A 2025-07-12 WSJ article called the Linear No Threshold (LNT) radiation the model, the model that assumes "there is no safe level of exposure to radiation". LNT makes no such claim. LNT converts a dose rate profile into a cancer incidence prediction. That's it. LNT like many other possible models predicts a positive cancer incidence for any dose rate profile whose cumulative dose is positive. //

A far better definition of LNT is: the model that assumes radiation damage to our DNA is unrepairable. Harm just keeps building up. Therefore, the only thing that counts is total dose. How quickly or slowly that dose is incurred is irrelevant.

The no repair assumption was proposed about 100 years ago, at a time when we knew nothing about DNA. We did not even know it existed. We now know a providential Nature has equipped us with a remarkably effective DNA repair system. She had to do this to protect our DNA from our own oxygen based metabolism which produces double strand breaks of the DNA helix at least 25,000 times more rapidly than average background radiation. This repair system can be overwhelmed if the dose rate is high enough; but such dose rates will almost never be encountered by the public in a nuclear power plant release.

LNT denies well established, indisputable biology. In 2018 [2015], Nobel prizes were awarded to three scientists that have been in the forefront of figuring out just how the repair processes work.

Fossil fuels pollute and renewables are not enough.
AI, industry, and growing economies need more power than ever. Meanwhile fossil fuels pollute, and renewables flicker when we need them most.

Global Energy Demand will rise 50% by 2050.
No other clean energy solution can scale fast enough to meet demand.

Renewables only provide 30-40% capacity factor.
Intermittency and the sky-high costs of battery storage make renewables an incomplete solution.

Coal Plants emit 15 billion tons of CO2 Annually.
The single largest driver of climate change, coal remains the dominant global energy source.

Nuclear only Changes the World if it

01 Scales on an assembly line.
02 Competes with coal on cost.
03 Can be deployed worldwide with ease.

Thorcon Changes The Game for Nuclear.

5-7X
Faster construction thanks to innovative shipyard construction.

1GW
High output dual plants deliver power at costs competitive with coal.

40%+
More efficient than traditional nuclear reactors.

Global
Transportable by sea. Build in shipyards and tow to installation site.

Safe
Safe by design, requiring no operator intervention or external power to maintain stability.

On June 23, New York’s Governor Hochul announced that she had directed the New York Power Authority to build a new nuclear energy facility with at least 1 GWe of capacity. During the announcement speech, she provided several bits of information leading to an informed prediction that the facility will initially include 4 BWRX-300’s on a site close to Lake Ontario. ///

Didn't New York just shut down a 1GWe (or more?) nuclear power plant near NYC just a couple of years ago in favor or "renewable energy"? So this is an acknowledgement that shutting it down was a mistake and waste of money.

Likely most alarming to critics, the desired reforms emphasized tossing out the standards that the NRC currently uses that "posit there is no safe threshold of radiation exposure, and that harm is directly proportional to the amount of exposure."

Until Trump started meddling, the NRC established those guidelines after agreeing with studies examining "cancer cases among 86,600 survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan during World War II," Science reported. Those studies concluded that "the incidence of cancer in the survivors rose linearly—in a straight line—with the radiation dose." By rejecting that evidence, Trump could be slowly creeping up the radiation dose and leading Americans to blindly take greater risks.

But according to Trump, by adopting those current standards, the NRC is supposedly bogging down the nuclear industry by trying to "insulate Americans from the most remote risks without appropriate regard for the severe domestic and geopolitical costs of such risk aversion." Instead, the US should prioritize solving the riddle of what might be safe radiation levels, Trump suggests, while restoring US dominance in the nuclear industry, which Trump views as vital to national security and economic growth.

Although Trump claimed the NRC's current standards were "irrational" and "lack scientific basis," Science reported that the so-called "linear no-threshold (LNT) model of ionizing radiation" that Trump is criticizing "is widely accepted in the scientific community and informs almost all regulation of the US nuclear industry."

There were more than 2,000 active generation interconnection requests as of April 30, totalling 411,600 MW of capacity, according to grid operator ERCOT. A bill awaiting signature on Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk, S.B. 6, looks to filter out unserious large-load projects bloating the queue by imposing a $100,000 fee for interconnection studies.

