A little radiation is bad for you! Shut down hormesis.

Even a little radiation is BAD for you. It can give you cancer and other diseases and children are uniquely vulnerable. Studies show that natural background doses of radiation -- doses we are normally, and inescapably, exposed to -- can give children cancer.

NRC has decided to accept a petition for rulmaking to explore whether the current model of radiation damage, the linear-no-threshold model (LNT), should be replaced by a model which assumes a little radiation is good for you (hormesis). The LNT assumes that risk of radiation damage increases with dose and that even the lowest doses pose risks.

EPA states in their comments on this NRC petition for rulemaking that "a single track of ionizing radiation passing through a cell produces complex damage sites in DNA, unique to radiation, the repair of which is error-prone. Thus, no threshold...has been observed." (emphasis added)

But the radiation deniers are demanding NRC allow the public to be exposed to 50 to 100 times the background amount in the form of man-made radioactivity, like that routinely released from the nuclear power industry. They call this level of radiation "beneficial" and they want to allow it even for "pregnant women, embryos and fetuses, and children under 18 years of age."

TELL THE NRC "NO WAY!" SIGN our petition if you haven't already (deadline is November 18, 2015), or write your own comments using some sample talking points. Deadline for comments is November 19, 2015. Submit comments to rulemaking.comments@nrc.gov.  Please circulate this action. Thanks!

Update on May 8, 2017 by admin

For Beyond Nuclear's final comments to the NRC on hormesis, click here.

#Goodbyetonukes. It's the new trend as Entergy says it will close FitzPatrick

The nuclear dominoes continue to fall with the latest announcement coming from embattled Entergy as the company announced it will close its FitzPatrick plant in upstate New York.  The closure is slated for late 2016 or early 2017.  The plant is the latest victim of the notoriously poor economics that have plagued the nuclear sector for some time.  Entergy has already closed its Vermont Yankee reactor and announced it will also shutter its Pilgrim plant near Plymouth, MA.  

The announcement that FitzPatrick will close is particularly welcome given the reactor, a GE Mark I boiling water reactor and the same design as those at Fukushima, is the only U.S. plant not to voluntarily install a hardened vent on its notoriously weak containment.  This means that if the reactor were to undergo a severe accident the plan would be to vent the radioactive and explosive gases and extremely hot steam into an adjacent building, blowing the doors off at ground level and releasing radioactivity into the atmosphere.  While the news of the reactor's impending shutdown is welcome, residents around Oswego and far beyond remain in peril for at least another year or more while the deeply flawed and dangerous reactor continues to operate. More.

Where is America’s cyberdefense plan?

That is the online title of an op-ed by Ted Koppel appearing in the Washington Post (the hardcopy headline reads "Before the cyber-blackout"). Koppel, best known for hosting the ABC news program “Nightline” from 1980 to 2005, is the author of the new book, Lights Out: A Cyberattack, a Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath.

The op-ed raises the specter of a power outage lasting not hours, or days, but weeks, or months, due to a coordinated cyber-attack on the vulnerable U.S. electricity grid.

But the op-ed does not address what this would mean at the 100 still operating atomic reactors across the country, and even at the numerous atomic reactors permanently shutdown. Even if operating atomic reactors were able to power down and shutdown safely during a power outage, their thermally hot cores would still have to be cooled for several days, or longer, before cold shutdown was reached, or else risk melting down. Although high-level radioactive waste storage pools would have a longer fuse -- days or even weeks before boiling would expose irradiated nuclear fuel to air, and risk a catastrophic fire -- the pools are not even required to be connected to emergency diesel generators, as reactors are. More.