The Nuclear Safety Protections in Federal Crosshairs
By Alicia Inez Guzmán, High Country News
Throughout, Clawson, a member of the United Steelworkers union, leaned on safety standards to argue for extra protections against radiation, including respirators and additional shielding.
But Donald Trump’s sweeping agenda to expand nuclear energy
and modernize nuclear weapons now includes easing the radiation standards that
Clawson credits with keeping his exposure as low as possible.
“They’re pulling away from what’s kept us safe all these
years,” said Clawson, who retired in 2021 and now serves on the advisory board
on radiation and workers under the Centers for Disease Control. He spoke
to High Country News in an unofficial personal capacity.
Last May, Trump signed four executive orders aimed at
reviving what he called an industry “atrophied” by regulation. The U.S.
Department of Energy quickly began stripping away regulations designed to
reduce the amount of radiation exposure workers can face at its national
laboratories, cleanup sites, and energy infrastructure.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which licenses and regulates commercial reactors and related infrastructure, is following suit. In response to another executive order that required it undergo “wholesale revision of its regulations and guidance,” the agency recently announced that it’s considering easing long-held standards that limit workers’ and the public’s exposure to radioactivity.
The controversial changes promise to reshape nuclear sites
across the nation — especially in the Western U.S., where nuclear weapons and
nuclear energy were born and continue to hold an outsized presence.
And while some hailed the moves as a new dawn for industry,
the United Steel Workers union called the
directives a “dangerous rewriting of radiation safety rules.”
Forty-one other organizations — community advocates,
scientists, and doctors — said it amounted to “a deliberate subversion of
science and public health in favor of corporate interests,” in a letter
of protest to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The United Steel Workers union called the
directives a “dangerous rewriting of radiation safety rules.”
An Energy Department spokesperson told High Country
News that it “is committed to ensuring its radiation protection
standards are aligned with Gold Standard Science,” as outlined in another
executive order. “DOE is still evaluating what specific changes to these
standards are needed,” the statement added.
A spokesperson for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote
that the agency was still in the process of amending the framework for
radiation protection, adding that “public health and safety will always be our
top priority.” A new rule
will be released at the end of April.
For decades, radiation protection was based on
the hypothesis that even a small amount of radiation carries some risk of harm.
The Trump administration now rejects the very basis of this view, which could
change how work is performed on dozens of projects in the West.
At Los Alamos National Laboratory, for instance, workers
build the nuclear bomb cores or “pits” that will be used to arm the next
generation of warheads. Besides the technicians handling plutonium are the
pipefitters, ironworkers, and carpenters renovating the facility, who are also
exposed to at least some radiation. Meanwhile, the federal government has moved
to double the facility’s annual output.
For decades, radiation protection was based on the
hypothesis that even a small amount of radiation carries some risk of harm. The
Trump administration now rejects the very basis of this view.
More than 50 reactors have been built and operated at the
nearly 900-square-mile Idaho National Laboratory since 1951. Another extremely
radioactive form of plutonium used to power Mars’ rovers is also produced
there, and now, more reactors are slated to be constructed.
Nuclear laboratories, including the Los Alamos and Idaho
facilities, send waste, old and new, to the Waste
Isolation Pilot Plant in southern New Mexico, the nation’s only
long-term repository built for such waste.
At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore,
California, nuclear materials are handled for research, while the Hanford Site
in Washington, a decommissioned nuclear production complex is undergoing a
decades-long remediation effort. Elsewhere, at the Nevada National Security
Site, plutonium pits from the current stockpile undergo tests — without nuclear
explosions — to ensure their continued usefulness.
Other efforts include a push to power data centers with
nuclear reactors on 16 national laboratories in the West. A February
announcement said that Energy Department will no
longer require environmental assessments in order to build advanced
nuclear reactors.
Among the sites that the Nuclear Regulatory agency regulates
in the region is the Palo Verde Generating Station, located in Wintersburg,
Arizona, one of the nation’s largest, along with other nuclear waste dumps, and
shuttered uranium mills.
An overriding priority of the Trump
administration has been “to usher in a nuclear renaissance,” a credo that has
manifested in the rollbacks. The major regulatory standard now in the
crosshairs, called ALARA and short for “as low as reasonably achievable,” has
long been central to radiation safety at numerous federal and international
agencies.
At its core is the “Linear No-Threshold model,” which holds
that no dose of radiation is safe. An agency would set limits on how much
radiation exposure workers and the public were permitted. ALARA further
required that exposures under that limit be reduced to the lowest amount
possible under the circumstances. That could happen in various ways — curbing
the amount of time employees worked with radioactive materials, requiring added
protective gear, putting lead blankets over highly radioactive equipment to
reduce exposures, or maintaining greater distances from a radioactive source.
For the public, it could mean lowering emissions from facilities below legal
thresholds.
“In the long run it helped us as workers. It was keeping
us from getting a higher dose.”
Because of the added guardrails, worker exposures have been
substantially lower than the Energy Department’s limits, according to a 2025
report from Idaho National Laboratory. Without them, workers could be
exposed to up to five times more radiation. The loss of ALARA doesn’t mean
workers won’t have any protections at all; instead, experts believe that they
may lose those additional layers of safety.
The policy shifts have been made possible by ongoing
scientific debate over whether low doses of radiation pose harm. The most
comprehensive epidemiological
study to date, based on over 300,000 nuclear workers from the U.S.,
U.K., and France, found that cumulative exposure to low doses of ionizing
radiation increased the rate of death from certain types of cancer by 50
percent. “These results can help to strengthen radiation protection, especially
for low dose exposures,” the authors wrote in 2023.
However, some critics in the field of health physics, which
is dedicated to managing radiation safety, say ALARA is subjective and
outdated. The Idaho report stated that rescinding ALARA would save money while
still protecting workers. Some even argue that ALARA is scientifically unsound,
while a small minority of health physicists insist that low levels of radiation
are beneficial.
“The people not doing the job are the ones calculating the
risk,” said Clawson, who is only too familiar with the back-and-forth. When he
started out, ALARA was not a rule at the Energy Department. It was codified in
1993 as part of a suite of worker protections created after the Cold War, when
nearly every aspect of the nuclear landscape, including safety culture, came
under scrutiny. Proof that the previously accepted practices were unsafe, he
added, can be seen in the number of workers currently being compensated by the
federal government for illnesses attributed to their exposure.
Clawson acknowledged that complying with ALARA could slow
down planning because workers had to carefully consider how to accomplish
high-stakes tasks while minimizing risks, especially in hot cells where a
person’s exposure could change simply based on where they were standing. The
effects of an exposure — potentially compounded by exposures to other toxic chemicals —
may not be seen for years, however.
“In the long run it helped us as workers,” Clawson said. “It
was keeping us from getting a higher dose.”
Alicia Inez Guzmán is a correspondent for High
Country News, based in northern New Mexico.
This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.