLAs welcome Remembrance Day award of medal to nuke test ‘Sniffers’, but fight not over as groundcrews exposed to radiation remain forgotten

The NFLAs have welcomed the Remembrance Day announcement that the Government has agreed to award the Nuclear Test Medal to gallant RAF aircrew of 27 and 543 Squadrons and sailors aboard the Royal Fleet Auxiliary vessel Sir Percivale who passed through French and Chinese atmospheric nuclear tests in the Far East to carry out air sampling.

British personnel were ordered to fly or sail through the radioactive clouds of over 40 atomic and nuclear atmospheric tests carried out by China and France.

The NFLAs have been strong advocates for recognition, justice and compensation for Britain’s nuclear test veterans and their families, and the latest announcement comes just a month after NFLA Chair, Councillor Lawrence O’Neill, wrote to the new Veterans Minister, Louise Sandher-Jones, calling for the eligibility criteria for the medal to be extended to include these forgotten ‘sniffers’.

Unfortunately, the revised award criteria still wrongly exclude the RAF ground crew involved in decontaminating the aircraft on their return to the UK. The aircraft involved in sniffing operations were contaminated with radioactivity, and they were decontaminated by washing by groundcrew. Many of these groundcrew were unaware of the levels of radioactivity on the aircraft.

Consequently, many of these ground crew also developed cancers and other health conditions related to exposure to ionising radiation, some repeatedly. Some personnel died and others were able to access a War Pension as a result.

The latest decision by Ministers therefore only represents a part-victory. Councillor O’Neill believes that excluding the ground crew seems ‘not only unjust, but also bizarre and perverse’ given these veterans faced the same dangers as their colleagues who engaged in ‘sniffing’ duties on British tests and who will now qualify for the medal.

The fight therefore continues.

November 14, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | health, UK | Leave a comment

The remnants of Chernobyl are still present in the Black Sea

Forty years have passed since Chernobyl, but Chernobyl-related radioactive contamination in the Black Sea has not ended. TENMAK’s research has revealed that the concentration of caesium-137 in the Black Sea is seven times higher than in the Mediterranean Sea.

BirGün Daily, Giriş: 07.11.2025 , https://www.birgun.net/haber/the-remnants-of-chernobyl-are-still-present-in-the-black-sea-667018

Nearly 40 years have passed since the Chernobyl disaster, considered one of the world’s three largest nuclear accidents, but the radioactive contamination caused by the accident continues to affect the Black Sea. At the IVth National Symposium on Monitoring and Assessment in the Seas, Dr Aysun Kılınçarslan, presenting on behalf of the Turkish Energy, Nuclear and Mining Research Institute (TENMAK), announced the results of monitoring studies on radioactive contamination in Turkey’s coastal waters and sediments.

Analyses conducted in coastal sediments between 2015 and 2023 detected high levels of caesium-137 and strontium-90. While an average of 21 becquerels of caesium-137 isotope per kilogram was observed in the Black Sea, this rate was recorded as only 3.2 becquerels in the Mediterranean Sea. Values that are relatively high in the Sea of Marmara decrease as one moves towards the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas. The highest value found in the analyses exceeds 82 becquerels. This figure is 10 times higher than the highest value observed in the Mediterranean Sea. When viewed on a regional basis, the highest caesium-137 value in sediments, 50 becquerels, was found in Hopa. Hopa is followed by Trabzon and Sinop.

HIGH FIGURES IN TRABZON AND HOPA

In measurements taken in coastal surface waters between 2014 and 2023, the caesium-137 concentration averaged 9 millibecquerels per litre in the Black Sea, while this figure dropped to 1.6 millibecquerels in the Mediterranean Sea. Rates in the Bosphorus, Marmara and Çanakkale ranged between 8.4 and 6.9 millibecquerels, while the amount of caesium-137 in the water decreased in the Aegean Sea, falling to 1.8 millibecquerels. The highest figures were found in Trabzon and Hopa, which have been affected by Chernobyl for years and where cancer rates have increased. Tekirdağ, Ordu, Karasu and İğneada stand out as other regions with high measurements. Although the study’s findings indicate that these levels do not pose a risk to human health or environmental pollution, the significant difference between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean clearly demonstrates the consequences of Chernobyl-related contamination.

