Coal plants emit more radiation than nuclear plants.
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2026
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I know this is probably unpopular, but there is a youtube channel by a supposed nuclear power plant engineer that pointed out that our current radiation standards are not like any other standards. IIRC he said the current standards don't set a given exposure level and simply say as low as reasonably possible. Which sounds great till you realize that what's reasonably possible is a constantly lowering standard - what I mean is as tech gets better the standard is always stricter. Which sounds great, but in reality isn't how we regulate (as far as I know) anything else - we set a safety level and politically revisit it as makes sense.
As I understand it - this would be like saying lightbulbs must use as little energy as reasonably possible for a given lumen output. This sounds good too - except that it means we never get to attain cost savings, or ever reach a "good enough" level. And this isn't new installs, this is under legal and inspection threat that if you haven't replaced your incandecents as soon as florescent came out, then replaced those with LED, then replaced those with more efficient LED basically as soon as it was available, constantly planning and replacing your otherwise working lightbulbs - you get huge fines.
And our radiation protections only apply to nuclear plants etc, yet I've widely seen reported that coal plants actually give off more radiation now, it's just diffuse. So we're not actually worried about radiation exposure in general. We're also not comparing to background radiation ...
Which sounds great till you realize that what's reasonably possible is a constantly lowering standard - what I mean is as tech gets better the standard is always stricter. Which sounds great, but in reality isn't how we regulate (as far as I know) anything else - we set a safety level and politically revisit it as makes sense.
That's exactly how we regulate process safety in OSHA PSM facilities. Which is basically all of heavy industry, chemical, even some food and pharma.
I'm not opposed to a science based, well defined criteria for nuclear safety. But we don't need to throw ALARP out to have it. There are exposure limits for various chemicals that guide how high the exposures can be and still be considered ALARP. If we can get a scientific consensus for each kind of radiation exposure, the same can happen for nuclear. AFAIK, we don't have said consensus.
You’re mostly right.
The issue is that the ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) principle has been improperly applied and has quietly over time changed to leave out the “reasonably” part. So regulations and protective measures have gone for as low as achievable period.
This is in part driven by fear of nuclear radiation –stemming from the Chernobyl disaster, Fukushima and others– and the application of the LNT model (linear non-threshold).
That’s where we meet another issue: we actually have no idea what low levels of radiation exposure do to a human body. There very well might be threshold, after which the risk becomes linear. All we know about the effects is based on studies on high radiation dosages from the nuclear bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet we have applied the linear risk of cancer we found in those studies and simply drew the line in the graph from the lowest risk we observeren down to zero, which gives us the LNT model.
The article kind of makes it seem like this model is proven fact, but for the lower exposures, which is basically all we’re dealing with at nuclear facilities, it simply isn’t.
This is good actually. The current standards assume that exposure to ionizing radiation is always bad no matter how small. The evidence suggests that small doses are absolutely safe, and arguably beneficial.
Panicking about small radiation doses has absolutely caused public harm and even death. Many people argue that some of the evacuations around Fukushima were overly conservative and ultimately more harmful than doing nothing.
That isn’t true either. Hormesis is a hypothesis for which there is some evidence, but it’s far from settled and we absolutely can’t say it is completely safe. We simply don’t have the data to confirm or deny it either way.