Conventional wisdom holds that nuclear power plants — outside of ultra-rare disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima — are perfectly safe for nearby residents.
But a massive new study conducted by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has thrown a monkey wrench in that narrative by finding an alarming link between nuclear facilities and cancer. After gathering and analyzing nearly two decades worth of data, the Harvard team found higher rates of cancer mortality in communities that lived closer to nuclear power plants. And the closer that a community was to a nuclear plant, the higher the cancer mortality rates.
The findings, described in a new study published in the journal Nature Communications, are not definitive, and do not, on their own, prove that the nuclear plants caused the bump in cancer deaths. One of the study’s drawbacks was that it did not factor in direct radiation measurements for each facility, and assumed that all nuclear plants would have the same impact.
Nonetheless, the researchers say the association is significant enough to warrant further inquiry.
“Our study suggests that living near a [nuclear power plant] may carry a measurable cancer risk — one that lessens with distance,” senior author Petros Koutrakis, a professor of environmental health and human habitation at the Harvard school, said in a statement about the work. “We recommend that more studies be done that address the issue of NPPs and health impacts, particularly at a time when nuclear power is being promoted as a clean solution to climate change.”
The researchers say that previous studies into this area focused on the impact of a single nuclear plant on its surrounding community. To get a bigger picture, they pulled data on a national scale spanning 2000 and 2018, including county-level data on cancer mortality from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and data on the nuclear plants from the US Energy Information Administration. These were fed into a statistical model for “continuous proximity” that accounted for the impact of all nearby nuclear plants, instead of just one. The team also controlled for other factors, like median household income, rates of smoking, and the proximity to the nearest hospital.
Rates of cancer mortality — especially among older adults — were higher in communities closer to nuclear plants. And during the study period, the researchers estimated that roughly 115,000 cancer deaths across the US, or about 6,400 deaths per year, were attributable to proximity to nuclear power plants.
Again, this is alarming, but not proof of causation. Though the approach is novel, it contradicts decades of research into the topic. And the study does not identify what could be the mechanism behind the cancer deaths. Radiation seems the obvious culprit. But the scientific consensus is that the radiation emitted by nuclear facilities is negligible. Per the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a person living within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant would receive an average radiation dose of 0.001 millirem per year. “To put this in perspective,” the commission states in its FAQ, “the average person in the United States receives an exposure of 300 millirem per year from natural background sources of radiation.”
Still, this doesn’t necessarily preclude the possibility that nuclear plants may not be living up to safety standards and cutting corners. On the other hand, maybe it’s the nuclear plant’s locations that are responsible for the upticks in cancer. At this moment, though, we just don’t know.
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