CHERNOBYL FLOWS

Another noteworthy finding of the study was the detection of plutonium-239, which does not occur naturally and is produced by nuclear reactions, alongside caesium-137. While average values do not differ between seas, the locations most affected by this contamination include Erdek, the Bosphorus Strait, Hopa, and Sinop. Experts point out that the sources of contamination linked to these isotopes are nuclear power plant accidents, nuclear weapons tests, and operational nuclear reactors. Chernobyl is also cited as a source of contamination in the Black Sea. Radioactive pollution from the out-of-control melted reactor and the surrounding area reaches the Black Sea via groundwater and the Dnieper River.

MARINE ASSESSMENT IS NECESSARY

Prof. Dr. İnci Gökmen, who revealed high levels of radiation in tea after Chernobyl, points out that the radiation level detected at 21 becquerels per kilogram is quite high. Gökmen states that data collected from the seas and coasts also highlights the need to measure radiation levels in the soil, adding, “It is surprising to see plutonium in the seas, even at low levels. Strontium is not surprising. However, since strontium does not emit gamma radiation and must be measured by chemical separation, measurements were rarely taken despite the presence of strontium in the environment and food after Chernobyl. However, the strontium values immediately after the accident can be estimated from the current results. By looking at the caesium levels in coastal surface water in some areas, it would be good to calculate the doses that swimmers or those working at sea, such as fishermen, would receive. It would be appropriate to take measurements in fish, mussels and other seafood. Thirty-nine years have passed since Chernobyl. Caesium has only undergone one half-life. This means that radioactive elements will remain in the seas for a long time to come,” he said. WHAT IS CAESIUM (CS-137)?

The most common radioactive form of caesium is Cs-137. Caesium-137 is produced by nuclear reactions. External exposure to Cs-137 can cause burns, acute radiation sickness and even death. Exposure to large amounts of Cs-137 can result from the misuse of a powerful industrial Cs-137 source, a nuclear explosion, or a major nuclear accident. Under normal conditions, large amounts of Cs-137 are not found in the environment. Exposure to Cs-137 can increase the risk of cancer due to the presence of high-energy gamma radiation. Ingestion or inhalation of Cs-137 increases the risk of cancer by causing the radioactive material to spread to soft tissues, particularly muscle tissue. Vascular plants do not accumulate high levels of caesium through root uptake because caesium is strongly adsorbed to the soil. However, the accumulation of radioactive residues on flora with large surface areas, such as lichens or mosses, is significant. Animals that feed on these plants can consume large amounts of radiocaesium (and other radionuclides present in radioactive fallout). Human consumption of the meat of such animals leads to the uptake of these radionuclides into the body.

Note: This article is translated from the original article titled Çernobil’in izleri hâlâ Karadeniz’de, published in BirGün newspaper on November 7, 2025.

November 13, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | environment, radiation, Reference | Leave a comment

The men who stared at mushroom clouds .

In a beige function room at the Pontins holiday park, Weston-super-Mare, a
man in a Hawaiian shirt addresses the veterans of Britain’s little-known
nuclear testing programme. There are about 130 people in the room. More
than half are in their late eighties and participated in the programme.
Also here are their children and, in a few cases, their children’s
children. They’re wearing Hawaiian shirts too, a tapestry of tropical print
and palm trees embellished with plastic flower garlands, tinsel, wigs and
novelty hats. It’s the third day of the All Tests Reunion, a week-long
gathering for this rarefied demographic, and the group chats excitedly as
they await the evening’s entertainment. Tables are laden with bottles of
house wine and pints of bitter, walking sticks propped behind chairs. In
the corner of the room, four women who are due to perform shuffle about as they attach te riri ni mwaie around their waists — heavy straw-like
dancing skirts that are native to Kiribati, a Pacific island nation that
was among several locations the British chose for nuclear weapons tests
during the 1950s and ’60s.

Until tonight, the group has been discussing
rather serious matters. Such as whether the Ministry of Defence (MoD) was
aware of the risks when it stationed thousands of young servicemen in
places such as Kiritimati (or Christmas Island) and started detonating
atomic and hydrogen bombs in the vicinity; and why it continues to deny or
delay access to the medical records of those deployed there. One
particularly urgent question is whether exposure to blast after blast,
without protective shielding, may be the reason so many of the veterans and their descendants have suffered health problems. Many of these questions remain unanswered. Some may be unanswerable.

