Yucca Mountain News Clips
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
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Senator Harry Reid (D-NV)
Monday, August 8, 2005
Reid, Ensign secure hearing on public safety standards at proposed Yucca Mountain site
Reid, Ensign Give Nevadans Opportunity to Voice Opposition to Proposed Nuclear Waste Dump
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senators Harry Reid and John Ensign are working to ensure Nevadans continue to have a voice in the ongoing fight to stop the proposed Yucca Mountain project.
The project was already years behind schedule, and recently received a substantial set back after a court ruling that the project must meet much stronger radiation standards than the Bush Administration had proposed. The court determined that any radiation limit set for the Yucca Mountain project must be based on the time the public would be exposed to the peak level of radiation. The Department of Energy, the agency trying to open the project, had been hoping for a much weaker standard.
Based on the court ruling, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), tasked with setting the limit on how much total radiation the public can be exposed to, is working on setting a new standard to which DOE must comply. EPA is expected to release the revised radiation very soon. As required by law, that standard will be subject to a public comment period before it becomes final.
Under pressure from the two Nevada Senators, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson promised to hold a public comment hearing in Las Vegas so the community has a chance to be heard. In a letter sent to Administrator Johnson today, Reid and Ensign reminded him of that commitment and asked that the agency also hold hearings in Reno and Amargosa Valley. The Senators expect the EPA to fulfill their responsibility of making public safety and sound science a top priority and to include any opposition and concerns when setting the final limit for radiation exposure.
A copy of that letter follows:
August 8, 2005
The Honorable Stephen Johnson
Administrator
United States Environmental Protection Agency
1200 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20460
Dear Administrator Johnson:
We are writing in regard to the public hearing that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has agreed to hold in Las Vegas, Nevada, following EPA´s publication of its revised radiation standard for Yucca Mountain.
We appreciate your commitment to hold a public hearing in Las Vegas on your upcoming proposed radiation standard for the proposed Yucca Mountain repository. It is important that those members of the public potentially most affected by the radiation standard be given the opportunity to meaningfully participate in the decision-making process. As discussed with you and your staff, the structure of the hearing is critical to ensuring full participation and that Nevadans´ concerns are given careful consideration and adequate response. Accordingly, the following recommendations are critical to ensuring that this is done.
The comment period for this proposal must be no less than 180 days. This will provide sufficient time to review and provide comments on the proposal. This is particularly important as we understand that your proposal may depend on assessments in DOE's draft license application that to date DOE has been unwilling to provide. Nevadans may not be in a position to respond fully to the EPA rule until DOE releases this key information. In addition, the rule should be published, and the public should receive notice of the hearing, at least 60 days before the date of the hearing.
We also encourage EPA to hold hearings in Reno and Amargosa Valley as well as Las Vegas. However, hearings in other locations should in no way be seen as a substitute for holding a hearing in Las Vegas. At a minimum, the hearing should have a satellite feed in order to enable community members in multiple locations to participate. Likewise, we urge EPA to accept video and written testimony from those who cannot attend the hearing in person.
Finally, we urge you to personally attend the hearing so that you can hear and see the depth of Nevadans´ opposition to a weak radiation standard that does not meet the National Academy of Sciences guidelines, thus needlessly exposing them to public health risks. Because of the enormity, time span and risk of the proposed project, any standard must err on the side of caution in order to guarantee the protection of public health and the environment for hundreds of thousands of years
Given the magnitude of human health and safety implications of the proposed Yucca Mountain project, we hope that you will act to fully implement these recommendations. We appreciate your attention to this important matter.
Sincerely,
HARRY REID, United States Senator
JOHN ENSIGN, United States Senator
Cc: Kenny C. Guinn, Governor of Nevada
Bob Loux, Executive Director, Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects
Brian Sandavol, Attorney General, State of Nevada
Samuel Bodman, Secretary, Department of Energy
Nils Diaz, Chairman, Nuclear Regulatory Commission
B. John Garrick, Chairman, Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board
G. Paul Bollwerk III, Chairman, Atomic Safety and Licensing Board
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Congressman Jim Gibbons (R-NV)
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Gibbons Statement on EPA's New Radiation Standard for Yucca Mountain
Public health and safety standards should not be based on speculation and supposition
-- Washington, DC --- An ardent opponent to the Yucca Mountain project, Congressman Jim Gibbons (R-Nev.) released the following statement regarding the new radiation standard for Yucca Mountain as announced today by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
“The standard released by the EPA today is arbitrary and grossly misguided. EPA has an obligation to protect public safety today, tomorrow, and in a million years. Yet, the EPA thought it would be OK to increase its radiation standard from 15 millirem to 350 millirem—a 23 fold increase—when the clock hits 10,000 years and 1 day simply because we don´t know what the future holds. They have no scientific evidence to show such a dramatic increase is warranted or safe.
“The EPA should not speculate that a standard which is not deemed safe today could miraculously become a safe standard in the future. Public health and safety standards should not be based on speculation and supposition. Nevadans deserve better, and I will stand united with our Congressional delegation and our state leaders in fighting any future progress on the Yucca Mountain Project.’
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Las Vegas SUN
August 10, 2005
EPA proposal gives Yucca a boost
Nevada officials vow to challenge radiation standard
By Benjamin Grove <grove@lasvegassun.com>
and Suzanne Struglinski <suzanne@lasvegassun.com>
Sun Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- The Environmental Protection Agency gave Yucca Mountain a burst of momentum on Tuesday when it issued a revised radiation-release rule that Nevada officials say is dangerously lax.
Energy Department officials said the proposed nuclear waste repository could meet the standard and they hope the new rule will help put the beleaguered project back on track.
But Nevada officials vow to again take the fight over radiation standards to court.
"If this bogus new standard, or anything close to it, ends up being adopted by EPA, Nevada will sue them again," Attorney General Brian Sandoval said.
The proposed new standard actually offers future generations less protection from radiation than the old one and does not mesh with a federal court's requirement for a new standard, Nevada officials and Yucca critics said.
Gov. Kenny Guinn called it "junk science at its worst."
"I can't imagine how they could have done anything to make themselves more vulnerable in the court of law as well as the court of science," Guinn said.
The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday proposed regulations that limit the amount of radiation that could be safely emitted from the proposed underground repository for high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The agency in 2001 established a 15-millirem radiation exposure limit for up to 10,000 years, which means a person living in the immediate vicinity of Yucca could receive that much radiation in a year -- roughly equivalent to a chest X-ray.
But delivering a major setback to Yucca last year, a federal court threw out that standard, saying it was not "based upon and consistent with" recommendations by the National Academy of Sciences, as Congress required.
The court said the academy rejected 10,000 years "as a proper benchmark but EPA used it anyway." The academy said the standard should go out to the "peak dose," when the radiation levels would be at their highest. This could occur about 100,000 years or more into the future.
That left two courses of action for Yucca to proceed: Congress could allow the agency to create a standard outside of what the academy wanted, or the EPA could revise the standard to bring it in line with the academy's recommendation.
The agency proposed a "two-tiered" rule Tuesday. One tier maintains the 15-millirem standard for up to 10,000 years, and the other limits exposure to 350 millirem per year for 10,000 to 1 million years.
The rule is not final. It will go through a 60-day public comment period before a finished rule is published and implemented by the agency.
Energy Department officials seemed content with the standard.
