WASHINGTON — The nation’s nuclear power oversight agency has put forward a proposal to overhaul a rule designed to protect people from radiation exposure, marking the latest in a series of moves by the Trump administration aimed at accelerating the growth of atomic energy while reducing costs for new reactor construction.
President Donald Trump signed executive orders in 2025 aimed at speeding up the reactor permitting process and restructuring the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He also directed the Energy and Defense departments to collaborate on building nuclear facilities on federal lands. The administration’s broader goal is to quadruple the country’s nuclear power output by 2050 to keep pace with growing electricity demands driven by data centers, electric vehicles, and cryptocurrency operations.
At the center of Wednesday’s proposal is the elimination of a radiation protection standard known as As Low as Reasonably Achievable, or ALARA, which sets objective limits on radiation doses. NRC Chairman Ho Nieh defended the proposal, telling reporters, “This rulemaking is raising the bar on clarity in our regulations. It is not lowering the bar on our safety standards.”
The nuclear industry has long pushed back against ALARA, arguing it is based on a model called Linear No-Threshold, which holds that even the smallest amount of radiation exposure carries some cancer risk. Industry representatives have called compliance with ALARA expensive, time-consuming, and riddled with uncertainty.
Under the proposed changes, the agency would shift to a graduated approach to managing radiation doses based on risk levels and specific operational situations. Plant operators would also gain more freedom to apply what the agency describes as “modern methods for evaluating radiation doses to workers and the public.”
Nieh said he does not expect existing nuclear plants to undergo major changes if the rule is finalized, but he believes it could help fast-track the development of new reactors. “Now they have a very clear picture of what the requirements for radiation protection are going to look like, that will inform how they build and design their reactor, in terms of the shielding and the materials that they’re using,” he said.
Not everyone is on board with the proposal. Edwin Lyman, a physicist and nuclear safety advocate at the Union of Concerned Scientists, acknowledged that the NRC has correctly upheld the scientific consensus that no level of radiation is completely safe and that cancer risk increases with dose. However, he sharply criticized the removal of ALARA.
“In eliminating its use of the ALARA principle, the agency’s sweeping new proposed rule would allow nuclear facility workers and the general public to be exposed to higher levels of cancer-causing radiation just to save the nuclear industry money,” Lyman said. He added, “This will only increase the disease burden at a time when cancer rates are already rising among younger people.”
The radiation proposal comes just weeks after the NRC put forward separate rule changes affecting security standards at nuclear plants — changes the Union of Concerned Scientists said would “dramatically weaken measures that protect their facilities from terrorist attacks.” A separate rule also announced Wednesday would make broad changes to the reactor licensing process, including streamlining how new reactors are built.
The public will have 45 days to submit comments on the radiation protection rule before it moves toward finalization.
