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Last week, just before the US 4th of July holiday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) he prepared a new law which can change the way they interact with radiation. The Trump administration has been pushing to restart the construction of nuclear weapons in the US, and many nuclear activists have complained about the existing regulations in the US, portraying them as a major obstacle to the industry’s growth. So, it seemed that a major reformation was coming.
Instead, the new rules proposed by the NRC acknowledge the science behind its current rules and point out that any problems are vague in the terms they have been using. So, instead, it accepts standards that are supposed to meet those requirements, but avoid using the language it relied on. Perhaps the most obvious indication of the evolution in the game is that the NRC estimates that the regulatory changes will save the industry—not only energy, but also medical and research services—about $9.5 million a year.
LNT and ALARA
There are two technical tricks among US nuclear law. The first is LNT, which stands for “linear non-threshold.” I’m talking about the issue of whether there is any level of radiation that is so low that it no longer produces biological damage – the “start” in LNT. “Infinite” means that it does not, and it is related to biology, which has shown that even small particles or photons of radiation can damage DNA and that the mechanisms that cells have to repair the damage are faulty. “Linear” in LNT simply describes how the radiation intensity increases directly with dose.