"The department believes this is a standard that can be met," Energy Department spokesman Craig Stevens said. "This is a positive step in the process."
The radiation standard is important because the Energy Department must prove that Yucca can meet the standard in order to obtain a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC ultimately will determine whether Yucca can meet the standard, and whether Yucca can be licensed as a safe repository site.
The next step now for the department is to submit a license application, which it aims to do early next year. The NRC could take up to four years to review and approve the license before construction could begin. Yucca is not expected to begin accepting waste until 2012 at the earliest.
Nevada cannot challenge the new standard in court until it becomes final, but state officials will use the time to prepare a challenge, Nevada senior deputy attorney general Marta Adams said.
"It's amazing how much this deviates from what the NAS requires," Adams said.
Among the complaints of Yucca critics and Nevada officials is that the EPA is proposing a more lax standard at the time when the repository's radiation levels would be at their highest -- after 10,000 years. Nevada believes the waste storage containers and other man-made elements will fail by that time and the rock will not offer enough protection to contain radiation.
Joe Egan, a lawyer who handles Yucca issues for the state, said the EPA gave no justification for a standard that increases 23-fold between 10,000 and 10,001 years, except that the performance of the repository is uncertain.
"What does that have to do with how much radiation a human should get?" Egan said. "They fit the rule to meet the repository."
Jeffrey Holmstead, EPA's assistant administrator for air and radiation, said EPA officials had carefully reviewed the federal court ruling and were "quite confident" that their new standard would hold up in court if Nevada officials challenge it.
As part of its deliberations, the EPA considered current levels of background radiation in a number of major U.S. cities, he said. Currently, U.S. citizens receive various levels of "background" radiation from a number of sources, mostly natural sources, depending on where they live and their lifestyles.
People can receive radiation from natural sources that include the sun, soil, rocks, even food and other people. Radon gas is a common source of radiation often found in homes. People also get doses from man-made sources such as X-rays. A chest X-ray emits about 10 millirem of radiation and a mammogram about 30 millirem, Holmstead said.
People receive about 350 millirem a year on average, Holmstead said.
People living in the high-elevation city of Denver receive about 700 millirem of radiation a year, Holmstead said. In part relying on that statistic, the EPA deemed it "acceptable" for a person living near Yucca to receive roughly 350 millirem in background radiation, plus an additional 350 millirem from Yucca, Holmstead said.
Egan said this means the federal government is saying Nevadans can get twice the background levels of radiation than the rest of the country.
Holmstead said the EPA had avoided trying to set a radiation standard beyond 10,000 years in its first attempt in 2001 because it was so difficult to set standards that far into the future.
The EPA spent seven years researching and developing the standard released in 2001. It took just over a year to release a revised standard.
Devising a new 1 million-year standard was "a real scientific challenge," but the EPA issued it in order to respond to the court's direction, he said.
"The time frame we're dealing with here is really unprecedented," Holmstead said.
When pressed on how the public could have confidence in the standard, Holmstead said, "We do the best job we can based on all the science we have."
The radiation standard's 10,000-year compliance period would begin when Yucca is filled to capacity, currently set at 77,000 tons, and sealed, which could be roughly 50 years after it begins collecting waste.
A 60-day public comment period begins immediately. There will be two public comment hearings in Nevada and one in Washington, Holmstead said. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., had asked for three hearings in Nevada and a 180-day comment period.
Some nuclear power industry officials, as well as state officials in states with nuclear waste piling up at power plants, were initially pleased with the EPA standard.
"On the surface, it gives the DOE the opportunity to move on with the license application," said Martez Norris, executive director of the Nuclear Waste Strategy Coalition, another coalition of state government agencies and nuclear utilities. "It's a very positive sign."
Energy Department officials likely will not be surprised or troubled by the 350-millirem standard, said Charles Pray, Maine state nuclear safety advisor and a former Energy Department official. Department officials all along have anticipated that they might have to meet a two-tiered standard, said Pray, who is also co-chairman of the Yucca Mountain Task Force, a coalition of state regulatory agencies and nuclear industry officials advocating for Yucca.
"I think the science and the technology are there" for Yucca to meet the post-10,000-year standard, Pray said.
Brian O'Connell, director of the nuclear waste program at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, agreed Yucca should be able to meet the 350-millirem standard.
"It looks comfortable for compliance," O'Connell said. "I'm glad it's not 15 millirem for a million years."
But Guinn and Sandoval argued that the standard suggests that it is acceptable for Nevadans to receive twice a normal radiation dosage.
"For the first time ever in the world, it seeks to establish the level of 'natural background radiation' received by Americans as a tolerable threshold for additional radiation from man-made sources," they said in a news release.
Sandoval said, "In a snub to the scientific community and a federal appeals court in Washington, the EPA today issued a proposed standard for the licensing that is 100 times more lenient than what the government permits for releases from nuclear power plants."
The two Republican state officials said Nevadans could suffer 100 more times radiation exposure than what the federal government now permits for residents living near nuclear power plants. They said it is "by far the most lenient radiation protection standard proposed for any nuclear waste disposal project in the world."
Reaction from Nevada's congressional delegation was swift and shrill.
"I am appalled at the complete arrogance of the EPA in announcing these standards," Ensign said. "We've been down this road before. The federal appeals court already determined that the 10,000-year standard violated the law. This new standard is no better, and the EPA has provided no scientific basis for the 350 millirem figure."
"I am astounded that the EPA actually put those recommendations on paper," Reid said. "What the agency released today is nothing more than voodoo science and arbitrary numbers."
The post-10,000-year standard is not grounded in science, Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., said.
"EPA has an obligation to protect public safety today, tomorrow, and in a million years," Gibbons said. "Yet, the EPA thought it would be OK to increase its radiation standard from 15 millirem to 350 millirem -- a 23-fold increase when the clock hits 10,000 years and 1 day simply because we don't know what the future holds."
Gibbons noted the contrast in the EPA previously arguing for a very low standard for arsenic in drinking water because scientists do not know what level of arsenic is safe.
"They have failed us," Gibbons said of the EPA, during an appearance on Las Vegas ONE, Cox cable channel 19.
Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., asked, "Where's the proof that an additional 350 millirem per year of radiation won't have a negative impact on a human being? That contravenes 50 years of radiation science."
Reid and Berkley also alleged that the EPA had issued its standard as part of a Bush administration effort to jump start the stalled Yucca program.
So did Arjun Makhijani, president of the Maryland-based Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, noted that the Energy Department in 1999 told Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, a congressionally mandated watchdog group, that the maximum dose from Yucca would be 200 to 300 millirem per year several hundred thousand years into the future. That's conveniently just under the 350-millirem level, Makhijani noted.
"The dose limit seems designed to protect the industry's interest in a bad site, rather than public health," said Makhijani, who supports geologic disposal of nuclear waste, but believes Yucca is a bad site. "This is one more example of what I have called the 'double-standard standard.' When Yucca Mountain cannot meet the rules, the federal agencies change the rules to fit Yucca Mountain."
A 350-millirem level is still dangerous, Makhijani said. He said a person exposed to 350 millirem per year every year for 70 years would run a 1-in-40 chance of getting cancer. He called the EPA standard the worst single action the agency has taken since he began analyzing the agency nearly 25 years ago.
