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To the Journal editor:
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission keeps a price for a human life. By its own numbers, a year of savings from its newest rule is worth less than one of those lives.
The rule, proposed in July under a 2025 executive order, drops a 50-year-old principle called ALARA: keep radiation "as low as reasonably achievable." The NRC's analysis puts the savings at about $10.5 million a year, counted "to the nearest 1,000 dollars," mostly from less paperwork. The agency values one statistical life at roughly $12 million.
The case for the change is fair. ALARA's paperwork costs money, and doses near plants are already far below legal limits. The industry has spent fifty years pushing them down. Why keep paying for a rule that did its job? Because the NRC credits ALARA for that record: it "has generally led to low overall radiation doses." That record belongs to the old rule. It tells us nothing about the new one.
The NRC did not count the lives. It says it could not estimate any change in dose "because the information required to meaningfully do so is not obtainable." The agency keeps a scale for weighing lives against dollars. For this rule, it put the dollars on the scale and left the lives off.
Here's how the new cost test works. It doesn't ask how much radiation you would get. It adds up everyone's dose into one total. Each person in L'Anse could get the same dose as each person near Detroit. Same risk, person for person. But 2,000 people add up to far less than 50,000. So a safety fix worth paying for near Detroit can fail the test in L'Anse. Operators can use that test to skip a fix, and nothing in the rule promises the community will see the numbers.
A cancer from a small added dose never carries a name. The person can't prove the cause, and no operator is linked. The cost savings are booked every year; any deaths are charged to no one. You may never know.
The new rules may be safe. The agency cannot tell us. It didn't count.
The rule isn't final, and the Commission faces a November deadline. Before it votes, our two senators and Rep. Jack Bergman can put one question to the NRC: what evidence shows this rule is safe, if the agency cannot estimate the dose? It's worth asking them.