Good afternoon. I’m Steve Milloy. I going to briefly discuss why we can’t build more nuclear power, store spent nuclear fuel, clean up nuclear waste sites and why everyone is so freaked out about harmless exposures to radiation.
Here’s my background. In summary, I have worked for more than 33 years to fix the abuses of science by government, activists and others. I’ve been a consultant to industry and government. I was a coal industry executive. I founded and managed a publicly traded mutual fund. I served on the Trump EPA transition team in 2016. I wrote the plans for stopping EPA misuse and abuse of science. There is no one on the planet that knows as much about EPA’s abuse of science as I do.
The basic outline is this: 1) There’s been almost 100 years of not just bad science, but fraudulent science that has gone into radiation protection standards; 2) If we had honest science we would have real-world-based standards for radiation safety. That would allow for more things nuclear; 3) The reason we don’t have honest science is not because we don’t what honest radiation risk science is; it’s because the people who control radiation protection standards are old-school anti-nuclear leftists; 4) Finally, until Congress steps in, the anti-nuclear madness will continue. Here are a few examples of the anti-nuclear madness, I’m talking about.
It took 18 years from application to open up both of the new Georgia Power nuclear reactors. The cost overrun was more than double, from $14 billion to $32 billion.
Then there’s the clean-up of Hanford, a former nuclear weapons development site in Washington state. It was made a Superfund site in 1988. It’s still not cleaned up and may never be cleaned up even as taxpayers thrown more than $500 billion at it.
Here’s Yucca Mountain, a desolate site where the Department of Energy once hoped to store spent nuclear fuel one mile underground. Per EPA regulations, the Department of Energy had to guarantee Yucca Mountain’s safety for a one million years. Instead of Yucca Mountain, nuclear plants are forced to store their spent fuel onsite in above ground swimming pools.
Irrational public fear of radiation goes back to the 1950s. But contrary to story of Godzilla, even high doses of radiation don’t cause mutations.
Here’s the basic toxicology involved. It’s very simple: The dose makes the poison. Everything can be toxic – even the purest water. It’s a matter of dose. In the context of radiation, the dose issue is embodied in something called the linear no-threshold model for cancer risk assessment, or “LNT” for short. The purpose of the LNT is to relate radiation exposures to cancer so that permissible exposure standards can be established. It is important to remember that the LNT model is not science; it is a beast called science policy. Science policy happens when there are gaps and uncertainties in scientific data that regulators fill in with policy and political decisions. In 1993,the Bush Department of Energy hired me to determine whether EPA risk policy was based on science or politics. By the time I finished my report, the Clinton Department of Energy tried to suppress it from distribution and publication. So you can imagine what my report concluded, which was that EPA risk policy was based on politics and not science. The LNT is the foremost example of EPA’s politicized risk policy.
Before we get into the LNT, allow me to relate this anecdote. Before 9/11, I was able to get into the Capitol Rotunda with a Geiger counter. I wanted to measure the radioactivity coming of the statues in the Rotunda. I wanted to do this because EPA was in the process of setting crazy safety standards for Yucca Mountain. What I found from my measurements was that radiation coming from the Rotunda statuary was much greater than EPA proposed to allow for Yucca Mountain – 65 times greater, in fact, as measured at the statue of Roger Williams. Recall that EPA wanted the Department of Energy to guarantee below-Capitol-Rotunda levels radiation at Yucca Mountain for one million years.
This slide shows the problem, the scientific solution and a compromise solution for radiation safety science and science policy. Let’s start with the problematic LNT.
Highlighted in blue is the currently used LNT model. It was constructed by using the radiation exposure and cancer data of the most acutely exposed atomic bomb survivors at the high end of the dose curve. Cancer risks is then arbitrarily determined by drawing a line from way up from their ultra-high and instantaneous exposures down to the origin or zero risk point of the graph. Now, there is no data showing cancer risk from any exposure between the atomic bomb survivors experience and zero exposure. But EPA’s science policy is just to draw the line and regulate based on the assumption that any exposure to radiation increases cancer risk and that risk of cancer increases linearly with dose. These assumptions are not science. They are science policy.
If we were to use all the data from all the atomic bomb survivors and all the other radiation risk data we have, we would regulate based on this so-called J-curve shaped graph. This graph shows that in the low-dose range of radiation exposure, where virtually all radiation exposure regulation occurs, not only is there no increased risk of cancer, there is actually a decreased risk of cancer. This effect is called hormesis. Don’t be surprised about it. This is how vaccines work. A little exposure to a weakened virus improves your immune system’s ability to fight the virus. In contrast to the LNT, the hormetic curve is data-based science. Not assumptions. Just real-world data. The reality-based hormetic risk model would result in cheaper and more quickly built nuclear power plants, faster clean-ups, the opening of spent nuclear fuel repositories like Yucca Mountain and less irrational radiation fear.
Next, we have a compromise model. If it’s too freaky to believe that low-dose radiation exposure can reduce cancer risk, let’s at least assume that it doesn’t increase cancer risk. And we can still have all the benefits of the J-curve.
So here’s the summary of the models. Continued use of the LNT by EPA means continued fear and no more nukes, endless and expensive cleanups and no spent fuel repository. In contrast, the hormetic and threshold models open up all possibilities.
Earlier, I mentioned there is long-standing bureaucratic resistance to getting rid of the LNT. On my website, JunkScience.com, I have a trove of emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act demonstrating how desperate the LNT Protection Racket is to save the LNT from the ash bin of history it belongs in.
I’ll close out with what Congress can and must do. Using your standard tools, we must end the use of the LNT by regulators. We need to decide what the threshold of risk will be – and it is much higher than where it is now, which essentially at zero. And this process of reform cannot be entrusted to the LNT Protection Racket, which includes the regulatory agencies (EPA/CDC/Department of Energy/NRC), the National Academy of Sciences (which helped invent the bogus LNT in the first place) and the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurement (NCRP), which is a congressionally chartered non-profit whose existence depends on the LNT. There are many independent experts around the world that can show us the way out of the LNT dungeon.
I’m happy to answer any of your questions.