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Las Vegas SUN
August 10, 2005
Editorial: A miracle -- overnight
Las Vegas Sun
The Environmental Protection Agency spent just a little more than a year in revising its radiation standard for Yucca Mountain. This short period of time is ridiculously inadequate for such a life-and-death determination. Yucca Mountain, in a desert area 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is where Congress and President Bush have chosen to bury the nation's high-level nuclear waste. Construction on underground tunnels and burial vaults is under way by the Energy Department, which hopes to have a license to operate the repository by at least 2015.
The original radiation standard was a proposed maximum amount of radiation that would be allowed to escape from the repository each year over a period of 10,000 years. The standard was created by calculating how well the waste would be protected from the outer environment once it was buried under the mountain's thick rock in man-made casks. A federal court, basing its decision on a recommendation by the National Academy of Sciences, ruled last year that the proposed daily maximum amount of escaping radiation should be in place far longer than 10,000 years.
On Tuesday the EPA came out with its revision. The new standard retains the proposed maximum Yucca-related exposure for 10,000 years, which is 15 millirems per person per year (a single chest X-ray is 10 millirems). But in an effort to comply with the court order, the EPA announced that it was adding another proposed radiation standard for the next 990,000 years. During this period, the standard would be 350 millirems per person per year. The EPA says this second standard is equivalent to the natural and man-made radiation that people absorb each day. This second standard also requires the Energy Department to study what could happen to Yucca Mountain over 1 million years in terms of destructive events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, climactic changes and corrosion of the mountain and the man-made structures that would contain the waste.
In announcing the new standard, the EPA was affirmative in its belief that it could be achieved. "It is an unprecedented scientific challenge to develop proposed standards today that will protect the next 25,000 generations of Americans," said Jeffrey Holmstead, the EPA's assistant administrator for air and radiation. "EPA met this challenge by using the best available scientific approaches and has issued a standard that will protect public health for a million years."
Well, pardon our skepticism. The EPA has been around now for 35 years and in all that time hasn't even learned how to protect the public from dirty air and water. So how could it learn, in just over a year, how to protect the public from Yucca Mountain's radiation for an extra 990,000 years? And how can it expect the Energy Department to protect people in the distant future from cataclysmic events affecting the mountain? We hope the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which will rule on the new radiation standard, comes around to sharing our skepticism.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
August 10, 2005
Yucca radiation limits unveiled
Standards will be good for 1 million years, EPA says
By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday unveiled a new set of radiation limits for Yucca Mountain that appear headed on a path to prolong and intensify clashes over the safety of burying nuclear waste in Nevada.
A top EPA official said the standards, rewritten to satisfy a federal court ruling, would offer health protection to Nevadans from buried canisters of decaying nuclear fuel for as long as 1 million years.
But the federal agency's plan was met with immediate and strong criticism from Nevada leaders and citizen advocates.
They charged the EPA limits are lax and will do more to ensure a nuclear waste repository is built at Yucca Mountain than they will protect the public from exposure to radioactive particles expected to escape into the environment over thousands of years.
If EPA officials fail to change the benchmarks after fielding public comments over the next 60 days, Attorney General Brian Sandoval said Nevada "will sue them again."
"Never in our wildest nightmares would we have anticipated such a ridiculous standard," Gov. Kenny Guinn said. "This is junk science at its worst."
The radiation health standard is a primary benchmark used to ensure that safety protections are designed into the nuclear waste tunnels the Department of Energy proposes to build 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
EPA proposed a unique two-part standard, with one set of limits for the first 10,000 years of repository operation and a second set for the succeeding years, out to a million years.
The repository's potential impacts are projected through the use of complex computer modeling. Still, scientists vary in their levels of confidence to determine what Nevada's climate, geology and its population will be like thousands of years into the future.
"It is clear this is an unprecedented standard. We've never tried to regulate for this period of time," said Kevin Crowley, director of the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board of the National Academies of Science.
Jeffrey Holmstead, EPA assistant administrator for air and radiation, said the agency was attempting to set limits that will affect 25,000 generations.
"It's a real scientific challenge but we think we've done it in a way that is consistent with the best science," Holmstead said.
The Energy Department believes it can meet the proposed EPA standard, DOE spokesman Craig Stevens said. It was unclear what additional work DOE may need to perform to demonstrate compliance or what it might add to the project in terms of time or cost.
Yucca supporters said the proposed standards may finally give the Department of Energy some target to shoot for as its struggles to form a license application for the nuclear waste site.
The project has been delayed by several problems over the past year, most notably a federal court ruling last July 9 that threw out portions of the EPA's previous radiation standard.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled the EPA improperly limited its benchmark to 10,000 years. A National Academies of Science study ordered by Congress concluded in 1995 that long-lived radioactive particles could be escaping from Yucca Mountain at maximum dose levels for as long as 1 million years.
Holmstead maintained the revised limits should satisfy the judges.
"We're quite confident we've paid careful attention to what the court said," Holmstead said. "We are quite confident to the extent this is challenged it would be upheld."
Crowley, who was staff director of the panel that wrote the 1995 report, said it appeared "EPA has been very careful to link what they are doing to the recommendations in our previous report."
But Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said what EPA has proposed is "voodoo science and arbitrary numbers.
"I am astounded that the EPA actually put those recommendations on paper," Reid said.
Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., called the proposal "arbitrary and grossly misguided." Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., called it "irrational and misguided."
The EPA "is giving the finger to the court. It is almost as if they want it thrown out again," said Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.
"The EPA can propose any number it wants, but the real trick will be proving this new standard can be met, and it remains to be proven that can be done," said Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev.
For the first 10,000 years of operation, the Energy Department would need to calculate that a hypothetical farmer living 11 miles south of the repository, around Amargosa Valley, would be exposed to radiation from repository operations of no more than 15 millirem of radiation annually.
Holmstead said for comparison a chest X-ray exposes a patient to 10 millirem while a mammogram results in a 30 millirem exposure.
The repository exposures would be calculated on top of what people receive in natural background radiation given off by rocks and soil, building materials and cosmic rays. The EPA estimated the background radiation at Amargosa Valley at 350 millirem, while it said the national average was 300 millirem.
For the period beyond 10,000 years, EPA proposed to set the repository limit at 350 millirem above natural background. There is no corresponding groundwater standard.
In getting to that number, the EPA searched for a western state that it said would be "fairly well populated" and similar in other respects to Nevada. It settled on Colorado as a point of reference.
According to the EPA, Colorado's estimated annual average background radiation level is 700 millirem. The agency set 350 millirem as its post 10,000 year limit by subtracting Amargosa Valley's background levels from those in Colorado.
In that way, Holmstead said, "even in a million years from now, a person living at the border of the nuclear repository would not be exposed to radiation at levels any higher than what people are routinely exposed to throughout the country today."
The EPA also directed the Energy Department to perform additional analyses over the million-year time frame to determine how earthquakes, volcanic activities, a rainier climate and corrosion processes would affect its compliance with the reworked limits.
Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said the EPA approach was too much of a stretch.
"I am appalled at the complete arrogance of the EPA in announcing these standards," he said. "The EPA has provided no scientific basis for the 350 millirem figure."
"The EPA now has the dubious distinction of proposing a standard that would be the worst in the Western world, by far," said environmental scientist Arjun Makhijani, president of Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. "No Western programs explicitly allow as large as 350 millirem per year at the time of peak dose."