FT 1st Nov 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/1fca6893-7dfe-43e3-b7ec-c00e3d4ad0b6

November 6, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | health | Leave a comment

New Radiation Protection Standards in 2026?

Tony Webb – November 2025.

In May 2025 US President Donald Trump ordered the US Nuclear Regulatory
Commission (NRC) to review US radiation protection standards for workers and the public. The order claims that these and other NRC regulatory processes hinder development of US nuclear power generation and need to be revised – in line with another set of his ‘alternative facts’ that overturn almost all the established principles that provide the basis of national and international protection standards.

This latest diktat will result in a significant weakening of current protection at a time when we have mounting scientific evidence that the existing standards need to be significantly improved/tightened. Permissible radiation exposures to workers will likely increase five-fold. Exposures to the public could be 100 times greater than currently permitted. Changes in the USA will lead to pressure for similar changes to standards in other countries, including Australia. Whether we end up with better or worse protection will require a sustained awareness and advocacy campaign. This will need to involve exposed workers, trade unions, environment and public health
interests arguing: first that our government and radiation protection agencies should reject the US approach, and second that new and improved national standards in line with the latest evidence should be adopted.

Health effects of radiation exposure

It has long been recognised that all radiation exposures present a risk to human health. Put simply there is no safe level of radiation – whether naturally occurring or artificially generated. Some we cannot avoid. Some like diagnostic medical x-rays we accept as having other countervailing benefits. High doses, like those received
by Japanese residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from nuclear bombs in 1945, or some of the first responders to the Ukrainian Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown in 1986, cause ‘radiation sickness’ where whole organs are damaged often with fatal
effects.

The results from high-dose exposures are what are known as ‘determinate’ effects.
Above a threshold dose these effects occur with severity determined by the dose. Radiation standards are set to keep exposures below the threshold, so these do not occur.

Lower doses cause a different kind of damage. Particularly concerning are increased rates of a wide range of cancers and genetic damage being passed on to future generations. These are referred to as ‘stochastic’ effects. The damage is not ‘determinate’ with a threshold below which they do not occur. Stochastic damage is a ‘hit and miss’ affair. You either get this type of health damage or you don’t. And if you do the scale of the damage isn’t related to the radiation dose you received.

The initial damage occurs at the cellular level where a radiation strike can have one of three outcomes. (i) It may simply pass through causing no damage. Alternatively, (ii) the radiation may kill the cell which isn’t a problem, unless too many cells are killed at once affecting functioning of whole organs. Our bodies are eliminating and replacing dead and dying cells all the time. Problems arise however when (iii) the cell is merely damaged and goes on to replicate in this damaged form.

Our bodies do have well developed repair mechanisms that often result in adequate repair of the damage. There is even some evidence suggesting that some such radiation damage and repair may assist the body’s capacity for repair in the future.
But where radiation leaves the damaged cell to survive and replicate uncontrollably in this damaged form the result is what we call a cancer – sometimes detectable only decades after the initial radiation damage. The process can be complicated further as growth of some cancers involves a two-stage process – initiation, where damage (from radiation or other environmental pollutants) leaves the cell susceptible,
followed by promotion (again from radiation or other sources) which drives the cell-cancer process forward.

Stochastic radiation damage is real. it doesn’t involve a threshold dose. Any exposure can be the one that causes the initial and/or subsequent damage leading to the health effects. We are in the world of ‘probability’ – far from certainty at the individual level but with fairly predictable outcomes at the population level which allow us to assess the risk (i.e., probability of an adverse outcome) individuals face from receiving small, sometimes repeated, doses of radiation.

Radiation protection principles.
In light of these established mechanisms for harm from radiation, standard setting bodies have long adopted three principles – that any exposure needs to be: (i) justified as necessary against some social benefits; (ii) kept as low as reasonably achievable (the ALARA principle); and (iii) kept below specified limits set in regulations.

The last of these has been the subject of much controversy over the years.
Standards have been set for workers’ occupational exposures and for public exposures. These, first, ensure exposures are below the threshold levels where deterministic effects might occur. Below these high levels, they have been set such that the risk of stochastic effects – particularly cancers and genetic damage are at levels deemed ‘acceptable’. There have been arguments over both what is ‘acceptable’ and how the probable level of risk from any given low dose is estimated.

