Bradley P. Clawson spent more than three decades handling highly radioactive materials at Idaho National Laboratory, a nuclear energy testing and production hub outside Idaho Falls. His work ranged from shipping and receiving nuclear naval fuels to helping bring hundreds of canisters of leftover fuel to Idaho for storage after the catastrophic Three Mile Island meltdown. He often handled nuclear fuel in “hot cells,” immensely contaminated areas reinforced with thick concrete.
Throughout, Clawson, a member of the United Steelworkers union, leaned on safety standards to argue for extra protections against radiation, including respirators and additional shielding.
But President Donald Trump’s sweeping agenda to expand nuclear energy and modernize nuclear weapons now includes easing the radiation standards that Clawson credits with keeping his exposure as low as possible.
“They’re pulling away from what’s kept us safe all these years,” said Clawson, who retired in 2021 and now serves on the advisory board on radiation and workers under the Centers for Disease Control. He spoke to High Country News in an unofficial personal capacity.
Last May, Trump signed four executive orders aimed at reviving what he called an industry “atrophied” by regulation. The U.S. Department of Energy quickly began stripping away regulations designed to reduce the amount of radiation exposure workers can face at its national laboratories, cleanup sites and energy infrastructure.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which licenses and regulates commercial reactors and related infrastructure, is following suit. In response to another executive order that required it undergo “wholesale revision of its regulations and guidance,” the agency recently announced that it’s considering easing long-held standards that limit workers’ and the public’s exposure to radioactivity.
The controversial changes promise to reshape nuclear sites across the nation — especially in the Western U.S., where nuclear weapons and nuclear energy were born and continue to hold an outsized presence.
And while some hailed the moves as a new dawn for industry, the United Steel Workers union called the directives a “dangerous rewriting of radiation safety rules.”
Forty-one other organizations — community advocates, scientists and doctors — said it amounted to “a deliberate subversion of science and public health in favor of corporate interests,” in a letter of protest to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The United Steel Workers union called the directives a “dangerous rewriting of radiation safety rules.”
An Energy Department spokesperson told HCN that it “is committed to ensuring its radiation protection standards are aligned with Gold Standard Science,” as outlined in another executive order. “DOE is still evaluating what specific changes to these standards are needed,” the statement added.
A spokesperson for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote that the agency was still in the process of amending the framework for radiation protection, adding that “public health and safety will always be our top priority.” A new rule will be released at the end of April.
FOR DECADES, radiation protection was based on the hypothesis that even a small amount of radiation carries some risk of harm. The Trump administration now rejects the very basis of this view, which could change how work is performed on dozens of projects in the West.
At Los Alamos National Laboratory, for instance, workers build the nuclear bomb cores or “pits” that will be used to arm the next generation of warheads. Besides the technicians handling plutonium are the pipefitters, ironworkers and carpenters renovating the facility, who are also exposed to at least some radiation. Meanwhile, the federal government has moved to double the facility’s annual output.
More than 50 reactors have been built and operated at the nearly 900-square-mile Idaho National Laboratory since 1951. Another extremely radioactive form of plutonium used to power Mars’ rovers is also produced there, and now, more reactors are slated to be constructed.
Nuclear laboratories, including the Los Alamos and Idaho facilities, send waste, old and new, to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southern New Mexico, the nation’s only long-term repository built for such waste.
At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, nuclear materials are handled for research, while the Hanford Site in Washington, a decommissioned nuclear production complex is undergoing a decades-long remediation effort. Elsewhere, at the Nevada National Security Site, plutonium pits from the current stockpile undergo tests — without nuclear explosions — to ensure their continued usefulness.
Other efforts include a push to power data centers with nuclear reactors on 16 national laboratories in the West. A February announcement said that Energy Department will no longer require environmental assessments in order to build advanced nuclear reactors.
Among the sites that the Nuclear Regulatory agency regulates in the region is the Palo Verde Generating Station, located in Wintersburg, Arizona, one of the nation’s largest, along with other nuclear waste dumps, and shuttered uranium mills.
AN OVERRIDING PRIORITY of the Trump administration has been “to usher in a nuclear renaissance,” a credo that has manifested in the rollbacks. The major regulatory standard now in the crosshairs, called ALARA and short for “as low as reasonably achievable,” has long been central to radiation safety at numerous federal and international agencies.
At its core is the “Linear No-Threshold model,” which holds that no dose of radiation is safe. An agency would set limits on how much radiation exposure workers and the public were permitted. ALARA further required that exposures under that limit be reduced to the lowest amount possible under the circumstances. That could happen in various ways — curbing the amount of time employees worked with radioactive materials, requiring added protective gear, putting lead blankets over highly radioactive equipment to reduce exposures or maintaining greater distances from a radioactive source. For the public, it could mean lowering emissions from facilities below legal thresholds.
Because of the added guardrails, worker exposures have been substantially lower than the Energy Department’s limits, according to a 2025 report from Idaho National Laboratory. Without them, workers could be exposed to up to five times more radiation. The loss of ALARA doesn’t mean workers won’t have any protections at all; instead, experts believe that they may lose those additional layers of safety.
The policy shifts have been made possible by ongoing scientific debate over whether low doses of radiation pose harm. The most comprehensive epidemiological study to date, based on over 300,000 nuclear workers from the U.S., U.K. and France, found that cumulative exposure to low doses of ionizing radiation increased the rate of death from certain types of cancer by 50 percent. “These results can help to strengthen radiation protection, especially for low dose exposures,” the authors wrote in 2023.
However, some critics in the field of health physics, which is dedicated to managing radiation safety, say ALARA is subjective and outdated. The Idaho report stated that rescinding ALARA would save money while still protecting workers. Some even argue that ALARA is scientifically unsound, while a small minority of health physicists insist that low levels of radiation are beneficial.
“The people not doing the job are the ones calculating the risk,” said Clawson, who is only too familiar with the back-and-forth. When he started out, ALARA was not a rule at the Energy Department. It was codified in 1993 as part of a suite of worker protections created after the Cold War, when nearly every aspect of the nuclear landscape, including safety culture, came under scrutiny. Proof that the previously accepted practices were unsafe, he added, can be seen in the number of workers currently being compensated by the federal government for illnesses attributed to their exposure.
Clawson acknowledged that complying with ALARA could slow down planning because workers had to carefully consider how to accomplish high-stakes tasks while minimizing risks, especially in hot cells where a person’s exposure could change simply based on where they were standing. The effects of an exposure — potentially compounded by exposures to other toxic chemicals — may not be seen for years, however.
“In the long run it helped us as workers,” Clawson said. “It was keeping us from getting a higher dose.”
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