Devavani Chatterjea publishes letter to the editor in MinnPost on nuclear power and safety protocols

Devavani Chatterjea, program director and professor of environmental studies, published a letter to the editor in MinnPost titled, “Expanding nuclear power production while cutting safety protocols is a recipe for disaster.”

Documents released by National Public Radio last month reveal a chilling dismantling of nuclear safety via bureaucratic redline edits within the Department of Energy.

“Groundwater must be protected” is struck through and replaced with “considerations must be given to avoiding or minimizing potential radiological contamination of groundwater.” An accident will be investigated only when an employee is exposed to four times the legal limit of radiation rather than twice the limit per current guidelines.  

Under the new DOE protocol, Nuclear Safety Police Officers at reactor facilities will no longer be automatically given protective armor. To reduce construction costs and wages, reactors will no longer be guided by the decades-old ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable) principle and can therefore use less shielding and longer shifts, exposing workers to higher risk and levels of radiation. 

These edits are not simply changing words on paper. They remove the teeth of crucial protections and lower the bar for compliance such that they’re easily stepped over and ignored. Importantly, these lowered safety standards will be applied not just to reactors on government property but to DOE-contracted reactors built anywhere, coinciding with a new era in which tech giants like Amazon and Google support creating a next generation of small modular nuclear reactors to supply power at scale for data centers powering artificial intelligence. 

The desire to find cleaner energy sources for these efforts is laudable. But our country already has a nuclear waste problem that has been nearly a century in the making. While efforts to remedy perpetual problems continue to be ignored rather than addressed effectively, we’re now paving the way to create more problem areas across our communities.

The imminent rollback of reactor safety amplifies this throughline of disregard and greed and connects directly to harm that nuclear development brings when health and safety are discarded for military and industrial gain.

The Columbia River suffers ongoing contamination from the Manhattan Project Hanford Nuclear site in Washington. Radioactive uranium mining operations and waste sickened and killed thousands of Navajo mineworkers, who are still fighting for adequate cleanup and fair compensation for those affected 40 years after the last mine closed in Arizona.

Closer to home for me in southeastern Minnesota, the Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant houses nearly 1,000 tons of nuclear reactor waste storage. This is a ticking time bomb located right beside the Prairie Island Indian Community.

Eroding protections designed to protect the public is nothing new for this administration. A year ago, the Trump White House Council on Environmental Quality undid 45 years of the country’s bedrock environmental law, the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), and directed federal agencies to end environmental impact studies and stop attending to environmental justice concerns for projects on public lands. 

In January of this year, the EPA announced it will no longer consider the cost of lives saved by limiting air pollution and only consider the cost to businesses for implementing clean air practices. And in February, Trump’s EPA ended the legal authority for the federal government to control dangerous pollution from greenhouse gases.

In the face of relentless, disorienting attacks, individual resistance is paramount to ensure our collective safety. I draw courage and comfort from my home state of Minnesota, where peaceful protests against inhumane immigration enforcement have persisted for weeks amidst incredible pressure. Citizens documented attacks on our persons and constitutional rights with cell phones, and provided mutual aid to keep neighbors fed and housed. The country paid attention.

Our health and environment need a similar groundswell of fierce love and action. Show up. Learn. Resist disinformation. Support public media and environmental advocacy. Find and support local environmental organizations fighting for your community. Ask questions, learn, and listen about what is important to your neighbors. Share their stories. Call your representatives and hold them accountable to help keep our world cleaner and safer. 

And take time each day, even if it is just a moment, to enjoy being outside, taking in the wonder of this likely singular planet where life as we know it has flourished.

Let’s not take that for granted.

Read the full letter with citations on the MinnPost website.