NRC Wants to Bulldoze Workplace Radiation Protections - Confined Space

If your job requires you to work with radiation, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), whose mission it is to protect public health and safety, worries that you are getting too much protection from radiation exposure.

Yep, you read that right.

To solve this vexing problem, the NRC is preparing to make wholesale changes to the rules covering workplace radiation protection. Changes that will help the nuclear industry…and kill nuclear workers.

Radiation exposure is measured in “rem” — which stands for “roentgen equivalent man.” Rem is a unit used to measure the biological damage and potential health risk of ionizing radiation on the human body.)

The NRC currently requires annual worker radiation doses to be kept below 5 rem. However, 5 rem is not adequate to protect workers, so 50 years ago, the NRC also required radiation doses to be kept “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” (ALARA) which requires that radiation be reduced as far below 5 rem as is “practical”. ALARA is a precautionary principle, but it leaves employers with wiggle room if further dose reduction is not technically feasible or it is uneconomic. The dose limit sets a ceiling, while ALARA requires licensees to consider how to further reduce radiation exposure below that ceiling.

ALARA is based on the “linear no-threshold” (LNT) model (derived from Japanese atomic bomb survivors’ data): the scientific premise that there is no threshold below which there are no adverse health effects from ionizing radiation. In other words, any exposure to ionizing radiation, no matter how small, carries a risk of inducing cancer or other health effects (like heart disease, birth defects, cognitive defects, thyroid and endocrine disorders, genetic mutations, and infertility), and that harm is directly proportional to the amount of exposure. There is no demonstrated radiation exposure level that carries no risk.

Read more.