Wind and solar farms require vast acreage and generate energy intermittently, so they work best as part of a diversified electrical grid that collectively provides power day and night. But as the AI gold rush gathered momentum, a surge of new project proposals has created years-long wait times to connect to the grid, prompting many developers to bypass it and build their own power supply.

Operating alone, a wind or solar farm can’t run a data center. Battery technologies still can’t store such large amounts of energy for the length of time required to provide steady, uninterrupted power for 24 hours per day, as data centers require. Small nuclear reactors have been touted as a means to meet data center demand, but the first new units remain a decade from commercial deployment, while the AI boom is here today.

Now, Draper said, gas companies approach IREN all the time, offering to quickly provide additional power generation.

Gas provides almost half of all power generation capacity in Texas, far more than any other source. But the amount of gas power in Texas has remained flat for 20 years, while wind and solar have grown sharply, according to records from the US Energy Information Administration. Facing a tidal wave of proposed AI projects, state lawmakers have taken steps to try to slow the expansion of renewable energy and position gas as the predominant supply for a new era of demand.

It is received wisdom in pro-nuclear circles that sinister fossil fuel interests are partly if not largely responsible for nuclear's abject failure to live up to its remarkable promise. To examine this premise, we must divide fossil fuel into coal, oil, and gas. There has never been much overlap between coal and oil and, until recently, surprisingly little overlap between oil and gas. //

Jack Devanney
Dec 8, 2022

US nuclear died in the early, mid-1970's. There were only a handful of orders after 1975 and none after 1978 in the 20th century. Given the promethean promise of nuclear, we need to know what caused this demise. Some say it was Big Oil. But Big Oil was making a big investment in nuclear during this period. Gotta be something else. What happened in the last 15 or so years is irrelevant to to the question on the table.

We have been fed two lies about nuclear electricity by the nuclear power establishment.

The Negligible Probability Lie

The probability of a sizable release of radioactive material from a nuclear power plant is so low that we can just assume it won't happen. //

The Intolerable Harm Lie

Any significant release of radioactive material would be so catastrophic that it cannot be allowed to happen. //

Nuclear power emerged at just about the most difficult time possible economically. In the early-mid 1960's, the real cost of oil was at a all time low. The majors were buying oil in the Middle East at about a penny a liter. Oil was so cheap that it was pushing into electricity generation, the long time preserve of coal. This in turn forced the price of coal down, so it too was at an all time low. This was the cutthroat market that a technology that did not exist 15 years earlier, a technology that was just starting down a steep learning curve, had to enter and compete in. Amazingly it did so. Thanks to nuclear's incredible energy density, these fledgling plants were able to produce electricity at 0.37 cents per kWh in 1965. That's less than 3 cents/kWh in 2020 money.

But the cost of nuclear power escalated rapidly. In the boom of the late 60's and early 70's, nuclear lost control of its costs. This was accompanied by regulatory attempts to ensure we would never have a release. These attempts led to ALARA, the principle that any exposure to radiation is unacceptable if the plant can afford to reduce it further. In other words, there are no limits. //

The Intolerable Harm Lie is false. LNT is not a realistic model of radiation harm. The dose response curve is highly non-linear and critically dependent on dose rate. Cell based laboratory experiments, extensive animal testing, and human study after human study detected no statistically reliable harm unless the dose rates are well above the natural background dose rates in the highest background areas. At very low dose rates, LNT is off by orders of magnitude.

Perhaps the most compelling background radiation study was done in Kerala, India. //

For the US nuclear establishment, abandoning the Intolerable Harm Lie would be suicidal. And as long as you are promulgating the Intolerable Harm Lie, you need the Negligible Probability Lie to stay in business.

The EO starts out on a weak note, while falling into the threshold trap.

The NRC utilizes safety models that posit there is no safe threshold of radiation exposure and that harm is directly proportional to the amount of exposure. Those models lack sound scientific basis.

Here's what Trump should have said.

The NRC's regulatory philosophy is based on a 90 year old radiation harm model called LNT. LNT is biological nonsense. It denies our remarkable ability to repair radiation damage to our DNA. As a result, LNT over-predicts radiation harm to the public in a nuclear power plant release by many orders of magnitude. This ability is indisputable. To conform to undisputed science, LNT must be replaced.

