| Thursday, April 30, 2026 7pm Central Time (8pm ET, 6pm MT, 5pm PT) UTC - 5
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In March 2025, President Trump signed EO 14300 directing the NRC to relax the radiation protection regulations protecting nuclear workers and the public. This EO asserted that the existing regulations relied on the false premise of the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) and associated As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA) measures. The EO also directed the NRC to work with federal partners like DOE.
But those very measures had been challenged in February 2015. The NRC received three petitions for rulemaking seeking to remove LNT and ALARA.
The NRC denied all three petitions in June 2021 in a 50-plus page report. The NRC's denial cited numerous studies that all concluded that the LNT and ALARA were the proper means of protecting against radiation hazards. EO 14300 did not cite any studies or science emerging since the NRC shot down the earlier attempts to cut LNT and ALARA.
Through the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) and Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA), more than $33 billion had been paid out to victims of radiation exposures from being downwind of nuclear bomb testing or working at nuclear weapons facilities. The US Congress found that 98 percent of the radiation-related illnesses and deaths resulted from radiation exposures LESS than the federal limits. This evidence strongly suggests that the existing radiation protection limits are non-conservative and certainly do not support raising the limits to harm even more Americans.
David Lochbaum received a nuclear engineering degree from The University of Tennessee in June 1979 and began working in the U.S. nuclear power industry. He worked in the nuclear power industry for 17 years as a reactor engineer, shift technical advisor, system engineer, licensing engineer, and consultant.
While working on a power uprate project for a nuclear plant, he and a colleague identified a safety problem with onsite spent fuel storage. When the concerns were dismissed by the plant’s owner, they raised the issue with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). When the NRC slow-walked the matter, they went to Congressional committees that oversee the NRC. Lochbaum authored the book Nuclear Waste Disposal Crisis about the concern and campaign to resolve it.
Concerned about  nuclear safety and frustrated with the NRC’s complacency, Lochbaum joined the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in fall 1996. He monitored safety issues at U.S. nuclear power plants and engaged the NRC, Congress, media, and local activists when problems were identified.
Lochbaum left UCS in spring 2009 to become a reactor technology instructor at the NRC’s Technical Training Center. He taught NRC inspectors and reviewers in classroom and control room simulator environments for their initial certification and subsequent requalification. Lochbaum returned to UCS in March 2010 in his former position as Director of the Nuclear Safety Project. A year later, the meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan revealed vulnerabilities that needed to be addressed in the design and operation of U.S. reactors. Lochbaum co-authored Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster about the accident and the lessons that needed to be learned from it.
Lochbaum left UCS in October 2018 to enter semi-retirement, keeping active with selected consulting tasks. He is also a huge Bonnie Raitt fan and was thrilled to meet her in 1999. |