Estimates of risk
A number of early studies of patients exposed as part of medical procedures indicated a problem with radiation exposure and some early estimates of the stochastic risk. Since then, the bulk of the data for the estimates of risk has come from studies of survivors of the Japanese nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. These Life Span Studies (LSS) have consistently shown
increases in cancer rates among survivors higher than those in the non-exposed population. There are a number of problems with this data – not least that survivors were not wearing film badges when the bombs went off, so all doses have had to be estimated later. They were also the ‘hardy’ survivors of wide-ranging traumatic
events, perhaps less vulnerable to damage from radiation Most of these survivors received relatively high doses as a single exposure or within a relatively short time period. More accurate measures of small exposures repeated over longer time periods to a general population, might be expected to yield different results.

However, these were the best data to be had. The risks at lower doses are estimated using the assumption that, if there is no safe level of exposure, no threshold below which stochastic effects do not occur, we can estimate lower dose risks on a straight line from these higher LSS doses. This Linear No Threshold (LNT) assumption, though adopted by all stands setting bodies, has at times been contested. Some have suggested a sub-linear relationship with a threshold for any effects. Others have made the case for a super-linear or marginally higher effect at lower doses where these are spread over longer time periods or result from radiative material that gets inside the body.

For now all the significant agencies agree that radiation protection for workers and the public should be based on LNT and the three radiation protection principles: justification, ALARA, and Specific Exposure Limits. These agencies include: the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) the United Nations
Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) the US National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionising Radiation (known as the BEIR Committee) and national agencies like the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA). The cancer risk from low
dose radiation is estimated to be in the range of 4-6% per Sievert (1000 mSv) of exposure. The risk of genetic damage (first two generations only) is estimated to be around 1.5% per Sievert.

These estimates have resulted in national protection bodies setting standards that limit annual exposures. For workers the annual limit is 20 mSv as a target – but with 50 mSv allowed in any year provided the average over five years does not exceed 20 mSv. The annual limit for public exposures is 1 mSv. All of these are for
exposures in addition to what might be received from natural background radiation or exposures due to medical procedures such as diagnostic x-rays and nuclear medicine.

Change is coming – one way or another.
It is these protection principles and the exposure standards for workers and the public that the Presidential directive to the US NRC seeks to overturn. It calls on the NRC to reconsider reliance on LNT (and ALARA) as the basis for standard setting at low doses, where there is a need to protect against probable stochastic effects and
directs that instead the NRC set standards based on deterministic effects.

This will likely result in a significant weakening of the current standards at a time when the evidence strongly suggests that they are in need of further tightening. The current standards have been in place since 1991. Revisions at that time were the result of a sustained campaign throughout the 1980s led by trade unions in the UK, Europe, USA and Canada for reduction of the then 50 mSv occupational and 5 mSv public limits -justified in large part by emerging evidence from the Japanese lifespan studies. As previously noted, estimates of risk from these was based on one-off
short-term exposure to relatively high doses (at and above 100 mSv). Since then, studies in Europe and North America of workers exposed over years of work in nuclear industries to doses below the current occupational limits, indicate the risks are around 2 to 3 times greater than those used for setting the current standards.
They also show a doubling of expected rates of cardio-vascular diseases: strokes, arthro-sclerosis, and heart damage. In addition, studies of populations living close to nuclear facilities in Europe and the USA show childhood cancer rates significantly higher than expected. This evidence is cause for concern, suggesting that the
current standards provide inadequate protection and need to be tightened.

A new campaign for improved protection?
Past experience suggests that persuading national and international bodies to improve radiation protection standards is far from easy but not impossible. In the short term, a campaign would be seeking clear and unequivocal statements from national protection agencies that reject the US president’s directive that the NRC abandon the fundamental principles which have formed the basis for regulating worker and public exposures. If implemented Trump’s proposals would likely result in occupational exposure limits five times higher than presently allowed, and public exposure limits could be 100 times greater.

The campaign should seek assurances that there will be no change to the established principles underpinning radiation protection: that there is no safe level of radiation, that all exposures should be kept as low as can be reasonably achievable; and that occupational and public limits need to be based on the best scientific evidence of risk to human populations.

