It isn’t just the guys handling plutonium who need to worry about radiation — every US nuclear worker, from the plumbers patching leaks to the janitors mopping floors, has a reason to be on guard.
New reporting by High Country News detailed the startling impact the Trump administration is having on the safety of nuclear energy workers. As part of the administration’s “nuclear renaissance,” the US Department of Energy (DOE) has begun stripping back effective safety regulations that had previously limited workers’ exposure to deadly radiation.
“They’re pulling away from what’s kept us safe all these years,” Bradley Clawson, a former nuclear energy worker at Idaho National Laboratory, told HCN. “In the long run it helped us as workers. It was keeping us from getting a higher dose.”
Following four executive orders aimed at nuclear deregulation, both the DOE and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) have taken an increasingly lax view of safety at both federal nuclear projects like labs and cleanup sites, as well as commercial energy facilities. Under Trump, these agencies no longer seem to operate on the long-held assumption that even a small amount of radiation exposure is bad for human health. Instead, speed is the name of the game.
The language in one May 2025 executive order makes its deregulatory intent clear in no uncertain terms: “In particular, the NRC shall reconsider reliance on the linear no-threshold (LNT) model for radiation exposure and the ‘as low as reasonably achievable’ standard, which is predicated on LNT,” the order read.
At Los Alamos National Laboratory, for example, non-nuclear workers like plumbers and metalworkers are exposed to some amount of radiation, but as HCN notes, the Trump administration has forced the site to double its annual output of nuclear cores.
In a scathing letter to various government administrators, a group of organizations made up of doctors, environmental activists, and researchers called the safety rollbacks a “deliberate subversion of science and public health in favor of corporate interests.”
“Accepting weaker radiation protections amounts to accepting an ever-increasing level of avoidable human disease and suffering,” the letter continues.
The deregulations come as nuclear facilities across the US face a growing shortage of trained and experienced staff — an issue Trump admin energy department layoffs hasn’t exactly helped, and which is in direct contradiction with the White House’s stated goal of jumpstarting America’s nuclear energy capacity.
Facing lagging staff numbers but a rapidly changing nuclear energy landscape, many facilities have to turned to third-party contractors in order to keep up. The result, critics say, is a breakdown in long-term safety culture as contractors move from site to site. One prime example of this came in October, when a contractor at Michigan’s Palisade Power Plant fell into a reactor cavity.
Whether Trumps deregulation caused that specific incident is arguable. However, it’s hard to dispute that it came at a time of increasing pressure, under an administration that shows no signs of slowing down.
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