A little later on, we find:

When carrying out its licensing and related regulatory functions, the NRC shall consider the benefits of increased availability of, and innovation in, nuclear power to our economic and national security in addition to safety, health, and environmental considerations.

This call to consider has no teeth. How about:

Any regulatory requirement or action shall be supported by a cost/benefit analysis. These analyses shall explicitly include the reduction in harm from displacing alternate sources of this power. //

It sounds good; but all it really requires is the delivery of some paperwork. The NRC gets to decide what's in these revisions. Once again we are asking the NRC to judge itself. We've done that before, most recently with NEIMA and the Advance Act, with nothing to show for it. There is no reason to believe that this time the results will be different. //

The sad truth is Trump can't change the incentives that will dictate the NRC's behavior. Whatever all the preambles and declaration of purposes, etc say the NRC will continue to be judged on its ability to prevent a release. And as long as we give such a bureaucracy the final say, it will be the bureaucrats' incentives that rule, not society's. But Trump could have outlawed LNT. And he could have forced ALARA underground. //

Business as usual, and the business is extracting money from the taxpayer.

In 1982 and 1983, recycled rebar, containing Cobalt-60, was “accidentally” used in the construction of 180 apartment buildings in Taipei. Most of the buildings were completed in 1983. The problem was discovered in the mid-1990's, and full scale investigations started in 1996 after a kindergartener whose classroom was in one of the contaminated buildings died of leukemia.

The Chen 2004 Study
The first study was led by W. L. Chen of the National Yang-Ming University. //

In 2006, Hwang et al published a competing study of the Taipei apartment exposure. //

The Taipei apartment data emphatically contradicts LNT. Hwang's methodology in attempting to refute this conclusion suggests that we are dealing with defense lawyers, not scientists.

The Hwang paper was designed to shoot down the Chen paper and reestablish LNT. //

The Hwang numbers may not demolish LNT as dramatically as the Chen figures; but they clearly meet Feynman's criterion for "one ugly fact", although in this case, the fact that a providential Nature has endowed us with a radiation damage repair system which has no problem with dose rate profiles such as Figure 2 is far from ugly. It's humanity's salvation.

Here's a truly ugly fact. The promoters of LNT can't show us one situation, not one, where people have received a very large dose spread more or less evenly over a protracted period where LNT does not screw up completely. It's quite remarkable that a 100 year old theory that is based on an assumption --- radiation damage is unrepairable --- that we now know is flat wrong, and is always orders of magnitude in error on the kind of dose rate profiles that will be incurred in a nuclear power plant release has survived.

EDF is building a nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point in England. EDF proudly requires that each of its plants have a tombstone like Figure 1 at the main entrance, a point it emphasizes in its advertising. EDF is not alone, you will find the phrase "safety is our overriding priority" in various forms repeated over and over again by the NRC, INPO, and the rest of the nuclear establishment. For example, INPO has a monomanical focus on safety culture which it defines as “an organization’s values and behaviors that serve to make nuclear safety the overriding priority.”

Hinkley Point C(HPC) will cost at least $18,000/kW and take over 12 years to construct. //

Table 1 shows the overnight cost in 2024 USD and build times of the six lowest overnight cost plants built in the USA. When I lived in the Florida Keys, I enjoyed some of the cheapest electricity in the country, thanks to Turkey Point 3 and 4.

If you repeat the Figure 2 calculation for Turkey Point 3 at $795 per kW, the LCOE is just under 3 cents/kWh, about 4 times less than Hinkley Point 3. //

Over the 3 year, 2022-2024 period, the EIA finds that Turkey Point 3 had a capacity factor of 95.2%, about 5% above the USA average, and ranking it 15th among 92 reactors, In 53 years of operation, Turkey Point 3 and all its elderly brethren have harmed exactly zero members of the public. Most of these plants will still be operating in 2050. Turkey Point 3 and the other five plants in Table 1 were designed and built before the current regulatory apparat became organized. There was no independent regulator. //

We made a disastrous, tragic, colossal, brobdingnagian blunder. We set up an omnipotent bureaucracy whose overriding priority, as it so clearly states, is nuclear safety. While Congress declared "public health and safety" to be just one one of its goals, it created an apparat for which nuclear health and safety was effectively the only goal. The NRC would be judged on its ability to prevent a release. Period.