Steve Frishman, a Nevada technical adviser, said the new rules also cut DOE a break by allowing it to use median values in calculating radiation doses, allowing it effectively to discard high measurements. EPA said the change ensures compliance is measured by "the most likely performance" of the repository.
In its 216-page proposed regulation, the EPA noted it considered a two-part radiation standard in 1999 but rejected it. But due to the federal court's decision last summer "it is necessary for us to re-evaluate potential approaches," the agency said.
Given the uncertainties far into the future, the EPA's approach is "scientifically defensible," said Rod McCullum, a senior project manager for the Nuclear Energy Institute.
At 350 millirem, "it still is a small level of radiation," McCullum said. "You don't get health effects until you get into the hundreds of thousands of millirem."
But Judy Treichel, director of the nonprofit Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force, pointed to a recent National Academies study that concluded radiation exposures of any level increase health risks.
"This doesn't protect public health. It protects DOE's ability to build the dump," Treichel said.
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Pahrump Valley Times
August 10, 2005
Feds challenge Nye's oversight spending
By Steve Tetreault
PVT Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - Government auditors in a report Thursday challenged $1.2 million that the state of Nevada and three counties spent from federal funds to oversee Department of Energy activities at Yucca Mountain.
An inspector general's investigation concluded Nye, Clark, and Lincoln County officials misspent almost $1.1 million between them on un-permitted consultant tasks, salaries, travel to conferences and office expenses.
Auditors also said the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects misapplied $81,000 in payments to its nuclear waste law firm. The audit report said more than $74,000 was paid back during the investigation.
Officials in Nye and Clark counties disputed the audit and said they planned to appeal. However, Nye officials have not discussed the issue in a public forum and have not announced the results of the audit. The nuclear waste coordinator for Lincoln County was not available.
Local officials said they also were frustrated. Many of the expenses flagged by auditors had been approved by Yucca Mountain managers, they maintained.
"Basically, with no disrespect to the auditors, but they know nothing of what DOE has asked the counties to do or what we are allowed to do," said Nye County Commissioner Candice Trummell. Yucca Mountain is sited in Nye County, roughly 50 miles northeast of Pahrump and 20 miles north and east of Amargosa Valley and Beatty, respectively. "Some of the responsibility ought to be on DOE for having approved our work plans."
If the audit findings are upheld, counties could lose Yucca Mountain grants to make up the shortcomings.
An inspector general's audit two years ago challenged $3.3 million in county spending, although some of that was allowed after appeals. Nye County still is challenging more than $1 million in questioned spending from that audit, Trummell said.
The audit released Thursday challenged more than $163,000 in Clark County spending, about $720,000 spent by Nye County and more than $200,000 for Lincoln County.
"We don't believe any of our costs were questionable," said Irene Navis, Clark County director of nuclear waste planning. "We believe we are completely within the law and the intent of Congress. We welcome the scrutiny but it should be fair."
The Energy Department will ask the counties to submit monthly expense reports to avoid problems in the future, DOE spokesman Allen Benson said.
"It's in nobody's interest for the counties to have to get these constant audit findings," Benson said. "We want to work with them."
Navis said the counties would probably reject the idea. With DOE and Nevada heading toward conflicts over repository licensing, county officials are looking to loosen ties not strengthen them, she said.
Auditors reviewed invoices and work plans from May 2002 to July 2004, a period where the state and three counties spent $11.7 million appropriated by Congress to monitor the Yucca project.
The $1.2 million in questionable spending was less than the $3.3 million that inspectors challenged in a similar audit two years ago.
Still, DOE inspector general Gregory Friedman said, the audit "suggests that this program is still not fully achieving its intended results" to help counties weigh the potential local impacts of the proposed nuclear waste repository.
Federal law allows the county governments to use federal money grants to hire consultants to judge the repository's local impacts, to review Yucca science and to communicate with residents and with DOE.
Counties cannot spend federal money on lobbying or lawsuits. Nye County has spent the bulk of its oversight funding on consultants who have performed independent studies separate from the Energy Department's work. Additionally, millions of dollars have been spent on the Early Warning Drilling Program in Amargosa Valley near Yucca Mountain, which helps scientists determine water quality. Groundwater flow paths have also been studied and countless other scientific efforts have been undertaken. Nye County has not lobbied against the project nor is local government party to the state's official opposition to the repository.
Auditors said Nye County improperly allocated $224,000 in oversight funds for worker salaries that should have been charged to a separate Yucca Mountain grant. Trummell responded DOE had okayed the accounting.
Auditors also questioned $12,000 in travel costs for Nye County officials, including a trip to a National Association of Counties meeting in New Orleans and reimbursements for trips to the Nevada Test Site.
A $70,000 payment for an Indian Springs report commissioned by Clark County was challenged, as well as $87,000 given to a consultant to analyze federal legislation. Navis responded the audit figures were inflated, and the costs were allowable in both cases.
In Lincoln County, auditors questioned $86,000 in consultant fees to track legislation and review lawsuits related to the project.
Doug McMurdo contributed to this story.
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Pahrump Valley Times
August 10, 2005
Guesswork at root of radiation standards
By Phillip Gomez
PVT
The United States Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday said that a million years from now Amargosa Valley residents, living closest to the border of the proposed Yucca Mountain Repository, would be exposed to the same levels of radiation as urban residents of Salt Lake City or Denver, or "what people routinely accept (today)."
In a telephone news conference from Washington, D.C., with the nation's major news media, EPA Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation Jeffrey Holmstead asserted that the agency was being responsive to a federal court of appeals ruling last summer that said 10,000 years was an insufficient period of time for Yucca Mountain to be guaranteed safe.
In response, the EPA's new radiation standard projects 1 million years into the future.
Holmstead began by saying the court ruling had set an unprecedented challenge for the EPA to meet in analyzing the health and safety risks of the repository containing stored nuclear waste for more than a million-year period.
"If looked backward, that's 995,000 times longer than human history," Holmstead said. The risk protection standards established Tuesday were "unprecedented in human history," he said.
The Energy Policy Act of 1992 required EPA to develop standards for possible radiation leakage from the Yucca Mountain site. The long-term standards were designed to protect the public and the environment from exposure to the radioactive wastes stored in the federal facility operated by the Department of Energy.
The court ruling in July 2004 upheld most of the standards established by EPA in 2001, designed to protect people living closest to the repository within a range the agency deemed an acceptable level of risk up to 10,000 years.
The standards limited an individual's annual radiation exposure from ingestion, inhalation or physical contact to no greater than 15 millirem (a measure of the actual biological effects of radiation absorbed in human tissue).
That's roughly the radiation dosage from three chest X-rays per year.
But the court's decision was that EPA had ignored the longer 1-million-year standard recommended by the National Academy of Sciences, which the Energy Policy Act required EPA to base its standards upon and be consistent with.
The standards are important because the National Regulatory Commission must include the EPA's level of safety assurance in its licensing regulations for the repository.
Tuesday's revision of the standards, intended to satisfy the court by providing assurance up to 1 million years out, put the EPA's credibility on the line that it could guarantee the public's health based on sound science.