Raising the concern about, and seeking rejection of, the likely US NRC changes will require building an informed coalition of trade union, environment and public health interests. Occupational and public radiation exposures are more widespread that commonly appreciated. Workers are routinely exposed in mining, industry and medicine as well as those associated with the nuclear power industry. The. campaign could involve local initiatives that focus concerns of workers in , and people living close to sites of: proposed nuclear power plants; existing uranium, mineral sands, and hard rock mines; proposed ‘rare earth’ mines; medical and other
radioactive waste storage sites; and other activities that routinely release radiative materials.

Opposing Trump’s latest proposals to weaken standards is fairly straightforward. If implemented by the NRC they would dismantle the whole edifice on which radiation protection has been built over the past 80 years – a framework that many concerned about radiation protection within the affected industries have invested time and energy to establish and maintain.

Pressing the claim for improvements is harder but not impossible given the evidence for greater harm that is emerging. The case can already be made for at least halving the permissible occupational and public exposure limits. If we are successful in pressing for improved protection standards, the nuclear industry is unlikely to thank President Trump for opening this can of worms with his NRC directive. Once opened it will be hard to close without increasing worker and public awareness of how any, and all radiation exposures increase health risks to workers the public and to future generations.

Tony Webb has worked as a researcher, consultant and advisor on radiation and health issues to politicians, trade unions, environment and public health groups in the UK, Europe, USA , Canada and Australasia since the late1970s. He can be contacted for information on how to assist the latest evolving international campaign via tonyrwebb@gmail.com.

October 31, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | radiation, Reference | Leave a comment

Three workers at nuclear fuel reprocessing plant possibly exposed to internal radiation

AOMORI – https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2025/10/29/japan/society/nuclear-plant-internal-exposure/

Three workers may have suffered internal radiation exposure while working in a spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in Rokkasho, Aomori Prefecture, Japan Nuclear Fuel has said.

The men in their 20s to 40s are employees of a partner company sent to work in a controlled area of the plant, according to an announcement by Japan Nuclear Fuel on Monday.

Radiation was detected inside the nasal cavity of one of the three, who is in his 40s, prompting the company to check whether all three had been internally exposed.

None of them has reported any change in their health condition so far, Japan Nuclear Fuel said.

According to the company, the three were working to replace filters that remove radioactive materials from gas emitted from a tank, in a building used for denitration of uranium-plutonium mixed solution, when radiation levels rose at around 11:10 a.m. Friday.

After they left the area, as instructed, contamination was found on the outer surface of the filters of their protective masks.

When contamination is detected, workers are typically instructed to cover air intake filters with tape to prevent further contamination and replace the filter while holding their breath.

However, two of the three breathed without filters for up to three minutes, according to Japan Nuclear Fuel. It is not clear when that occurred.

The company is still investigating why the two men breathed without filters. It is also analyzing urine and stool samples from the three workers to determine whether internal radiation exposure occurred, and investigating the cause of the increase in radiation levels.

October 30, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, radiation | Leave a comment

Dounreay waste particle ‘most radioactive’ find for three years

Steven McKenzie, Highlands and Islands reporter and Rachel Grant, BBC Scotland. 23 Oct 25

A fragment of waste found near the decommissioned experimental nuclear power facility in Dounreay in April was the most radioactive to be detected in the past three years, the Highland site’s operator has said.

The fragment, categorised as “significant”, was discovered during monitoring work around the nuclear power plant near Thurso. It is the latest in a long line of particle discoveries in the area.

Dounreay was built in the 1950s as the UK’s centre of fast reactor research, but during the 1960s and 1970s sand-sized particles of irradiated nuclear fuel got into the drainage system.

Work to clear the pollution began in the 1980s, after particles were found washed up on the nearby foreshore.

The facility closed in 1994. The multi-billion pound decommissioning process involves hundreds of workers and is expected to last into the 2070s.

The full decontamination of the site is expected to take more than 300 years.

A Dounreay spokesperson said: “Particles are a legacy of industrial practices dating back to the early 1960s and our commitment today to environmental protection includes their monitoring and removal from the marine environment and transparent reporting of our activities.”

