We are writing to express our concerns with a January 30, 2014 article by Rita F. Redberg and Rebecca Smith-Bindman. The article is alarmingly titled, “We Are Giving Ourselves Cancer”, and is accompanied by a frightening cartoon that appears to be a doctor holding an X-ray film, and wearing a gas mask and helmet. The picture and title are the first clues that sensational claims follow, and the article does not disappoint in that regard, though it falls far short in offering prudent medical advice to frightened patients and parents.
The authors only mention in passing that medical imaging can save lives, and quickly move on to assert that there is little evidence of better health outcomes from current scanning practices. They do not mention, for example that the National Lung Screening Trial recently found that former smokers who received CT screening were 20% less likely to die from lung cancer and 7% less likely to die from any cause, compared to those who were screened with lower dose chest radiography. They do not mention the studies demonstrating the clear clinical benefits of mammography, bone mineral densitometry, and CT colonography. They do not mention the hundreds of studies that suggest that the body’s natural defense systems are quite capable of dealing with very low doses of radiation – like those that have existed on our planet since its beginning and those associated with modern medical imaging.
This essay responds to an article by Stanford Professor Mark Z. Jacobson et al, 100% Clean and Renewable Wind, Water, and Sunlight (WWS) All-Sector Energy Roadmaps for 139 Countries of the World. Their controversial WWS roadmap has several interesting features and benefits. //
Several authors have pointed out the impossibility of this Stanford WWS roadmap. Jesse Jenkins and Samuel Thernstrom published Deep Decarbonization of the Electric Power Sector. Mathijs Beckers wrote The Non-Solutions Project of Mark Z. Jacobson.
Misled by Jacobson, climate activists such as Bill McKibben of 350.org calls for world war-like mobilization of nations to effect the $125 trillion WWS roadmap.
This present essay describes a doable, affordable liquid fission (LF) power roadmap to solve the multiple issues of climate change, air pollution, and poverty reduction.
When a single RIF (Radiation Induced Foci) is faced with multiple DSB's (Double Strand Break in DNA), it can end up rejoining the wrong ends, creating a possibly viable misrepair. A few of the viable mutations will escape our immune system, and a few of those could become cancerous.
If double DSB's are the real problem, then dose rate and repair time becomes all important. The probability that a hit will cause a DDSB is proportional to the inventory of still unrepaired DSB's at the time of the hit.3 To over-simplify, if the repair processes can keep up with the damage, and keep that inventory low, we are OK. If the damage rate is higher than the repair rate, the inventory of unrepaired DSB's will build up, and the probability of a DDSB and a misrepair will grow rapidly. //
If we conservatively assume 10 metabolic DSB's per cell-day, and 0.04 DSB's per millisievert then it would take 250 mSv per day to equal the number of DSB's produced by our metabolism. 250 mSv is about 25,000 times normal background radiation. If normal metabolic damage is equivalent to 250 mSv/d, then any damage associated with 2 mSv/d would almost certainly not be detectable. At the same time, it is not surprising that we start to detect harm at 20 or so mSv/d. At that point, the cell is forced to deal with a substantially higher than normal number of DSB's. ///
Nature has equipped us with a remarkably effective DNA repair system. She had to do this because our O2 based metabolism damages our DNA at a rate that is more than 25,000 times the damage rate from average background radiation.
Despite technological and regulatory hurdles, Amazon remains convinced that small modular reactors (SMRs) are the answer to the cloud titan's power woes.
Last fall, the house of Bezos announced a $500 million investment in SMR startup X-Energy. On Thursday, the e-tailer revealed that X-Energy's Xe-100 SMR designs would eventually supply Washington State with "up to" 960 megawatts of clean energy.
"Eventually" is the key word here as construction isn't expected to start until the end of the decade and the plants won't begin operations until sometime in the 2030s.
About six-in-ten U.S. adults now say they favor more nuclear power plants to generate electricity, according to a Pew Research Center survey fielded in April and May. That’s up from 43% in 2020, driven by increasing support among both Republicans and Democrats.
A line chart showing that a Majority of Americans continue to support more nuclear power in the U.S. //
Americans remain more likely to favor expanding solar (77%) and wind power (68%) than nuclear power (59%). But while support for solar and wind power has declined by double digits since 2020 – largely driven by drops in Republican support – the share who favor nuclear power has grown by 16 percentage points since then.
How We Can Make Nuclear Cheap Again Paperback – March 30, 2025
by Jack Devanney (Author)
This book has a joyful message. We can simultaneously solve the Gordian Knot of our time: the closely coupled problems of energy poverty and global warming. The solution is cheap nuclear power, and we can have cheap nuclear if we want it.