Bureaucrats are not saints. They reacted according to the incentives they have been given, just as we would. And since we have given the last word to these souls we have misguided, it is their priorities that rule, not society's. The regulatory structure that the AEA/ERA setup is inherently inconsistent with the stated goals.

The result has been an auto-genocidal increase in the cost of nuclear power for no apparent benefit. There is nothing in the actual harm data that suggests the oldest plants are less safe than the newest. When Three Mile Island 2 melted down in 1979 and produced the biggest release in the US so far, it was the youngest plant in the US fleet, and subject to the most stringent regulation. //

vboring
May 13

Grok estimates that the choice to implement "safety" regulations for nuclear energy in such expensive ways has killed about 840,000 people in the US so far.

Safety first! is a strict lie.

https://x.com/i/grok/share/H38COlrdT1VvfBrjU0rlLv3HE

Or why I hate costly nuclear. //

Poverty has a Lost Life Expectacy(LLE) of the order of tens of billions of years per year. And we reject should-cost nuclear for fear of an occasional release that worst case, Chernobyl, properly handled, will have a public LLE of less than a 1000 years? This makes sense only if we assume a malthusian level of selfishness. But that is precisely where the nuclear establishment is. //

Jack Devanney
May 19
Edited

I rarely compliment the choir, but I do want to give a shout out to the choristers for whom nuclear's main attraction is its low CO2. For them, this was a very tough sermon. It was a call to change focus, metanoeite if you will, from what nuclear can do for the climate to what nuclear can do for the poor, and for all humanity. That's not an easy switch. For one thing, it implies that costly nuclear is not good enough. It's immoral. We must have should-cost nuclear, and that will require a complete rethink about how we regulate nuclear.

I expected something like a 5% subscriber cancellation rate. Instead we lost 7 of 2900. I thought that was impressive.

Here's your reward. If and only if we push nuclear down to its should-cost, not only will nuclear push fossil fuel out of power generation except for a bit of peaking and backup fo r unplanned outages and do so automatically, not only will EV's now be very attractive economically, but now we can talk seriously about synfuels starting with synthetic methane.

If LNT is biological nonsense, how did it ever get accepted? The Hamlet in that tragedy is Ed Lewis.

The Rockefeller Foundation and the Genetic Scare. //

Hundreds of scientists could have pointed out the glaring inconsistency. But as far as I know none did. Moreover, fractionation, dividing a therapeutic dose into fractions, delivered a day or so apart to allow healthy cells to recover, was universal medical practice. If LNT is valid, fractionation makes no sense. Even Lauriston Taylor, a towering figure, who called LNT "a deeply immoral use of our scientific heritage" did not speak out until 1980. He was about 25 years too late. Were all these people grasping creeps?

Of course not. They were petrified of the bomb. If LNT could end bomb testing, then I will have to abandon scientific integrity, just this once. Look at Taylor's strange wording. You don't normally call a model, a "use". He knew LNT had been accepted not because it was correct, but because it was a tool, a tool for controlling the bomb.

https://heartland.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Apr-25-ARC-Scorecard.pdf

Adding together the above numbers yields the following affordable, reliable, and clean total scores, with lower scores being closer to perfect power sources and higher scores being least compatible with the affordable, reliable, and clean ideal:

Natural gas - 3
Nuclear - 6
Hydro -7
Coal - 8
Biomass - 12
Wind - 22
Solar - 23

North America has vast reserves of uranium, enough to power the United States and Canada for hundreds of years, and the Trump administration's Department of the Interior is now, as we see, fast-tracking approval of new uranium mines:

The decision, executed by the Department of the Interior, was made in just 14 days…a stark contrast to the months or years such reviews typically require. //

According to a report by the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency and the International Atomic Energy Agency, as of 2015, the United States' reserves of recoverable uranium were at 101,900 tonnes (metric), and Canada is blowing us away with 969,200 tonnes. That's a lot of uranium. But, according to this same report, the world champion by a wide margin is Australia, with 2,049,400 tonnes.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a confidential report circulated to member states that Iran had grown its stockpile of 60%-enriched uranium to 408.6 kilograms from 274.8 kilograms in early February, an increase of around 50%. The Wall Street Journal viewed a copy of the report.

