The LNT Report: How Bad Science Made The World Afraid of Nuclear Power

#1 New Release in Nuclear Engineering 

In May 2025, President Trump issued his executive orders greenlighting nuclear power and identifying something called “LNT” as a flawed theory not grounded in science. Suddenly, many thousands of people wanted to know “What the hell is LNT? And why, after all these years, should it be abandoned?” 

This new book by Mike Conley gives the answers to these questions. It’s the first book for the general reader on this important topic. LNT (“Linear No-Threshold”) is the hypothesis that any amount of nuclear radiation, no matter how tiny, does some harm, and the only safe dose of radiation is zero. This hypothesis is provably false, and yet it has dominated nuclear policy since the 1940s, holding back the development of the safest, most efficient, and cleanest form of energy generation. 

The LNT Report: How Bad Science Made the World Afraid of Nuclear Power is a fascinating detective story, uncovering the history of the LNT dogma, showing how it finally came to be exposed and debunked as bad science (BS). Careless assumptions, panicky post-Hiroshima emotions, careerist bad faith, and the financial interests of fossil-fuel titans all played a part. The result was the domination of public discussion by a false conclusion: radiation is risky in any quantity, no matter how low the dose. 

In 1927, Professor Hermann Muller published a paper asserting the LNT hypothesis, though providing no evidence for it. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for this paper in 1946, despite the fact that the evidence he had gathered since 1927 was deeply flawed and the hypothesis itself dubious. In the years that followed, Muller and his supporters employed all available means to cover up the deficiencies in LNT, even to the point of suppressing contrary evidence. 

The hero of this detective story is the outstanding scientific authority in the field, Professor Edward J. Calabrese, who traced the LNT hypothesis from its inception up to recent years. Calabrese looked at every available detail of the discussion, even including the private correspondence of Muller and others, and showed how, at every step, wrong assumptions and unsound experimental techniques were employed to save LNT from public refutation, and to save Muller’s Nobel Prize from being scandalously discredited. 

The truth, finally made clear by many years of careful scientific examination and by recent advances in cell biology, is that low doses of radiation are harmless, and even beneficial to health, because of the human body’s natural ability to repair cells damaged by radiation. Fears of the risks of nuclear power have been wildly exaggerated and then irresponsibly hyped. 

We’re all constantly subject to natural background radiation. Life on Earth evolved subject to continual radiation, which has gradually declined over the millennia, so that we’re pre-adapted to higher background radiation than we experience today, and may even benefit from increased radiation. Low-dose radiation is like exercise for your body’s cells, which naturally respond by up-regulating their DNA repair mechanisms. 

Nuclear energy is not only clean and inexhaustible, its risks are far smaller than the hazards of any alternative, including not just fossil fuels but also ‘renewables’, solar and wind, which turn out to be more dangerous than people have been led to believe, as well as unsustainable economically. Wind and solar can only be maintained if supported by nuclear power or fossil fuels, or by environmentally hazardous fleets of jumbo batteries. 

Beginning with Muller’s careless assumptions. The LNT Report traces the twists and turns of LNT’s reception and dissemination by politicians, media, and the public. The propagation of LNT was boosted by people’s horror at the prospect of nuclear war, motivating them to say anything to discredit nuclear energy, and also by fossil fuel financial interests, which had their own anti-nuclear bias. 

The LNT Report has been exhaustively vetted and approved by numerous scientific experts, some of whose names and credentials are listed in the book. This is solid science at its best, explained to the non-scientist reader by an outstanding popular science writer. It’s a companion book to Earth Is a Nuclear Planet (2024) and the forthcoming Roadmap to Nowhere (2026), the ultimate exposé of ‘renewables’, both co-authored by Mike Conley.

MIKE CONLEY, a lifelong science nerd, became interested in nuclear power in 2010, and quickly saw that the field was in dire need of writers who could explain the technology to the average reader. So he joined the Thorium Energy Alliance, met dozens of scientists and engineers, and made them an offer: “You explain it to me and I’ll explain it to the world.” The son of a career naval officer, Mike Conley has lived in Yokohama, Oslo, Idaho, Washington, Nevada, Arizona, Illinois, Maryland, Hawaii, and California, and has backpacked through Thailand and Cambodia. Born in Chicago, he’s been a resident of Southern California since 1967 and has lived in the Echo Park Hills of Los Angeles since 1994, working on screenplays for Hollywood.