DOE memo on ALARA - Re: E&E: DOE kills decades-old radiation safety standard (ALARA)
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DOE kills decades-old radiation safety standard
The standard is based on the principle that there is no safe dose of radiation.
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| 01/12/2026 04:32 PM EST
The Department of Energy in Washington on May 1, 2015. Jacquelyn Martin/AP
E&E NEWS PM | Energy Secretary Chris Wright killed the Department of Energy’s decades-old radiation safety standard Friday.
Wright ended the department's use of the As Low As Reasonably Achievable — or "ALARA" — principle, which has long been a staple of nuclear regulation. ALARA is rooted in the idea that any radiation exposure carries risks, but low doses can be justified by practical considerations. Critics in the nuclear power and health fields argue that the standard is overly burdensome with no real safety benefits.
The move could lower operational costs and accelerate projects using nuclear material, but it will alter an established safety-first culture. The change in safety standards may impact DOE’s ongoing advanced nuclear reactor pilot program and high-stakes radiation cleanups, like the Hanford site in Washington state that has been dubbed the most contaminated place in the Western Hemisphere.
A person familiar with the Trump administration’s nuclear policy, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive issues, confirmed that Wright decided to remove ALARA from DOE regulations and that there would be a subsequent process to decide replacement standards. DOE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
"ALARA is effectively, as far as I understand it, as of Friday, totally nullified and gone," said Emily Caffrey, a radiation health physicist and assistant professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "So anywhere you see ALARA in DOE regulations, you'll scratch it out with no replacement."
DOE is engaged in an advanced reactor pilot program with nine companies. The participating companies have their sights on selling their technology commercially to power military bases, data centers and homes across the country.
The secretary’s memo does not directly affect the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which regulates the operation of America’s 94 nuclear reactors powering one-fifth of the country. That means the pilot program participants won’t need to adhere to ALARA immediately, but they will still need to satisfy it if they want the requisite NRC license to build reactors to feed the larger electricity grid.
The severe health impacts of ionizing radiation became apparent to the public after the 1945 atomic bombings in Japan, where thousands of initial survivors died of cancers linked to the bombings.
In response, the U.S. sought to establish increasingly strict safety standards for nuclear workers and civilians. This evolution culminated in the As Low As Reasonably Achievable protocol. Since its introduction by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the 1970s, ALARA has been the "gold standard for nuclear safety" despite its significant implementation costs.
DOE began to adopt ALARA for certain activities in 1988. Today, its regulations apply the ALARA standard across various aspects of radiation safety, including occupational exposure, environmental releases and site decommissioning.
“It is the underlying philosophy that NRC and the Department of Energy use when thinking about radiation exposures,” Caffrey said. “Anytime you have a worker or someone who is going to encounter ionizing radiation, you think about ALARA.”
The decision might put additional pressure on the NRC to ditch ALARA, too. A May 2025 executive order from President Donald Trump asked the NRC to reconsider its use of the standard. Wright’s move may also have implications for DOE’s ongoing radiation cleanups of abandoned uranium mines and Manhattan Project sites, like the one in Hanford.
Hanford produced the bulk of America’s weapons-grade plutonium, and nuclear waste is still stored on the site. But Hanford has been plagued with problems from explosions to toxic vapor releases to nuclear waste leaking from its tanks, and the federal government has paid out nearly $2.7 billion to thousands of workers for illnesses linked to exposure to radiation and toxic chemicals.
DOE estimates it will cost $364 billion to $590 billion to finish the Hanford cleanup. Lowering the radiation dose standard might allow the cleanup to proceed faster.
ALARA has long been hotly debated in the nuclear industry and among health experts.
“ALARA means different things depending on the context,” Caffrey said. “You can get a state like California, where if you need to decommission a facility, you have to go to zero radiation dose.”
Caffrey said she thinks that California takes ALARA too far since people are naturally exposed to some radiation from the sun and space constantly.
“This is really the fundamental reason why so many people get so upset about ALARA,” she said.
The nuclear power industry has also often complained about the principle. A December report from the pro-nuclear Breakthrough Institute points out that the ALARA principle often means minimizing doses to 25 times lower than what other regulations consider already safe.
“This increases licensing costs and timelines without improving protection,” the report says of ALARA.
Edwin Lyman, a physicist and the director of nuclear power safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists, defended the NRC’s radiation standard in a 2025 interview.
“Documented scientific evidence has only indicated that [low-level radiation exposure] is more dangerous than was known decades ago, when these standards were set,” Lyman said. “Evidence has emerged about the impact of the level of radiation exposure on cardiovascular disease.”
“ALARA has been misapplied across the board in a lot of different areas, and it has cost taxpayers a lot of money, and it has caused a lot of unnecessary fear in the public by saying, ‘Well, any little bit of radiation dose is going to give you a cancer,’ which is just fundamentally not true,” Caffrey concluded. “But as a radiation protection principle and paradigm, it was well-intended.”
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