PRESS RELEASE — FOR IMMEDIATE USE
As a courtesy to our safe-energy colleagues at the Generational Radiation Impact Project (GRIP), and co-signers of the referenced letter, we provide this press release exposing Trump Administration plans to allow greater radiation exposure to the public, and its disproportionate effects on children and women. A letter co-signed by over 40 organizations nationally calls for opposition to these plans, strengthening of standards, and further research into the effects of ionizing radiation.
In May, 2025 President Trump signed a series of executive orders, one of which initiates the process to lower radiation exposure standards to the public. Scientific evidence (referenced below and in the linked letter to NRC, et al) demonstrates that women and children would suffer far greater risk from increased radiation exposures than would men. Another Trump executive order calls for a fourfold increase in the number of U.S. nuclear plants by 2050. The resulting cancer effects could be enormous.
In the Spring Legislative Session, Illinois Governor Pritzker and the Legislature repealed the Illinois nuclear construction moratorium, removing the barrier to building more nuclear reactors beyond the 11 Illinois already has. In numerous letters, webinars, and alerts NEIS warned Governor Pritzker and many in the legislature of the numerous largely undiscussed and unconsidered implications of allowing the expansion of nuclear power in allowing the repeal. The Governor never replied; and few legislators were willing to even discuss or acknowledge these additional, undeliberated effects. The Trump Administration executive orders were among that list.
Should the Trump Administration succeed in weakening radioactive exposure standards, and more reactors get built, any increase in cancer rates, especially among children and women, will lay squarely on the shoulders of the Governor and the Legislature. To the extent that they can take a stand against this reckless policy, they should be working closely with the Illinois Delegation to Congress to work against the implementation of this radiation standards-weakening executive order.
For questions regarding the Joint Letter or the supportive article in today’s Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, please go directly to the sources provided below.
Source: Generational Radiation Impact Project (GRIP) www.radiationproject.org
NEWS RELEASE
For immediate release
Contacts: Mary Olson, gripcom2025@gmail.com, 828-242-5621
Stephen Kent, skent@kentcom.com, 914-589-5988
[Asheville, North Carolina – November 14] Over forty citizen’s sector organizations including the national nonprofit Physicians for Social Responsibility have sent a joint letter to federal officials warning of public health consequences of a series of executive orders by President Trump which direct the NRC to dramatically weaken Standards for Protection Against Radiation in the US federal code. The letter points out sharply disproportionate impacts on women and children from weakening existing radiation exposure standards and calls for strengthening them.
The letter is posted here. It was spearheaded by the nonprofit Generational Radiation Impact Project (GRIP) and sent to US Nuclear Regulatory Commissioners, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Surgeon General Denise Hinton, and other key elected and appointed officials.
Recent Trump executive orders direct the NRC to “reconsider” the linear no-threshold (LNT) model. The joint letter argues that this “would undermine public trust by falsely claiming that the NRC’s radiation risk models lack scientific basis, despite decades of peer-reviewed evidence and international consensus.” The widely accepted LNT model has no limit “below regulatory concern,” i.e. no level below which radiation exposure can be treated as negligible or zero-risk. Where applied, LNT takes account of proportional cancer and health risks of all tiny exposures no matter how small.
Trump executive orders direct the NRC to undertake new rulemaking and “wholesale revision” of existing radiation regulations, which would likely lead to the NRC abandoning LNT and raising allowable exposure limits.
A July 2025 Idaho National Laboratory report commissioned by the Department of Energy recommended loosening the public radiation standard fivefold to 500 millirems. In 2021 the NRC roundly rejected a petition to raise allowable radiation exposures for all Americans, including children and pregnant women, to 10 Rems a year, 100 times the current limit.
But past NRC opposition to such changes stands to be reversed by the Trump executive orders. If federal radiation regulations were weakened to permit exposures of 10 Rems a year, scientists estimate that over a 70-year lifetime, four out of five people would develop cancer they would not otherwise get.
Today’s joint letter stresses that health damage would not be evenly distributed across the population, but would disproportionately affect women and children, who are biologically more susceptible to ionizing radiation than men. And an article published today in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists cites several lines of evidence “that women and young girls are significantly more vulnerable to radiation harm than men—in some cases by as much as a ten-fold difference” and that “infants are especially vulnerable to radiation harm.”
“[NRC] bases its risk assessments on Reference Man, a model that represents a young adult male and fails to reflect the greater impacts to infants, children, and women—pregnant or not,” the joint letter states. “Newer research has shown that external radiation harms children more than adults and female bodies more than male bodies. Research on internal exposures…has not yet been sufficiently analyzed to discover if there are broad age-based or male/female differences in impact…. Existing standards should therefore be strengthened to account for these life-stage and gender disparities…not weakened. Radiation causes infertility, loss of pregnancy, birth complications and defects, as well as solid tumor cancer, leukemia, non-cancer outcomes including cardiovascular disease, increased incidence of autoimmune disease and ongoing new findings.”
In cases where cancer, heart disease, and vascular degradation including stroke are caused by radiation, they are documented at higher rates in women than in men, according to 2024 UNIDIR report Gender and Ionizing Radiation.
The joint letter urges the NRC to “to stand up to the Executive Order’s marching orders to ‘promote’ nuclear power—a mission outside its legal regulatory mandate,” and adopt “stronger, science-based radiation protections….Contemporary research shows that radiation’s impact is far greater on females, children, and fetuses—the most at-risk postnatal group being girls from birth to age five. A truly protective framework would replace Reference Man with a lifecycle model.”
“All US radiation regulations and most radiation risk assessments are based on outcomes for the Reference Man,” said Mary Olson, CEO of GRIP, the organization which spearheaded the joint letter, and co-author of Gender and Ionizing Radiation. “Young men like the Reference Man are harmed by radiation, but they’re more resistant to harm than are women and children. Radiation causes cancer in women at twice the rate of adult men, while the same exposure in early childhood, will, across their lifetimes, produce seven times more cancer in young females, and four times more in young males.”
“We know that exposure to radiation causes disproportionate harm from both cancer and non-cancer related disease outcomes over the course of the lifetime to women and especially to little girls, but radiation is dangerous for everyone,” said Amanda M. Nichols, Ph.D., lead author of Gender and Ionizing Radiation. “[President Trump’s] executive order will allow the industry to relax the current standards for radiological protection, which are already far from adequate. This will have detrimental health consequences for humans and for our shared environments and puts us all at higher risk for negative health consequences. ”
“Living near nuclear power facilities doubles the risk of leukemia in children; and radiation is also associated with numerous reproductive harms including infertility, stillbirths and birth defects.,” said Cindy Folkers, Radiation and Health Hazard Specialist with the NGO Beyond Nuclear, a signatory to the joint letter. “Exposing people to more radiation, as this order would do if implemented, would be tantamount to legitimizing their suffering as the price of nuclear expansion.”
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NOTE TO EDITORS AND PRODUCERS: The joint letter to federal officials is posted here. Sources quoted in this release are available for comment and interviews on request. For more information, please contact Stephen Kent, skent@kentcom.com, 914-589-5988
ADDITIONAL SOURCE INFORMATION: “Trump’s new radiation exposure limits could be ‘catastrophic’ for women and girls,” by Lesley M. M. Blume, Chloe Shrager, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November 14, 2025.
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Mary Olson, Founder and CEO
GENERATIONAL RADIATION IMPACT PROJECT / GRIP
828-242-5621
Life cycles…we are part
