Imagine a world where electricity is so abundant and inexpensive that energy scarcity ceases to exist. A world where every home, every town, every factory and data center has access to reliable, carbon-free power 24 hours a day. Where desalination plants turn seawater into fresh water for drought-stricken regions. Where synthetic fuels such as hydrogen are made cleanly, cheaply, and at scale. Where heavy industries—steel, cement, ammonia—emit almost no carbon. Where the price of energy no longer constrains economic opportunity anywhere on Earth.

This future is not speculative. It is not distant. It is technically available today.

The technologies required to deliver effectively limitless clean energy exist. We have known how to build safe, high-output nuclear reactors for well more than half a century. Moreover, the hundreds of reactors that have been running for the last 70 years have a better safety record than any other power source—that’s right, even better than solar and wind. Modern designs are even safer and simpler than what came before, and they can be built modularly, quickly, and at costs low enough to transform the global economy. We know how to build them; other countries are doing it.

What stands between us and abundant clean energy is not physics, engineering, or economics. It is a cultural fear—a deep, reflexive anxiety about the danger of radiation that has shaped public opinion, education, regulatory frameworks, and policy choices for three generations.

This fear has cost humanity more than almost any other scientific misunderstanding of the modern age.

The Promise We’ve Postponed

If nuclear energy had been allowed to scale naturally after the 1970s, analysts estimate that:

• atmospheric carbon might be almost 100 gigatons lower,
• millions of lives lost to air pollution would have been saved,
• energy prices would be lower and far more stable,
• and nations would be less dependent on volatile fuel markets.

Every credible study shows the same thing: Nuclear energy is the safest, cleanest, and most reliable high-density power source humanity has discovered. In the late 1970s, France nuclearized almost all of its fossil-fueled generation. Their experience—abundant clean electricity, minimal carbon emissions, low household power costs—is just a modest glimpse of what widespread nuclear adoption could have provided globally.

We could be living in an age of clean plenty. Instead, we argue about scarcity.

Why Didn’t This Happen?

It didn’t happen because in the late 1950s and ’60s, at the dawn of the nuclear age, the world became deeply—and understandably—frightened. Atmospheric nuclear weapons tests spread fear across continents. Scientists and policy leaders adopted an extremely cautious framework to predict the effect of radiation exposure: the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) model. The model assumes that any dose of radiation, no matter how small, carries health risks.

This was not based on low-dose human data. It was impossible to find low-dose harm in the data. So the model made a precautionary extrapolation from high-dose observations. This was a choice made because the world needed a simple, conservative way to discourage nuclear brinkmanship. In retrospect, it helped shape the visceral global fear of any nuclear radiation.

But the unintended result was that a fear designed to restrain warfare began to restrain peaceful technology and the path to a safer, cleaner world.

Fear Hardened Into Dogma

Over time, the LNT—and the anxieties that accompanied it—ossified into regulation. Agencies mandated that nuclear plants must prevent even radiation releases so small that they are drowned out by natural background variation. Evacuation standards assumed danger at levels far below those ever shown to produce harm. Licensing processes grew lengthier, more expensive, and more extremely risk averse.

Public belief followed. People began to fear even medical imaging. A radiation dose from a CT scan, a dental X-ray, or even an intercontinental flight felt ominous—even though these exposures are tiny compared with the daily exposure experienced by people living with high natural background radiation. In places like Ramsar, Iran, and Kerala, India, tens of thousands live with background radiation levels that the LNT predicts will be fatal. Yet their health and longevity are as good as or better than that of surrounding populations.

Decades of scientific study, including large-scale investigations by the United Nations Scientific Committee and others, have shown that negative health effects from chronic low-dose radiation, if they exist, are too small to detect. Yet though challenged, the LNT continues to direct policy, regulation, and fear.

The human body is not fragile. It is resilient. Our biology evolved in a sea of natural radiation and its repair mechanisms handle low-dose exposure easily. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here.

The Real Consequences of Imaginary Danger

Treating minuscule potential risk as if it were to bring certain harm has had profound global consequences:

• The United States abandoned a clean, safe energy technology just as it was maturing.
• Developing nations grew dependent on coal because nuclear projects were deemed too “dangerous.”
• The world poured trillions into fossil fuels—the energy source that is actually deadly, actually polluting, and actually destabilizing our climate.
• Medical, industrial, and research uses of radiation were slowed, discouraged, or made prohibitively expensive.

In short, it is fear of radiation—not radiation itself—that has done measurable harm to human health and well-being.

A Better Approach for a Better Century

We should not ignore real hazards. High-dose radiation, delivered quickly, can be dangerous, even fatal, and must be regulated. But it is time to distinguish genuine risk from imagined peril.

That means:

• updating regulatory frameworks so they reflect modern biological knowledge;
• ending policies that treat micro-dose exposure as morally unacceptable;
• accelerating licensing for new reactors and, especially, advanced reactor designs;
• and allowing communities to weigh the real, enormous benefits of nuclear energy against its actual—if almost unmeasurable—risks.

If we do this, abundant clean energy becomes not a dream but a reality.

A Future Worth Choosing

Humanity’s greatest advances have always come from overcoming fear—fear of sea voyaging, fear of flight, fear of the unknown. Radiation belongs on that list.

For 70 years, fear blocked the path to an energy-rich future. The science now makes clear: The danger was never low-level radiation. The danger was the fear.

If we choose evidence over anxiety and possibility over fear, we can finally build the world we should already have—cleaner, safer, and more affordable and abundant than we ever allowed ourselves to imagine.