CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Radiation Exposure Rule Changes to Increase Cancer Rates

Among the hundreds of Trump White House executive orders (EO), No. 14300 directs the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to weaken its long-standing radiation exposure rule, “Standards for Protection Against Radiation.

Based on the EO, an upcoming NRC rule change calls for setting a radiation exposure “threshold” or level below which your exposure to ionizing radiation “would not count” or would be considered “never to have occurred.”

The proposed NRC exposure rules will be 5-100 times less protective than current law, and will likely be based on the archaic “Reference Man” standard, the grossly outdated radiation risk model. “Reference Man” represents a young adult male, and so the standard both ignores and denies the greater harm exposure to the fetus, to infants, to children, and to women, done by a given radiation exposure.

The EO would........

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