A group of independent experts, who advise the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) and Dounreay, classify particles by the radioactivity of their caesium-137 content.

The categories are minor, relevant and significant.

Significant means a reading greater than one million becquerels of CS-137.

A becquerel is the standard unit of radioactivity.

The particle was found on the western part of Dounreay’s foreshore on 7 April. Eight other finds reported since then have been categorised as “minor” or “relevant”.

A significant-category particle was last discovered in March 2022.

Thousands of particles of different categories have been removed from beaches, foreshore and seabed at Dounreay.

The site’s operator said monitoring on the site on the north Caithness coast continued to be done on a fortnightly basis.

On occasions it said the scheduled work could be interrupted by bad weather or the presence of protected species of ground-nesting birds……………………………………………………..

What risk is there to the public?

According to official reports, risk to people on local beaches is very low.

Guidance issued by the UK government’s Nuclear Restoration Services says the most at-risk area is not accessible to the public.

The particles found along the coast vary in size and radioactivity with smaller and less active particles generally found on beaches used by the public.

Larger particles have only been found only on the foreshore at Dounreay, which is not used by the public.

The particles found on beaches are believed to come from the disintegration of larger fragments in the seabed near Dounreay. The area is continuously monitored for traces of radioactive materials.

Harvesting of seafood is prohibited within a 2km (1.2 mile) radius of a point near Dounreay. This is where the largest and most hazardous fragments have been detected.

Dounreay’s radioactive history

1954 – A remote site on the north coast of Scotland is chosen as the site of a new type of nuclear reactor. Modern homes were built in Caithness to attract workers to the sparsely populated area.
1957 – A chain reaction which provided sustained and controlled nuclear energy is achieved for the first time.
1959 – A new disposal site for radioactive waste called the Shaft opens. It drops 65.4m (214.5ft) below ground.
1962 – The fast reactor inside the dome is the first in the world to provide electricity to a national grid.
1977 – The original “golf ball” reactor is shut down and waste disposal in the Shaft ends after an explosion.
1994 – Dounreay nuclear power generating facility closes.
1998 – Decommissioning programme is announced.
2008 – Operation to scour the seabed for hazardous material begins and the Shaft shaft is encircled in a boot-shaped ring of grout to prevent contamination.
2020 – Clean-up begins of the highly contaminated Shaft – a three decades-long project.
2333 – Decontamination expected to be complete, making the 148-acre site available for other uses. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz91nx0lv59o

October 27, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | radiation, Reference, UK | Leave a comment

Generational RADIATION IMPACT Project

Uncovering Radiation’s Hidden Dangers

Protecting Women and Future Generations

Our Mission

The Generational Radiation Impact Project (GRIP) leads a global effort to bring gender-specific insights into radiation safety. Women are twice as likely to develop radiation-related cancer, yet this crucial fact is missing from most regulations. We aim to change that by conducting groundbreaking research, educating the public, and advocating for policy change. We envision a future where everyone has access to information about radiation risks, especially women and children, who are disproportionately affected. Learn more about how radiation affects women.

Why This Matters Now

Every day, millions of women and children are exposed to radiation through medical treatments, environmental pollution, and consumer goods. Yet, safety standards are based on outdated models that overlook biological differences between men and women. This leaves women—especially those of reproductive age—at greater risk for radiation-induced cancers. We are working to change this. With your support, we will continue our research to inform better policies and protect future generations.

…………………… Generational Radiation Impact Project works at the intersection of public health, medicine, and public policy. We are an educational and funding group that brings together top thinkers to understand the role biological sex plays in harm from radiation.

While this public health threat impacts us all, the risk is dramatically greater for girls and women. For every two men who develop cancer through exposure to ionizing radiation, three women will get the disease. Now we must learn why. https://www.radiationproject.org/

October 15, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | radiation | Leave a comment

Leah McGrath Goodman, Tony Blair and issues on torture (with added radiation)

Published by arclight2011- date 15 Sep 2012 -nuclear-news.net

[…]

Accusations: Despite the mockery of the film Borat, leaked U.S. cables suggest the country was undemocratic and used torture in detention

Other dignitaries at the meeting included former Italian Prime Minister and ex-EU Commission President

Romano Prodi. Mr Mittal’s employees in Kazakhstan have accused him of ‘slave labour’ conditions after a series of coal mining accidents between 2004 and 2007 which led to 91 deaths.

