For 50 years, US nuclear facilities have had to follow a rule called ALARA — keep radiation exposure "as low as reasonably achievable," on top of hard legal dose limits. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission wants to kill it, as part of a broader rule change the agency's own analysis estimates saves industry about $9.5 million a year overall. The reason traces directly to one thing: an executive order telling the NRC to help quadruple US nuclear capacity by 2050 to feed surging electricity demand from AI data centers. Officials say the hard dose limits themselves aren't changing. Having read the actual 164-page proposal, that's true in the narrowest sense — the headline numbers stay on the books — but the document changes how three of those limits actually work in practice: how much a worker can receive in a single year, how high a public dose limit can go with NRC sign-off, and whether an overexposure even has to be reported.