ALARA standard has limited upside and reduces incentives to cut costs for the nuclear industry

ALARA (which stands for "as low as reasonably achievable") means making "every reasonable effort to maintain exposures to ionizing radiation as far below the dose limits as practical"¹

Critics of the ALARA standard say that this is an unworkable standard that is holding back the nuclear industry.

Here Jason Crawford summarizes Jack Devanney's position:

Excessive concern about low levels of radiation led to a regulatory standard known as ALARA: As Low As Reasonably Achievable. What defines “reasonable”? It is an ever-tightening standard. As long as the costs of nuclear plant construction and operation are in the ballpark of other modes of power, then they are reasonable. This might seem like a sensible approach, until you realize that it eliminates, by definition, any chance for nuclear power to be cheaper than its competition. Nuclear can‘t even innovate its way out of this predicament: under ALARA, any technology, any operational improvement, anything that reduces costs, simply gives the regulator more room and more excuse to push for more stringent safety requirements, until the cost once again rises to make nuclear just a bit more expensive than everything else. ²

Josh Smith of the Abundance Insitute argues

ALARA essentially means there is no incentive to cut costs since savings in one area imply additional safety efforts must be taken. The key issue is that there are not well-defined limits to this principle, so nuclear companies are held to a rule with no “numerical threshold that would satisfy this ALARA requirement.” ³

Brian Potter offers additional context for the potential upside for ALARA reform:

“every country in the world has adopted the ALARA standard, as has the US Navy, so on its own the ALARA philosophy is not an especially good explanation for US nuclear plant construction costs. And blaming ALARA suggests an overly simple causal chain of nuclear regulatory increase. In particular, it omits the role of public concern and controversy, which historically has been a major factor - the word “controversy” appears 26 times in the NRC’s 116-page “Short History of Nuclear Regulation.”⁴

Groups working on this bottleneck

• The Abundance Institute

Potential solution pathways

1. Get rid of the ALARA Standard

   Replace it with firm limits: choose a threshold of radiation deemed safe; enforce that limit and nothing more. Further, these limits should balance risk vs. benefit, recognizing that nuclear is an alternative to other modes of power, including fossil fuels, that have their own health impacts.²

Related Bottlenecks

1. Linear No Threshold (LNT) is a flawed model of radiation risk