That means Iran has enough highly enriched uranium for roughly 10 nuclear weapons, based on IAEA measures of the minimum fissile material required, up from at least six at the time of the last report.

U.S. officials say it could take Iran less than two weeks to convert this highly enriched uranium into enough weapons-grade 90% fissile material for a nuclear weapon. //

anon-eruj
9 hours ago
They're not lying about peaceful use. You just have to understand what peace means to them. Once they kill all the jews and trigger Armageddon, the 12th imam will return and there will be world peace.

President Joe Biden, with strong backing from environmental lobbyists and a last-minute defection from West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, pushed through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Bill. These measures allocated billions of dollars in federal credits and loan guarantees to favored industries, all under the banner of environmental protection.

What followed was a Soviet-style industrial strategy in which a handful of Washington bureaucrats determined the winners and losers of America's energy future. //

Biden's green agenda had another critical flaw: financing. Much of it depended on borrowing from China—ironically benefiting Chinese companies dominating the very industries Biden sought to boost. Since the launch of China's "Made in China 2025" initiative, Chinese firms—heavily subsidized by their government—have taken over more than 85% of the global rooftop solar panel market. Battery components for solar installations have even higher Chinese market dominance. In effect, Biden borrowed money from China to finance the growth of Chinese companies that sold solar products to U.S. installers.

The new House bill aims to dismantle this entire framework in one stroke. It eliminates the trading of green credits between corporations, revokes low-interest green loans, and entirely phases out subsidies for renewable energy initiatives.

To those who claim this approach is irresponsible, we pose a simple question: How many more decades should the green energy sector rely on government aid to stay afloat? Sustainable energy and transition projects are essential, but they must prove their viability in the open market—just like oil and gas companies do every day. This is classic Adam Smith-style capitalism: let competition and innovation—not government favoritism—determine success.

Trump also supports nuclear power, one of the cleanest and most efficient methods of generating electricity. //

By issuing appropriate permitting waivers, Trump aims to unlock this potential, even if a modest federal investment is necessary to overcome ideological resistance from the Left.

According to NCRI sources, the primary function of the Rainbow Site is the extraction of tritium – a radioactive isotope used to enhance nuclear weapons. Unlike uranium enrichment, tritium has virtually no peaceful or commercial applications, casting further doubt on Iran’s longstanding claims that its nuclear ambitions are solely for energy or civilian use. //

Tritium is used to boost fission bombs for a substantial increase in yield, and it is used as a primary fuel source in thermonuclear weapons, or hydrogen bombs. //

Allowing Iran to maintain plants for nuclear enrichment isn't a good idea. Iran is the very definition of a rogue state. If they make a promise, they will break it. If they sign an agreement, they will violate it. If they say they will cease nuclear weapons development, they will be lying. And if they develop a nuclear weapon, they are very likely to use it.

Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. //

anon-wwfm Cleophus
an hour ago
“tritium has virtually no peaceful or commercial applications”
It’s used to make exit signs and rifle and pistol sights and other things that need to light up without battery power. //

The Real John from Jersey anon-d2hb
6 hours ago
The only US production site for tritium is the DOE Savannah River Site in Aiken SC, just outside of Augusta GA.

I actually interviewed for a job there 35 years ago. I had to get a classified security clearance, and the FBI came to interview my parents and grandparents.
When I got there, there were multiple layers of security to go through, each guarded by serious looking gentlemen with machine guns.

My point is, plutonium is easy to get, compared to tritium. And if the mullahs are trying to make it, there is no civilian use.

Command and Control, Goldsboro 1961
Clip | 2m 6s

Sometimes all that stands between the world and nuclear disaster is the flip of a switch.

Aired 01/10/2017 | Rating NR

Command and Control, Chapter 1
Clip | 9m 21s

A chilling nightmare at a Titan II missile complex in Arkansas in September, 1980.

Aired 01/10/2017 | Rating NR

Command and Control, Accident Report
Clip: Season 29 Episode 1 | 1m 8s

The Accident Report

Aired 01/10/2017 | Rating NR