In responding to a Washington Post reporter's question about how the revision differed from the previous standard, Holmstead said, "We have retained the 10,000-year standard. Amargosa Valley residents will be exposed to no more than 15 millirem of radiation (up to 10,000 years)." Beyond that, up to 1 million years, Amargosa Valley residents would only be exposed to radiation levels as great as 750 millirem, or the equivalent background radiation that urbanites in Salt Lake City or Denver are exposed to in 2005.
The reporter on the line from National Public Radio asked, "How can the public have any confidence in the (new) standard?"
Using phrases such as "a real scientific challenge" and "as much as we possibly can," Holmstead responded that science could only credibly certify eventualities up to 10,000 years.
"No one in the U.S. has gone out to 1 million years," he said. "In all the EPA programs we only go out to 10,000 years."
Retained in the standard was the requirement from 2001 that the overall radiation dose limit of 15 millirem for individuals and for protection of drinking water derived from Amargosa Valley's aquifer after 10,000 years. In the latter case, groundwater standards are the same as national standards established by the EPA.
Holmstead said that Amargosa Valley residents today were exposed to a natural background radiation of 350 millirem, compared to Denver residents' exposure to 700 to 750 millirem. "One million years from now," he said, "it would be acceptable for people in Amargosa Valley to be exposed to the same levels as Denver today."
The standards require the Yucca Mountain facility to withstand the effects of earthquakes, volcanoes and any climate change producing increased rainfall, and that any deterioration of the waste canisters does not compromise the safety of nearby residents or the potability of the underlying aquifer.
In a 1995 report, the National Academy of Sciences said, "peak risks might occur tens-to-hundreds-of-thousands of years or even farther into the future." The academy recommended that computer-modeling techniques about radiation uncertainties be measured for the time of peak risk "which is on the order of 1 million years."
With the new standards in place, the National Regulatory Commission will be responsible for evaluating how well the Department of Energy has complied with the EPA's requirements guaranteeing the safety of Yucca Mountain, Holmstead said.
Asked by a Gannett reporter how confident he was that the new revised rule would meet with the approval of the federal court of appeals, Holmstead said, "Quite confident. ... We hope it will not be challenged in court. We are quite confident for all science that goes in the repository. A lot of time and effort has gone into (the study of Yucca Mountain's safety.)"
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Platts
August 09, 2005
EPA proposes two-tiered radiation standard for Yucca Mtn.
Washington (Platts)--9Aug2005
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is proposing a two-tiered standard under which radiation releases from a repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev. would be regulated for 1-million years. The proposal unveiled today would maintain the EPA's existing 10,000-year radiation protection standard for the site as the first tier, limiting maximum releases to 15 millirem (mrem) a year from all pathways and maintaining a separate groundwater protection standard of 4 mrem/yr. Post-10,000 years, the limit would be 350 mrem/yr and a separate groundwater limit would no longer exist. "It is an unprecedented scientific challenge to develop proposed standards today that will protect the next 25,000 generations of Americans," said Jeffrey Holmstead, EPA assistant administrator for air and radiation. If it becomes final, the proposed regulation would replace the 10,000-year standard a federal court remanded to the agency last year because it did not comply with the National Academy of Science's recommendation that it be long enough to cover the peak radiation dose, which DOE has projected could occur more than 400,000 years after the repository is sealed.
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Los Angeles Times
August 10, 2005
New Radiation Levels Proposed for Waste Site
The Energy Dept. says Yucca Mountain can meet the rules. Nevada officials remain critical.
By Steven Bodzin
Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency gave a boost Tuesday to plans for a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, proposing safety rules for radiation levels a million years from now that the Department of Energy said the project could meet.
Under the proposed standard, said Jeffrey Holmstead, the EPA's assistant administrator for air and radiation, "any hypothetical person living right next to the repository" would be exposed to the same radiation levels that people in Denver are exposed to now.
A dispute over the radiation standard has delayed the government's plans to bury canisters containing tens of thousands of tons of radioactive waste, mostly spent rods from nuclear power plants, in the Nevada desert about 90 miles north of Las Vegas. The EPA's previous standard had been thrown out in court.
Tuesday's announcement of the revised standard is "clearly a positive step," said spokesman Craig Stevens of the Department of Energy. "Should this proposed rule become final, it is a standard that the Department of Energy believes it can meet."
But critics said the dump could meet the standard only because the rules were dangerously lax.
"You could build a repository in Disneyland and meet this standard," said Robert R. Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.
The new rule would force the Energy Department to design the dump in a way that would expose neighbors to less than 15 millirems of radiation a year, an amount comparable to a chest X-ray.
But that standard would disappear after 10,000 years. From then to 1 million years, the dump could expose its neighbors to up to 350 millirems of radiation a year through the atmosphere — and unlimited radiation through groundwater.
One group that supported the notion of higher exposure limits after 10,000 years was the Electric Power Research Institute, a trade association for electric utilities and generators. Still, it requested long-term limits of 100 millirems a year — far lower than the level the EPA proposed.
By comparison, the EPA would not permit nuclear plants to expose people within two miles to more than 25 millirems a year. The agency allows exposures of up to 100 millirems a year at the Nevada Test Site, where atomic bombs were tested.
The EPA said it based the 350-millirem-a-year figure on the typical level of background radiation in the United States.
People are already exposed, on average, to between 300 and 400 millirems each year, mostly from radon in buildings, the sun and cosmic radiation.
Exposure is greater in areas at higher elevations, such as Denver.
A federal appellate court ruled a year ago that the EPA's previous standard was inadequate because it did not address exposure beyond 10,000 years.
The National Academy of Sciences, along with Department of Energy scientists, have said the canisters isolating the waste were likely to break down by then, allowing groundwater to carry some of the most dangerous radioisotopes to the surface.
"We thought it would be bad, but not this bad," said lawyer Joe Egan, who represented the state of Nevada in the lawsuit that led to the proposed new rule. "They gave the repository a complete pass and established an unprecedentedly lenient standard. It would be by far the most lenient standard in the world if it were to be adopted as proposed."
Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), a longtime critic of the waste site, joined in the chorus of condemnation. "What the agency released today is nothing more than voodoo science and arbitrary numbers," he said.
Before Yucca Mountain could accept any uranium rods from nuclear plants around the country, it must still clear many obstacles. The EPA is accepting 60 days of public comment on the rule. If the agency decides to keep the rule, the Energy Department would then have to prove that the dump could live up to the standard. The department is not expected to apply for a license for the facility until at least next year.
But first, the state of Nevada promises to go back to court.
"If this bogus new standard, or anything close to it, ends up being adopted by EPA, Nevada will sue them again," Nevada Atty. Gen. Brian Sandoval said.
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New York Times
August 10, 2005
Million Years of Safety Are Sought for A-Waste
By Michael Janofsky
WASHINGTON, Aug. 9 - The Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday that it had revised its health standard for the proposed nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada to limit radiation releases for a million years.
Department of Energy, via Reuters
Yucca Mountain crest, in Nevada, a proposed nuclear storage site.
The new standard is a response to a federal appeals court ruling 13 months ago that said the previous standard, for 10,000 years, did not go far enough. The revision includes an additional standard for 990,000 years.
Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, has been under legal challenges led by Nevada state officials since Congress selected it in 1987 to be a central depository for nuclear waste now stored across the country. But the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit dismissed all but one challenge to the project last summer.
The remaining question was the agency's health safety guarantee, which was many fewer years than the National Academy of Science had recommended for the project.
