You're going to be hearing about this a lot. That "65 million" number is going to be carved on the public consciousness in letters a foot deep. Their contention is that the normal method of calculating radiation damage (from the International Commission on Radiological Protection [ICRP]) is not correct.

Naturally, you're going to hear squat in the media in terms of actual analysis, or where the numbers come from. I looked into it a bit, although I don't have the full report:

The group has a website here.

A few choice bits from the Executive Summary:

...The committee examines the ethical basis of principles implicit in the ICRP models and hence in legislation based on them. The committee concludes that the ICRP justifications are based on outmoded philosophical reasoning, specifically the averaging cost-benefit calculations of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism has long been discarded as a foundation for ethical justification of practice owing to its inability to distinguish between just and unjust societies and conditions. It may, for example, be used to underpin a slave society, since it is only the overall benefit which is calculated, and not individual benefit. The committee suggests that rights-based philosophies such as Rawls Theory of Justice or considerations based on the UN Declaration of Human Rights should be applied to the question of avoidable radiation exposures to members of the public resulting from practice. The committee concludes that releases of radioactivity without consent can not be justified ethically since the smallest dose has a finite, if small, probability of fatal harm. In the event that such exposures are permitted, the committee emphasises that the calculation of 'collective dose' should be employed for all practices and time scales of interest so that overall harm may be integrated over the populations.

This seems to place science below politics in the analysis. The bit about the smallest dose having a finite probability of fatal harm is bullshit, and the pure linear model of radiation exposure has been discarded by most scientists familiar with hormesis and the actual statistics on low-level radiation.

This is a transparent attempt to crush the nuclear industry, with the focus being the centralized power structure of the European Union. A number of the people associated with the ECRR are members of the Green Party. As they themselves put it:

...The committee lists its recommendations. The total maximum permissible dose to members of the public arising from all human practices should not be more than 0.1mSv, with a value of 5mSv for nuclear workers. This would severely curtail the operation of nuclear power stations and reprocessing plants, and this reflects the committee's belief that nuclear power is a costly way of producing energy when human health deficits are included in the overall assessment.

I expect to weigh in on this more in the future with my own opinions and others as they come in.

As usual, it is fascinating to see these people dismiss their opposition for being "pro-industry," and assume that all their data is therefore biased and worthless. On the other hand, they themselves, with a known agenda of being anti-industrial, anti-capitalist, and anti-Western, are never assumed to carry their own biases into their work.