DOGE Goes Nuclear: How Trump Invited Silicon Valley to US Nuclear Energy Regulator

The DOE spokesperson said its radiation standards “are aligned with Gold Standard Science… with a focus on protecting people and the environment while avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy.”

The department has already decided to abandon the long-standing radiation protection principle known as “ALARA,” the “as low as reasonably achievable” standard, which requires anyone working with radioactive materials to minimize exposure.

It often takes exposure well below legal thresholds. Many experts agreed that the ALARA principle was sometimes applied too strictly, but many leading radiological health experts opposed the decision to scrap it altogether.

Whether the agencies will actually change the legal thresholds for radiation exposure is an open question, sources familiar with the deliberations said.

Internal DOE documents advocating for changing dosing rules cite a report produced at the Idaho National Laboratory, which was compiled with the help of AI assistant Claude. “It’s really strange,” said Kathryn Higley, president of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, a congressionally chartered group that studies radiation safety. “They fundamentally confuse science.”

John Wagner, director of the Idaho National Laboratory and lead author of the report, acknowledged to ProPublica that the science on changing radiation exposure rules is highly controversial. “We recognize that respected experts interpret aspects of this literature differently,” he wrote. His analysis was not intended to be the last word, he said, but was “aimed at informing the debate.”

The impact of very low-dose radiation levels is difficult to measure, so the United States has historically struck a note of caution. Increasing dose limits could leave the United States out of step with international standards.

For his part, Cohen has told the nuclear industry that he sees it as his job to make sure the government “is no longer a barrier” to them.

In June, he rejected the idea that companies put money into a workers’ compensation fund. “Put yourself in the shoes of one of these startups,” he said. “They’re raising hundreds of millions of dollars to do this. And then they would have to go to their venture capitalists and their board of directors and say, listen guys, do we really need a few hundred million dollars more to put in a trust fund?”

He also suggested that regulators should not worry about preparing for so-called 100-year events: disasters that have about a 1 percent chance of occurring but can be catastrophic for nuclear facilities.

“When SpaceX started building rockets, they expected the first ones to explode,” he said.

This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

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Pratheek Rebala and Kirsten Berg contributed to the research.