Here's the Good News:
1) Our fear of radiation is vastly overblown. A providential Nature has provided us with DNA repair mechanisms that can easily handle dose rates 100's of times above normal background. Dose rates that exceed the repair capabilities of our bodies will almost never be encountered by the public in even a very large release.
2) Thanks to its insane energy density and the resulting tiny resource requirement, nuclear power is inherently cheap, less than 3 cents per kWh cheap. Indeed nascent nuclear in the 1960's did-cost less than 3 cents/kWh in today's money. Nuclear power should consume far less of the planet's precious resources than any other source of electricity, while producing nearly no pollution and very little CO2.
Nuclear's problems are man-made. Nuclear power never escaped from its government sponsored and controlled birth. In the process, it developed a regulatory regime explicitly mandated to increase costs to the point where nuclear power is barely economic, while at the same time convincing everyone that low dose rate radiation is perilous.
But what is man-made can be man-unmade. All that's required is an acceptance of these two providential realities, a change in attitude, a metanoia. With this change, the way forward becomes obvious, and not that difficult to implement.
This little book explains why (1) and (2) are true, and then traces nuclear power's decline into a prohibitively expensive mess. Finally, it offers a way out, a system for regulating nuclear which will force the providers of nuclear power to compete with each other and new entrants on a level playing field, in which case the inherent cheapness of fission power combined with technological advances will push the cost of nuclear electricity down to its should-cost.
Nuclear would undercut fossil fuel almost every where. Fossil would be relegated to a bit of peaking and backup for unplanned outages. Intermittents would be limited to a few niche markets. This would all be automatic. No need for subsidies or mandates. The poor would be immensely richer. Electrification of transportation and industry would explode. Desalinization would take off. Synthetic fuels could become viable. Skies would be clean. All this electricity would require little land and produce almost no CO2. The planet would be cooler. Could there be a more joyful message?
according to LNT, if every human ate a banana a week, bananas would kill 1600 people a year. In the same scenario, SNT kills one person every 2.5 million years.
Now, class, let's get back to basics.
Repeat after me:
It's not dose. It's dose rate profile.
Good.
Repeat after me:
LNT does not say eating a banana is safe or unsafe.
LNT says eating a banana has a 4 in a billion chance of killing you.
Repeat after me:
SNT does not say eating a banana is safe or unsafe.
SNT says eating a banana has a 1 in a billion-billion chance of killing you.
Whether those risks are safe or unsafe is up to you.
Class dismissed.
Mopani says:
July 22, 2025 at 1:18 PM
“Investors studiously seek to minimize or mitigate uncertainty.”
Absolutely 100%. The present operational method of the NRC militates against this very desire for certainty. ALARA and LNT both destroy certainty, and as others have pointed out, recent builds have proven it, with the NRC changing the rules mid-build. At minimum, once a construction license is awarded, the NRC should not be allowed to change the rules that the license was awarded under.
Mopani says:
July 22, 2025 at 1:28 PM
Separately from my previous comment, the US NRC logo in the article says everything about the viewpoint of the NRC: “Protecting People and the Environment” — from nuclear power evidently.
A better tagline would be “Clean & Safe Energy for All”. The NRC as presently constituted is not about promoting safe energy, its about promoting safety.
An illustration: If the first rule of traffic safety is “safety first” then 35MPH would be the maximum speed limit. If the first rule of traffic safety is “keep the traffic moving” then speed limits and other rules take their rightful place — accidents impede the flow of traffic, so traffic rules should help prevent accidents, but the rules become subservient to the primary goal of keeping traffic flowing.
The safety rules around Nuclear power should be subservient to the rule that nuclear power should be plentiful, cheap, and safe. Those are not unachievable goals. The failure of the NRC is to regard nuclear accidents as somehow more special than any other industrial accident, contributing to the culture of treating nuclear power as more dangerous than any other industry. As Petr Beckmann noted in the title of his book, “The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear”, depriving society of plentiful, cheap and safe energy is more hazardous.
As a retired nuke plant employee I take it as kind of an insult to read the utilities caused this Dense-pack problem to save a few bucks. After 47 yrs of commercial operation Davis Besse is still waiting on the Federal Government to come and get even one of THEIR spent fuel assemblies. //
mjd
Aug 16
Here's a link to proof the the US Government owns the Spent Fuel and even has to pay the utilities to store it. It's a breach of contract for the government not to take their Spent Fuel and proven in a court of law: https://www.buildsmartbradley.com/2024/08/united-states-ordered-to-pay-breach-of-contract-damages-to-nuclear-operator-in-spent-fuel-dispute/
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.
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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.
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.