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Trump’s EPA is Working to LOOSEN Radiation Limits
The Trump administration continues to target as many regulations as they can that were intended to protect us but might cost some companies money. For example, toxins and pollutants that cause significant health concerns or DEATH including coal power plant emissions and car exhaust, are regulated for necessary reasons. Trump and Republicans don't care because their corporate overlords tell them it's costly and burdensome for businesses.
The EPA is pursuing rule changes that experts say would weaken the way radiation exposure is regulated. The government’s current, decades-old guidance says that any exposure to harmful radiation is a cancer risk.
The proposed change could lead to higher levels of exposure for workers at nuclear installations and oil and gas drilling sites, medical workers doing X-rays and CT scans, people living next to Superfund sites and any members of the public who one day might find themselves exposed to a radiation release.
Yes that's right. Some very rich companies told Trump's EPA that radiation rules are harming profits so please loosen them. Because it's just radiation right? And now they're downplaying the risks of radiation on the record to save money for those people. Literally sickening.
....in an April news release announcing the proposed rule the agency quoted Edward Calabrese, a toxicologist at the University of Massachusetts who has said weakening limits on radiation exposure would save billions of dollars and have a positive impact on human health.
As recently as this March, the EPA’s online guidelines for radiation effects advised: “Current science suggests there is some cancer risk from any exposure to radiation.”
But that online guidance was edited in July to add a section emphasizing the low individual odds of cancer: “....radiation below these levels is a minor contributor to our overall cancer risk,” the revised policy says.
Not to be outdone by Calabrese and his crazy theory, we have a climate change denier working in the EPA who's very excited about this.
The radiation regulation is supported by Steven Milloy, a Trump transition team member for the EPA who is known for challenging widely accepted ideas about manmade climate change and the health risks of tobacco. He has been promoting Calabrese’s theory of healthy radiation on his blog.
Intelligent people say radiation remains extremely dangerous and regulations exist to save all of us from concentrations of it. Period.
U.S. agencies for decades have followed a policy that there is no threshold of radiation exposure that is risk-free. The National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements reaffirmed that principle this year after a review of 29 public health studies on cancer rates among people exposed to low-dose radiation...
Jan Beyea, a physicist whose work includes research with the National Academies of Science on the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant accident, said the EPA science proposal represents voices “generally dismissed by the great bulk of scientists.”
The EPA proposal would lead to “increases in chemical and radiation exposures in the workplace, home and outdoor environment, including the vicinity of Superfund sites,” Beyea wrote.
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