Radiophobia did not lead to rogue regulation.
Rogue regulation led to radiophobia.[Infallible Preacher]

Figure 1. Fiestaware Salad Bowls

In 2020, the parents of a South Jersey high schooler gave him a dosimeter for Christmas. To demonstrate it, they took him to an antique store and bought a 1950’s Fiestaware plate. In the mid 20th century, Fiestaware was a popular, upscale dishware brand, prized for its deep, glowing colors. To create these colors, the glaze contained uranium oxide. The dosimeter duly registered the change in dose rate as the young man moved the meter towards and away from the plate, demonstrating the square law.1 A good learning experience. Well done, parents and son.

Figure 2. South Jersey HAZMAT team trying to figure out what to with a dinner plate

Entranced, the kid took the dosimeter and the plate to school to show to his science teacher. When it was discovered that radioactive material was on the premises, the alarm was sounded, the school evacuated, and a phalanx of local police, firemen and the county Hazmat team rushed in to thwart the menace. The school was searched room by room, and the dangerous dish was found. I don’t know how it was disposed of.

Earlier in 2020, Theo Richel did an instructive video on low dose rate radiation,

In the course of filming that video, he visited the high background dose rate beach in Guarapari, Brazil, where people bury themselves in 0.7 mSv/day sand. They believe it eases their health problems. Theo brought two kilograms of beach sand back to his home in Holland, to demonstrate natural radioactivity in his presentations. When the Dutch government discovered he had Brazilian beach sand in his possession, they confiscated it. They intend to bury it at a depth of 500 meters in a yet to be developed repository to protect future generations from beach sand.

Under Austrian law, a health spa owner must maintain his radon levels 30 times higher than the EPA action level.\cite{ans-2012}[p 11] If he fails to do so, his customers can no longer use their government health insurance to pay for the treatment. Austria is stridently anti-nuclear power.

It’s easy to list example after example of the craziness caused by radiophobia. It would be awfully funny, if it weren’t auto-genocidally tragic.

How did we get here? The standard story goes something like this. Indoctrinated by anti-nuke activists, the public became radiophobic. They demanded a nuclear regulatory system whose overriding priority was preventing a release. This regulatory system got a little out of control and imposed some possibly unnecessary requirements.

The standard story is dead wrong. For one thing the timeline does not work. Nuclear costs were dropping fairly rapidly until 1967 at which point nuclear was as cheap as coal when coal was as cheap as it ever was in real terms. In 1967, six big nuke plants whose overnight cost was less than $1000/kW in today’s money began construction. But then things went south in a hurry.

Figure 3.Overnight Cost, USA Nuclear Power Plants, adapted from \cite{lovering-2016}}

By 1974, nuclear was prohibitively expensive. After 1974, essentially no new nuclear plants were ordered in the US in the 20th century.

Figure 4. USA Nuclear Power Plant Orders, reference \cite{eia-1997}[Table C-1]

Public support for nuclear remained strong throughout this period. In October, 1971, the whole town of Midland, Michigan turned out for a rally in support of two nuclear plants in the town, and a protest against the AEC, where the construction license application was languishing.[268] Local rock bands played and state politicians, GOP and Dem, bloviated. The rally ended with everybody singing:

Cleaner air and water for the mid-state is our stand,
For the welfare of our people and the future of our land.
Let us tell the folks in Washington, a license we demand.
We need nuclear power now.

as combined high school bands played The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

In 1974, polls showed the US public 60% in favor of nuclear power, and 28% opposed. In 1976, US activists sponsored voter initiatives in a half-dozen states, calling for a moratorium on nuclear plant construction. All were soundly defeated.[315][p 199]. The first real non-NIMBY protest against nuclear power was at Wyhl in Germany in 1975. The RAND corporation did not start chronicling US nuclear plant protests until 1977.[75] By that time nuclear power had already lost the war.

What actually happened in 1967? That should be an easy one. The Six Day War and the closing of the Suez Canal. The real price of oil, which had been falling slowly but steadily since the end of World War II and in 1967 was at an all time low, abruptly started to climb. Things got worse in 1969 when Qaddafi nationalized Libyan oil, and then a lot worse in 1973 with the Yom Kippur War and the Oil Embargo. The factor of three increase in real oil price between 1968 and 1974 priced oil out of the power generation market, creating a boom for coal and nuclear. Industry rushed to build more coal and nuclear plants. Pushback against the Regulatory Division of the AEC evaporated.

In 1961, the Regulatory Division of the AEC had been separated from the rest of the AEC. In 1963, they moved to their own campus in Bethesda.2 Their job was to prevent a release. Period. They had been probing, seeing how far they could go. Congress had given them no guidance and no limits. But there was strong pushback from industry which was in a life and death struggle with fossil, and from the promotional side of the AEC, and from Big Government Democrats in Congress. This created a kind of balance. Most importantly, the cost of coal put a cap on how hard they could push. With the massive jump in the cost of oil, followed by a big increase in the cost of coal, that balance disappeared.

What does this have to do with radiophobia? In 1959, the AEC pressured by a mendacious Rockefeller Foundation led campaign had adopted LNT. A release became intolerable. This meant the AEC had to claim they could prevent a release, or at least make its probability negligibly small. The Two Lies were born.

The Two Lies combined with the Oil Crisis did something more than raise nuclear’s cost by a factor of five or more. It created a large, well positioned, and very well funded ecosystem that depended on them:

1) The bureaucrats who wrote and enforced the regulations they decided was needed to prevent a release.

2) Nearly a dozen national labs who researched solutions to the problems associated with even the tiniest exposure and ways to make nuclear power ever safer. Often these labs were the largest single employer in their Congressional district.

3) An entire profession of Health Physics specialists who carefully monitored and documented the tiniest exposures. These experts were in an priviledged position to promulgate the Two Lies and defend attacks on them.

4) The armies of people required to clean up locations that had been contaminated by man-made radioisotopes, even if the dose rates were less than the natural background contamination.

5) Most importantly, a whole industry who at great cost had surmounted the barriers of entry erected by the Two Lies, and needed them to protect their failure to innovate, gross inefficiency, and sometimes shoddy quality

All these people, the nuclear complex, needed the public to be scared to death of radiation in order to feed their families. They needed and produced radiophobia.

As always, Ted Rockwell put it best. In a 2000 letter to the NRC arguing against LNT, he let it all hang out:

The short-term benefits to regulators and industry by the current commitment to waste massive public resources by fabricating public fears of radiation are ethically and morally untenable, as well as legally questionable.\cite{rockwell-2000}[Emphasis mine]

Rockwell knew the NRC would deny their motives were anything but saintly concern for human safety, so he ended the letter with an anecdote.

As the head of one national radiation protection program hissed to me at the BRPS Conference: ``We know your agenda; to kill the golden goose.”\cite{rockwell-2000}

The standard story has it backwards. Radiophobia did not lead to rogue regulation. Rogue regulation led to radiophobia. To rid ourselves of radiophobia, we must first rid ourselves of its cause.