[…]

Last week a senior adviser to the Kazakh president said that Mr Blair had opened an office in the capital.Presidential adviser Yermukhamet Yertysbayev said: ‘A large working group is here and, to my knowledge, it has already opened Tony Blair’s permanent office in Astana.’

It was reported last week that Mr Blair had secured an £8 million deal to clean up the image of Kazakhstan.

[…]

Mr Blair also visited Kazakhstan in 2008, and in 2003 Lord Levy went there to help UK firms win contracts.

[…]

Max Keiser talks to investigative journalist and author, Leah McGrath Goodman about her being banned from the UK for reporting on the Jersey sex and murder scandal. They discuss the $5 billion per square mile in laundered money that means Jersey rises, while Switzerland sinks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA_aVZrR5NI&feature=player_detailpage#t=749s

And as well as protecting the guilty child sex/torturers/murderers of the island of Jersey I believe that they are also protecting the tax dodgers from any association.. its just good PR!

FORMER Prime Minister Tony Blair was reportedly involved in helping to keep alive the world’s biggest takeover by Jersey-incorporated commodities trader Glencore of mining company Xstrata.

11/September/2012

[…]

Mr Blair was said to have attended a meeting at Claridge’s Hotel in London towards the end of last week which led to the Qatari Sovereign wealth fund supporting a final revised bid from Glencore for its shareholding. Continue reading →

October 4, 2025 Posted by arclight2011 | 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES, Belarus, civil liberties, depleted uranium, environment, Fukushima 2012, health, Japan, Kazakhstan, marketing, politics international, Reference archives, Russia, secrets,lies and civil liberties, UK, Ukraine, USA, wastes, weapons and war | 1 Comment

Here’s What Life Is Like Inside One of Gaza’s Last Remaining Hospitals

Inside al-Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital, starving doctors still fight to keep patients alive.

By Sara Awad , Truthout September 20, 2025, https://truthout.org/articles/heres-what-life-is-like-inside-one-of-gazas-last-remaining-hospitals/

In the heart of a city at war, al-Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital struggles to survive. This site of healing and recovery has now been transformed into a place overwhelmed by cruel suffering.

Please don’t be fooled by the Israeli military propaganda that has asserted that this “building does not currently serve as a hospital” — an assertion conveniently circulated by The Jerusalem Post in December 2024, as the Israeli military sought to deflect criticism of its decision to bomb the hospital. Many credible sources verify how ludicrous that claim is, from the images that Getty’s photojournalists took following that bombing, to the World Health Organization’s appeal for an end to Israel’s attacks on this and other hospitals in Gaza.

From March to May 2025, I lived within the hospital’s walls as a caregiver to my mother. I witnessed how al-Wafa held so much pain in its rooms and corners. From children to the elderly, each patient carries their own devastating injury. When I returned to the hospital three months later as a guest, I observed how much more crowded it had become, with a massive number of patients seeking treatment. I interviewed the medical team and injured patients. This is the story of a hospital pushed to its extreme limits, and of the patients who continue to resist and survive inside it.

The hospital atmosphere now is more suffocating than before. Everywhere you look, you will see someone suffering. Hospital beds are full of tiny bodies of different ages and genders. No one can walk, all are sitting in their wheelchairs due to injuries that left them paralyzed. Being able to walk while everyone around you cannot is emotionally distressing and isolating.

“We cannot offer the bare minimum for the patients,” said Dr. Wael Khalif, director of al-Wafa hospital. The hospital is running out of nearly all medical equipment, from needles to surgical devices. Dr. Khalif described the overwhelming situation, with a massive number of patients on the waitlist to have care from the only rehabilitation hospital still functioning in Gaza, “There are 100 top urgent [patients] needing a bed, while another 400 to 500 patients are also waiting to be admitted,” the hospital director said.

The hospital is running out of nearly all medical equipment, from needles to surgical devices.

Dr. Khalif shed light on the catastrophic consequences of starvation inside the hospital. “Even healthy people are struggling to endure hunger and lack of proper nutrition, so imagine what’s happening for patients suffering from serious illnesses,” he said. Many patients are unable to receive even one meal per day. “Since the starvation period has begun, we are helpless to provide food for our patients,” he added.

