By Kelvin Kemm
Thankfully President Trump has issued Executive Order 143000 under which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is undergoing restructuring and is reviewing the use of the Linear No-threshold (LNT) model. The Executive Order stated that the LNT model is flawed, and it instructs reviewers to use science-based measures. In June 2025 President Trump abruptly dismissed sitting NRC Chairman Chris Hanson. This marked the first time in the agency’s history that a sitting commissioner was removed. Before this happened, I had been told confidentially that the NRC had effectively become an anti-nuclear body, under the influence of the anti-nuclear lobby. Looking at the United States from other countries, it certainly had appeared like that. The NRC of the U.S. had become a major obstacle to the advance of nuclear power. Since mid-2025 a major NRC restructuring has been underway.
How did LNT happen, and what was the result?
What happened was that a scientist, Herman Mueller, discovered in 1927 that X-rays caused genetic mutations in fruit flies. Additional research in the 1920s and 1930s suggested a linear relationship between X-ray dose and fly mutations.
As the 1950s and 1960s of the Cold War era unfolded, the International Commission on Radiological Protection introduced this concept into nuclear radiation protection rules. They knew how much nuclear radiation would kill a person, and how much would seriously harm a person. At that point all was OK. But then people with political agendas extended the argument, (like the ice block story) and what they did was draw a straight line all the way to zero. But this was wrong. It implied that there was no dose under which nuclear radiation was harmless. The result was that huge costs were introduced into nuclear power plant construction, based on unrealistic assumptions of possible danger.
I asked a South African nuclear engineer, Andrew Kenny, to give a talk about this at a conference. Andrew did an excellent job and introduced the Falling Out Of Bed (FOOB) concept, as an amusing illustration of how silly LNT had become.
Andrew assembled real figures for injuries and death to people falling at industrial sites. The data was comprehensive. For example, for workers falling from, say, a four-storey building, death is virtually certain. From a two-storey building; very likely, but not certain, and so on. Andrew pointed out that falling from the height of a table would almost certainly not harm anyone, or at worst, break an arm. However, if you use the LNT nuclear radiation model, and foolishly extend the line all the way to zero, it would tell you that the chance of death was not zero. The law would then kick in, and require safety measures to be put in place to prevent anybody falling off a bar stool, from dying. Andrew took it further, and said that the mathematics would say that there was a chance of dying if a person fell out a bed. In the nuclear LNT scenario the law would then require that no bed could be higher than two bricks height, and that safety barriers would have to be built around the bed. This sounds silly but it is exactly what really happened in the nuclear industry.
Crazy cost escalation
As years went by, the application of the LNT model demanded hugely expensive safety measures be built into nuclear reactors, even though the real risks were negligible. These actions were enthusiastically encouraged by the anti-nuclear lobby who openly stated that they wanted to price nuclear power out of the market.
An interesting illustration was the Fukushima incident. The very old reactor complex was struck by the largest tsunami on record. It also turned out that Fukushima had a number of design faults and management faults as well, and yet the result was that not one single person was killed or injured by nuclear radiation. Additionally, no private property was harmed in any way by nuclear radiation. Fukushima was not a nuclear disaster. It was a conventional industrial incident which was very costly for the owners, and very damaging to the image and pride of the Japanese government. But it was not a nuclear disaster.
Air Disaster?
As a comparison, imagine if three large passenger aircraft were parked in a hangar at an airport, and the hangar catches fire. The hangar is burnt to the ground, and the three aircraft totally destroyed. Would you classify that as a major air disaster, merely because aircraft were involved? Not a chance…
Fukushima should have been hailed as an incredible illustration of just how safe nuclear power was. After all that went wrong, there was actually no nuclear problem. But the result of Fukushima internationally was that extra safety measures were demanded at reactors all over the world. Using the LNT model, ridiculously expensive additional safety measures were put in place, merely adding to the cost of nuclear power. So totally false LNT Index criteria were applied foolishly.
This is like creating a silly; Falling Out Of Bed Index (FOOBI) and applying it all over society to anything of any height, even your bed and barstool, supposedly to save lives on a massive scale.
So, the FOOBI concept shows that you can’t just extrapolate some data without actually checking if the extrapolation is valid.
In the case of LNT, it is not valid. Small doses of nuclear radiation are harmless and there’s no need for any concern. As much as you can safely sleep on a normal bed, you can safely sleep next door to a modern nuclear reactor.
