In the new documentary film “Bombshell,” filmmakers tell the story of how the federal government misled people in Utah regarding the safety of atomic weapons technology. The result of the government’s “nothing to see here” misinformation was catastrophic. Thousands of residents of Utah were afflicted with cancers caused by nuclear development.
I attended a Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) event for downwinders, uranium workers, and nuclear waste contamination victims at the Salt Lake City Library last month. The auditorium was full of cancer survivors and the loved ones of victims who have passed. Over 8,300 Utahns have been paid benefits under RECA to compensate them for cancer treatments, at a cost of almost $500,000,000. Thousands of Utahns and residents of other U.S. states are still afflicted, while thousands more mourn the losses of loved ones.
In my 1990s work in the nuclear energy industry, I had a front-row seat to public relations campaigns and lobbying used to downplay the risks of nuclear energy. But at that time, due to the lessons learned from the 1960s health catastrophes, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) had developed rigorous rules to protect public safety.
Today, Utah is in the midst of a nuclear energy resurgence. At the same time, the NRC is dismantling decades of nuclear energy and toxic waste management protections. Government urgency to restart nuclear technology has resulted in the firing of experienced people leading the NRC, and their replacements are demolishing 50 years of safety protection requirements on waste that remains toxic to all living things for up to 300,000 years and can be processed to arm nuclear weapons.
I have to ask…
- Can we trust the NRC’s new, scaled-back safety requirements?
- What now defines nuclear safety in Utah?
- Can we trust the government to be honest about the risks?
- Can we trust private industry not to cut corners and compromise safety to maximize profits?
Responses I have heard to these questions have a “nothing to see here” tone that feels too much like the government messaging portrayed in Bombshell:
- “Just be a good patriot and support nuclear.”
- “Just look at the jobs and economic benefits of nuclear.”
It concerns me that the government and industry are sharing nothing about the cancer risks and DNA damage suffered by people who live near “safely” operating nuclear power plants, or about how proximity to nuclear operations has been shown to create genetic mutations from radiation exposure that can be passed generationally from mothers to children or even to grandchildren. In family-friendly Utah, shouldn’t we be talking about how to prevent radiation exposure that causes cancer and DNA mutations in the grandchildren of mothers who live within a few miles of a nuclear power plant?
Many accomplished people have been assigned to the Utah Advanced Nuclear and Energy Institute Advisory Board and the Utah Nuclear Energy Consortium. But despite our tragic Utah history of radiation exposure, there is not a single person with a public health and safety resume on either of those oversight boards. I am confident that we have qualified health professionals at the Huntsman Cancer Institute, the State Department of Health or the Department of Environmental Quality willing to be assigned. The fact that we don’t leaves me feeling that the people leading this effort really don’t want to know the potential bombshell of the health risks.
If we downplay the risks of nuclear energy, we again lull the public into a “nothing to see here” passivity. As we have seen from our nuclear past, when the people trust government officials and private industry to watch out for their health and safety, but with no accountability, catastrophic results occur.
Ronald Reagan often said, we must “trust, but verify.” In this case, that means every Utahn insists on asking:
- “What are the safety standards?”
- “Are those standards aligned with the best public health practices informed by decades of global study and experience?”
Because if the safety standards are only the result of out-of-state private industry looking to maximize profits in Utah, shielded by their government lobbying, I fear that my grandkids will be attending RECA events 30 years from now and asking why we again failed to learn from the lessons of the past.