The announcement by the environmental agency drew stinging criticism from Nevada lawmakers who have consistently opposed moving the nation's radioactive material into their state.
"I am appalled at the complete arrogance of the E.P.A. in announcing these standards," said Senator John Ensign, the Nevada Republican who accused the agency of proposing a standard that lacked scientific basis.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader, called the new approach "voodoo science and arbitrary numbers." Mr. Reid added that he was "astounded that the E.P.A. actually put those recommendations on paper."
The executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, Robert R. Loux, echoed their sentiments. Mr. Loux said the revised standard was far more lenient than the current one for people who live close to nuclear energy plants and included no protections for groundwater beyond 10,000 years.
"It's just an outrageous standard," he said.
Officials at the environmental agency said the new approach would adopt the earlier proposed standard for the first 10,000 years and a second, less strict one, from 10,000 to one million years.
If the two-tier approach is adopted after public comments and public hearings in Nevada and Washington, the Federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission will use it to judge the application that the Energy Department will submit to open the site.
A spokesman for the department, Craig Stevens, said the department believed that it could meet the revised standard.
The court ruling last year sent scientists at the environmental agency back to their laboratories to redevelop models and produce one that they were confident would reflect safe limits for the additional 990,000 years by withstanding potential threats like earthquakes, climate changes and volcanic activity.
"This was an unprecedented scientific challenge," Jeffrey R. Holmstead, chief of the air and radiation office at the E.P.A., said in a conference call with reporters, explaining how the revised standard would protect the next 25,000 generations of residents living near the site.
Mr. Holmstead said that under the revised proposal residents near the site would be exposed to no more than 15 additional millirems a year in the first 10,000 years and no more than 350 additional millirems after that.
Americans are exposed, on average, to 360 millirem a year from X-rays, riding airplanes and other sources. Mr. Holmstead said a routine chest X-ray produced about 10 millirem, a mammogram about 30 and daily life for a year in a high-altitude city like Denver about 350.
Mr. Holmstead said he was confident that the court would approve the new proposal, although he hedged slightly when asked about public confidence in a standard that applies so far into the future.
"We do the best job we can based on the best science we have," he said. "Ten thousand years from now, a million years from now, who knows how technology can evaluate the need? Who knows if radiation will even be an issue? There's just no way to predict."
These days, just a handful of people live anywhere close to the edge of the proposed site. Among the 1,100 nearest, about 20 miles away in Beatty, Nev., reaction was mixed.
Lamar Walters, chairman of the Beatty Advisory Board, a panel that oversees town operations, said people he had spoken to about Yucca Mountain were just as comfortable with the 10,000-year standard.
Alpheus Bruton II, owner of the Beatty Club, a bar, said that even though he felt comfortable with the shorter standard, he was surprised that the environmental agency could be so sure about a standard 100 times longer.
"I just can't imagine how the E.P.A. can guarantee anything for a million years, including whether the earth will still be here," Mr. Bruton said. "To say anything is going to be good for a million years is preposterous."
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Washington Post
August 10, 2005
Radiation Limits for Waste Site Proposed
EPA Effort Aims to Satisfy Court on Nevada Project
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Environmental Protection Agency officials yesterday proposed new limits on radiation exposure for the next million years at a planned nuclear waste repository beneath Nevada's Yucca Mountain in an effort to overcome a court ruling that has threatened to block the project.
The new standard for radiation emanating from the buried waste through ground water or other sources could take effect as early as mid-October, after public comments. Yesterday's announcement is an important step in the protracted battle between the federal government and the state of Nevada and environmental groups over where to store as much as 77,000 tons of waste produced by the nation's nuclear reactors.
Bush administration officials, who have been pushing the controversial $58 billion project 90 miles from Las Vegas, are hoping to satisfy a year-old federal court ruling requiring them to set safety guidelines not just for the first 10,000 years after the plant is built but beyond. State officials and environmental groups charge that the current standard poses serious long-term health threats to residents of the small communities in the area.
Under the existing standard deemed inadequate by the court, people living near the desert site must be exposed to no more than an additional 15 millirems of radiation a year in the next 10,000 years as a result of radiation leaks from the buried waste. Thereafter, and for as long as 1 million years, the exposure limit would be set at 350 millirems per year under the plan announced yesterday. Annual radiation from natural sources averages about 300 millirems a year, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Jeffrey R. Holmstead, EPA's assistant administrator for air and radiation, said the proposed new standard would ensure that for the next million years area residents would be exposed to no more radiation than a typical urban dweller now experiences. Yet that radiation level is 3.5 times as much as the federal government allows for the cycle of activity related to a nuclear reactor, according to Energy Department officials.
"This is one of the most stringent radiation standards in the world," Holmstead told reporters in a telephone news conference. "We're setting a standard that not only protects our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but will protect for the next 25,000 generations."
Yesterday's proposal represents a calculated shift by the administration to try to salvage plans for establishing the nation's first central nuclear waste site. As recently as 2001, the EPA had rejected the idea of a two-tiered safety standard, but it decided to draft one to satisfy last year's U.S. District Court ruling here that stands in the way of the project, according to agency officials.
But public health and environmental advocates criticized the proposal, saying the most generous European nuclear waste storage standards are more than 10 times as strict. France sets its exposure level for radiation from waste sites at 25 millirems a year over the course of several hundreds of thousands of years.
Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear fusion scientist and president of the Maryland-based Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, said the new guidelines would "be the most lax standards for a repository in the world."
"I'm really shocked the EPA has proposed this," Makhijani said. "It's not a standard to protect public health. It's a standard to protect the industry's interest in Yucca Mountain."
Critics of the project and federal officials have been wrangling for more than two decades over whether to construct the huge nuclear waste dump in Nevada. President Bush, who pledged in his first presidential campaign to proceed with the project only if it was based on "sound science," approved it in early 2002. Nevada's governor utilized a provision of the federal law to veto the project, but Congress overrode that veto and authorized the project in the summer of 2002.
Energy Department officials said yesterday that they can meet the new safety standard. However, they must first apply to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license before construction can be completed. The agency is likely to formally submit its application early next year. The government had initially hoped to open the repository in 2010, but this target has slipped by a few years. Energy Department spokesman Craig Stevens said the agency is "just not working with dates anymore."
Nevada officials, who are still hoping to block the project in court, questioned why the government would establish a protective annual radiation level of 15 millirems and then set a different standard to take effect "seconds after midnight" after 10,000 years, in the words of lawyer Joseph Eagan.
"It's patently irrational," said Eagan, the lead attorney for Nevada in its fight to stop the project."The uncertainty is in the performance of the repository, not in the health standard. We know what levels of radiation are harmful."
Energy Department officials have laid out elaborate plans for containing the commercial-reactor fuel and high-level defense waste they hope to deposit 1,000 feet beneath the base of Yucca Mountain. They say they will place the solid-fuel pellets in stainless steel tubes and will encase the tubes in containers coated with alloy 22, today's most corrosion-resistant metal covering.
