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This isn't a rule that promotes safety. It's a rule that assuages the fears of anti-nuclear activists with no meaningful difference between this and other standards in terms of danger. "As low as reasonably achievable" means that even if there is seemingly no return from a safety perspective, you still need to reduce not just radiation emission, but exposure time. It assumes that radiation is lifetime accumulating and that there is no safe level of radiation exposure, even though that doesn't match the science.
Say, for instance, you have a nuclear reactor that exposes employees to the same amount of radiation from having a banana in their pocket during work hours would. There is a new type of radiation shielding that can be retrofitted to the reactor to reduce that by 10x. There is already no danger due to radiation exposure. ALARA states that you should undergo the retrofit, since it is possible to reduce the level of exposure, even though there is no difference in danger between now and that hypothetical future where you have the new shielding.
https://youtu.be/KT5hYHdelmg
... isn't that true though?
"Safe" is relative. Any radiation exposure has a small chance to cause cancer. We consider a few x-rays not harmful, but just because the chance is generally worth taking for the results.
It's the reason the person taking the X-ray is behind lead or a wall.
Yes, that is the way that the entire industry, from X-ray machines to NASA astronauts, is run. ALARA and the Linear No Threshold model are standard in the industry. The issue is that the science disagrees with the need to take those extreme precautions.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2663584/
Basically, ALARA and Linear No Threshold assumes that radiation is a novel danger and we must treat it as though our bodies have no mechanism for dealing with it. But our living world is absolutely steeped in radiation and we have obvious biological responses to those threats as a result. Like getting sunburnt. The sun didn't burn you, your skin cells voluntarily told your body to kill them because they were irradiated. We also have less extreme mechanisms of DNA repair for lower doses. Meaning there is actually a minimum dose needed for you to be in any kind of danger.