And it’s not just the patients facing starvation; the medical staff also cannot endure more suffering. They are exhausted, overwhelmed, and unable to afford services for their patients. “Many of the nursing staff are struggling with dizziness during their duties at the hospital,” said Dr. Khalif.

This disaster is deeply impacting nursing staff. Their hearts are breaking into a million pieces watching their patients dying of hunger and lack of proper care. “I wish I could offer food for my patients. I cannot offer even the smallest amount of food for them,” said Wesam Al-Shawa, 26, a nurse at al-Wafa hospital. She looked completely helpless, and I noticed the exhaustion in her eyes as she spoke.

The hospital’s physical therapist is also working under immense pressure. “We receive approximately 60 to 75 patients per day,” said Dr. Samah Awida, a physical therapist at al-Wafa. This huge number of patients seeking physical therapy sessions has taken a serious toll on the medical team as the situation continues to worsens.

“Many of the nursing staff are struggling with dizziness during their duties at the hospital.”

To make conditions even more unbearable, patients who reach the final stage of recovery are likely going to live in a tent with nothing more than an uninhabitable floor and a small space to sleep in, and, if they are lucky, access to a bathroom. “Our efforts go to waste when patients end up living in a tent,” Dr. Samah said, her tired eyes telling me everything.

Amid these collapsing systems, there is a girl with a story that should never have to be told: Dania Amara.

Five-year-old Dania is among the injured patients. She was wounded while playing with other children on July 7, 2025. “Her body was full of blood,” Dania’s mother recalled. Dania had injuries all over; small shrapnel tore at her small body and caused a paralysis of the limbs. “Why did Israel attack me? I was just playing around,” Dania asked her mother as I was interviewing her.

August 18, when I spoke to her, was Dania’s 40th day in the hospital. She dreams of going home to her siblings, walking again, painting, and enjoying proper meals. “My daughter is now disabled because of one piece of shrapnel,” her mother said.

Dania is just like any other child — full of innocence and life — but Israel has stolen that normalcy and turned her world upside down.

“She hits her legs and begs them to walk like before,” her mother said, tears filling her eyes. Dania’s injury has changed her life forever, and she is just one of thousands suffering as she does, most without documentation or recognition.

Only in Gaza’s hospitals can you watch childhood be stolen by war crimes.

Beyond physical rehabilitation, the occupational therapy department is facing its own obstacles in silence.

While the physical therapy sessions help patients to recover and potentially walk again, occupational rehabilitation helps them to live again. This department helps patients to be completely independent, hold spoons, brush their hair, dress themselves independently, and attend to other needs without assistance. “We do our utmost effort to give back life to our patients,” said Basam Alwan, a therapist in the department.

Hadeel Qriaqa, 27, is one of the many patients struggling to rebuild her life at al-Wafa. She sustained severe head trauma during an attack on her home in March 2025. Since then, she has lost much of her memory and the ability to speak.

Now, she attends occasional occupational therapy sessions with Dr. Alwan aimed at helping her relearn basic daily skills and regain some independence.

Al-Wafa rehabilitation hospital and its medical staff have displayed immense resilience amid the war. Despite all difficulties facing them, they are still fighting to keep their work alive two years into a genocide. The world must not continue to ignore their suffering.

September 24, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Gaza, health | Leave a comment

Why a national cancer study near US reactors must be conducted before any new expansion of nuclear power.

Nuclear power reactors were introduced in
the United States during the 1950s. Despite concerns about potential health
hazards posed by routine radioactive emissions into the environment, few
research articles have been published in professional journals. The only
national study of cancer near reactors was conducted by federal researchers
in the 1980s and found no association between proximity to reactors and
cancer risk.

But since then, articles on individual nuclear facilities have
documented elevated cancer rates in local populations. Current proposals to
expand US nuclear power, along with concerns about protracted exposures
near aging reactors, make it imperative that an objective, current national
study of cancer near existing reactors be conducted.

Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 12th Sept 2025, https://thebulletin.org/2025/09/why-a-national-cancer-study-near-us-reactors-must-be-conducted-before-any-new-expansion-of-nuclear-power/

September 20, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | health, USA | Leave a comment

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