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Grist Magazine
August 10, 2005
One Meeellion Years
Feds create million-year health standard for Yucca Mountain dump
The U.S. government has no plan for getting out of Iraq, balancing the budget, or repairing a hemorrhaging health-care system, but nuclear waste? It's got that covered for the next million years. Yes, responding to a 2004 federal court ruling that the previous standard of 10 millennia was insufficient, the U.S. EPA has revised its plan for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste dump in Nevada to account for earthquakes, climate change, and other potential upsets for an additional 990,000 years. The new standard has provoked outrage from Nevada politicians, including Sen. John Ensign (R), who said he was "appalled at the complete arrogance of the EPA in announcing these standards." Maybe he'll take comfort in recent news from Chernobyl: Though the region won't be safe for human habitation for hundreds of thousands of years, animals and plants there appear to be thriving. It's "evolution on steroids," said one excited ecologist, "a fantastic experiment."
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IEER
August 09, 2005
Environmental Protection Agency's Proposed Rule on Repository for High-Level Radioactive Waste Would Seriously Undermine Public Health
Rule Seems Designed to Fit Yucca Mountain
Proposed Standard Would Allow Largest Radiation to Future Generations in the Western World
Takoma Park, Maryland, 9 August 2005: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) proposed rule for radiation doses to future generations would overturn all established principles of public health protection, according to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER). The dose limit of 350 millirem per year beyond 10,000 years is three-and-a-half times the maximum limit allowed to the public from any human activity (other than medical radiation) according to current limits established in the United States and all western countries.
The new rule is being proposed in response to a federal court decision that required the EPA to limit radiation doses to future generations at the time of maximum radioactivity releases from the deep geologic repository being proposed for Yucca Mountain, Nevada. The most highly radioactive and dangerous waste from nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons production is proposed to be buried there.
"The EPA now has the dubious distinction of proposing a standard that would be the worst in the Western world, by far," said Dr. Arjun Makhijani, president of IEER. "No Western programs, explicitly allows as large as 350 millirem per year at the time of peak dose."
The goal of the French repository program, for instance, is to limit maximum doses, estimated to occur hundreds of thousands of years in the future, to 25 millirem per year. This proposed EPA limit beyond 10,000 years is more than ten times the French goal. The Canadian program limits doses to about 10 millirem per year for 10,000 years but does not allow a sudden increase after that. The EPA proposal would allow a sudden jump from 15 millirem per year to 350 millirem per year at 10,000 years.
IEER charged that the rule seems tailored to fit Yucca Mountain so that it could be licensed. According to estimates made by the U.S. Department of Energy, which DOE presented to the Congressionally-mandated Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board in 1999, the maximum dose from Yucca Mountain would be expected to be 200 to 300 millirem per year several hundred thousand years from the present. This is just under the proposed limit. The DOE charts can be seen at http://www.ieer.org/sdafiles/vol_7/7-3/yucca.html
"The dose limit seems designed to protect the industry's interest in a bad site, rather than public health," said Dr. Makhijani. "This is one more example of what I have called the 'double-standard standard.' When Yucca Mountain cannot meet the rules, the federal agencies change the rules to fit Yucca Mountain."
Congress asked the National Academy of Sciences to advise the EPA on setting standards especially for Yucca Mountain in the early 1990s, when it appeared that the site could not meet one of the limits set for nuclear waste repositories set by the EPA in 1989. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has also changed its rules for licensing since Yucca Mountain became the only site under investigation in 1987.
The 350 millirem limit proposed by the EPA is, according to its press release, supposed to be "based on natural background radiation levels that people currently live with in the United States." IEER noted that besides natural radiation from cosmic rays and other sources that people get when they are outdoors, the 350 millirem per year number includes exposure to radon inside houses, which constitutes about two-thirds of the total.
"It is wrong to consider indoor radon, which is an artifact of construction, as part of 'natural background'" said Dr. Makhijani. "Only doses that are truly natural, that cannot be controlled, should be regarded as natural."
"The EPA is misleading the public when it says that this rule is based on natural background radiation levels," said Lisa Ledwidge, IEER's Outreach Director. "The dose limit that EPA is proposing is in addition to, not in place of, the amount of radiation exposure people will already be getting. If the EPA had a number to present they should have presented it without trying to deceptively downplay the risks."
It is especially regrettable that the EPA has proposed such a lax rule just on the heels of a National Academy of Sciences report that showed that children are far more susceptible to radiation than adults, and that women and considerably more at risk than men. If a person is exposed to 350 millirem per year every year for 70 years, the lifetime risk of getting cancer due to the exposure would be about 1 in 40. For women it would be about 1 in 30. The risk of dying from that cancer would be about half the risk of contracting it.
"A lifetime risk of getting cancer of 1 in 30 violates every risk-based health standard the EPA has ever set for the public even if it far into the future -- it opens the door to a wholesale relaxation on other fronts, such as cleanup of contaminated sites, said Dr. Makhijani. "I consider this the worst single action that the EPA has taken on radiation issues ever since I began analyzing them almost 25 years ago."
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Deseret News
August 10, 2005
EPA looks million years into future
By H. Josef Hebert
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Conceding there's no way to know what life will be like in a million years, the Environmental Protection Agency nevertheless proposed limits Tuesday on how much radiation a person should be exposed to from a nuclear waste dump in that distant time.
The proposal would limit exposure near the proposed Yucca Mountain facility in Nevada to 15 millirems a year for 10,000 years into the future, but then increase the allowable level to 350 millirems for up to 1 million years.
That higher level is more than three times what is allowed from nuclear facilities today by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
A standard chest X-ray is about 10 millirems.
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., a staunch critic of the Yucca project, called the standard the product of "voodoo science and arbitrary numbers." The state's other senator, Republican John Ensign, said the standard had no scientific basis and was "a blatant disregard for . . . the health of Nevadans."
Asked if there was any way to assure such a standard would be relevant or be met that far in the future, the EPA's Jeffrey Holmstead replied, "That's a pretty darn good question. . . . We do the best job given all the science we have."
The radiation exposure issue has threatened to cripple the government's plans to bury 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste — mostly used reactor fuel rods now at commercial power plants — beneath a volcanic ridge at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert 90 miles from Las Vegas.
A year ago a federal court said the EPA standard, which is supposed to ensure nearby residents won't be harmed by leaking radioactivity from the dump, was inadequate because it didn't establish exposure limits beyond 10,000 years.
On Tuesday, the EPA announced a revised standard that reaches out to a million years.
"That's longer, many times longer than human history," said Holmstead, adding that he's certain the rule will be protective of the public. Once the standard is made final after a comment period, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will decide whether the Yucca facility's design is adequate to meet it.
"We're setting a standard that not only protects our children, our grandchildren ... it will protect the next 25,000 generations," said Holmstead.
But opponents of the Yucca waste project, including state officials in Nevada., saw it differently.
"In short they've decided to kill a few people," said Joe Egan, an attorney who represented Nevada in the court fight over the project. "This is an obvious effort to give the project a pass" after the 10,000 year period.
Egan said the standard would allow as much as 700 millirem of radiation exposure a year, when added to the 350 millirem of natural background radiation in the Yucca area. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which must still approve a permit for the Yucca waste site, limits public radiation exposure from nuclear facilities it licenses to no more than 100 millirems per year.
Holmstead, who is the EPA's head of air and radiation office, said a person living near the Yucca site will not be subjected to radiation "higher than people are routinely exposed to throughout the country" from natural background sources.
He noted that background radiation in Denver is 700 millirems, partly because of its high elevation. The EPA in its document cited natural background radiation levels in Colorado, North and South Dakota and Iowa in some cases was well over 700 millirems a year because of elevation and geology.
But Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear physicist who has been critical of the Yucca project and other government nuclear programs, called the standard "lax" and too vague and said to link Yucca Mountain exposure standards to background radiation is misleading if — as the EPA does — you include radiation from naturally occurring radon.
Radiation from radon, which occurs naturally in some rocks, can be extremely high in some areas. The NRC says 55 percent of human exposure to ionized radiation comes from radon. The average background radiation from natural sources including radon is about 300 millirem nationwide, according to the NRC.
Craig Stevens, a spokesman for the Energy Department, said the administration is firmly committed to pushing ahead with the Yucca project. It plans to submit a formal application for a license to the NRC next year.
"This is a standard that we can certainly meet," said Stevens, when told of the EPA's two-tier approach.
Reaction to the standard in Nevada was mixed.
"It's not a protective standard," said Judy Treichel, director of the Las Vegas-based Nuclear Waste Task Force, which opposes the Yucca project. "It's a way, I guess, for the EPA to help the Department of Energy build its dump."
David Swanson, chief of the nuclear repository oversight office in rural Nye County, called it "probably appropriate"
"You take your best shot with what you have predicting what will happen in the future, and then you monitor it," he said, adding he feels "comfortable" with the requirements out to 10,000 years. "It's just ridiculous to attempt to project farther than that."
Contributing: Ken Ritter
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Salt Lake City Weekly
August 10, 2005
Let´s (Not) Make a Deal
Desperate to stop N-waste on a Utah Indian reservation, state politicians pin their hopes on lobbying the Bush administration.
by Ted McDonough
In the eight years since the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians inked a deal to store waste for the nuclear energy industry in the state´s west desert, Utah politicians have tried everything they could think of to thwart the deal.
Without success. They´ve tried paying off the Goshutes, as well as federal court challenges. Nearly every objection raised to the project´s federal permit has been dismissed by federal nuclear regulators. As the project moves ever closer to an expected federal permit this summer, Utah´s congressional delegation is attempting increasingly desperate measures, from designating the area around the proposed above-ground storage site as wilderness to stalling the plan through a terrorist threat study.
For at least one Utah politician, the prospect of stopping Private Fuel Storage (PFS) looks bleak.
“I´m not an attorney, and I can´t say the state of Utah has exhausted its legal options, but so far it seems like they´ve gone through a lot of steps and have not been successful,’ U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson told City Weekly.
Matheson is a co-sponsor of a bill introduced by fellow Utah Rep. Rob Bishop to create a wilderness area on land PFS needs for a railroad line. That bill still has a chance, but Matheson isn´t holding his breath. Instead, he is putting his hope in the state´s new push—a direct appeal to the Bush administration.
Interior Secretary Gale Norton can stop PFS because, as the government´s trustee for American Indians, she must sign off on any business lease of Indian land. Utah´s senators are leading the congressional charge to persuade the administration. Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. has met with Norton and recently hired a D.C. lobbying firm to continue pressing the case.
Those discussions are fledgling, said Mike Lee, Huntsman´s lawyer. When the lobbying gets under way in earnest, it might not prove any easier than efforts to challenge PFS through the courts.
The strategy won´t work and isn´t fair, said Sue Martin, PFS spokeswoman. “The state has every opportunity to fight the project on a scientific and legal basis. That ought to be enough. To ask the Department of the Interior not to sign off on the lease seems to me to be an infringement on the sovereign rights of the Goshute Indians.’
Norton can´t just slap down the PFS plan willy-nilly. As trustee, she is supposed to look out for the tribe´s best interest. The case that big nuclear waste money isn´t in the interest of the impoverished tribe could be a hard sell.
By law, the secretary also must take into account potential environmental impacts on the reservation and surrounding land, as well as the adequacy of emergency services. A few B-list celebrities joined by two tribal members opposed to PFS tried to make the environmental argument while lobbying in Washington, D.C., last month, saying the waste plan would pollute Indian land and tradition.
That may or may not be true. But it´s hard to argue with $3 billion. That´s tribal Chairman Leon Bear´s estimate of the value of the band´s contract with PFS, a consortium of nuclear energy producing companies searching for a place to park spent fuel rods in the absence of a federal depository like the stalled Yucca Mountain project.
Bear believes the Interior Department already gave its blessing, pending approval by nuclear regulators, and said if Norton reverses the approval, there will be a lawsuit.
Norton “doesn´t have that trust responsibility to the state, she´s got it to the tribe,’ he said. “If she disallows [PFS], the band falters in their economics. That is not within her purview.’
Not all tribal members see PFS as salvation. Margene Bullcreek, a tribal member leading opposition to Bear´s leadership, filed suit in March seeking to overturn the PFS deal. She emphasized the opposition isn´t fighting against PFS, but for tribal sovereignty. Among their chief concerns are that windfall from the deal hasn´t been shared equally and that Bear, whose leadership is disputed, shouldn´t have been allowed to ink the deal.
Those issues aside, the PFS proposal is bad on its face, Bullcreek said. Nuclear waste “contains poison that has affected other indigenous tribes,’ she said. “All the money they are promising us is not enough to be able to sacrifice who we are as an indigenous tribe to store waste on our reservation that someday may do away with us.’
If all else fails, the state may have to beg the tribe. That may be the tallest order of all.
Bear said Utah would have to put up a lot to convince the tribe to give up its lucrative PFS deal. Ideally, that would include property from the Salt Flats to Salt Lake City and other traditional tribal lands. State help is the bottom line for Bullcreek, as well. Support for PFS among tribal members is eroding, she claimed, but added the state must offer an alternative for economic development.
Bear distrusts overtures from the governor´s office after his experience during the administration of Mike Leavitt, when he felt the tribe was promised money that never materialized as an incentive to avoid PFS.
“If the state of Utah comes back to us and says, ‘We are going to do this for you,´ well, fine, whatever. It doesn´t mean anything to us,’ Bear said.
Lee, Huntsman´s general counsel, said talks with the tribe, as other efforts, haven´t panned out. Still, he is less pessimistic than some. Rulings that have gone against the state so far “are very small parts in an overall battle that we are going to win,’ he said.
Utah already has hired a lawyer to launch a federal appeals court challenge if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as expected, grants a permit for the PFS project.
PFS and the Goshute´s leaders aren´t backing down either. The tribe has put lawyers on contract for the expected permit challenge. PFS spokeswoman Martin said the nuclear consortium will fight on. “We are so close at this point,’ she said. “I can´t imagine they will back down now.’
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EPA
August 09, 2005
Proposed Yucca Mountain Standards to Protect Public Health For a Million Years
(Washington, D.C.-August 9, 2005) EPA is proposing public health standards for the planned high-level radioactive waste disposal facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada that will protect public health for 1 million years. Under the standards, people living close to the facility would not receive total radiation higher than natural levels people experience routinely in other areas of the country.
"It is an unprecedented scientific challenge to develop proposed standards today that will protect the next 25,000 generations of Americans," EPA Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation Jeffrey Holmstead said. "EPA met this challenge by using the best available scientific approaches and has issued a standard that will protect public health for a million years."
The proposed standards set a maximum dose level for the first 10,000 years, more than twice as long as recorded human history. To provide safety beyond 10,000 years to 1 million years, EPA is proposing a separate, higher dose limit based on natural background radiation levels that people currently live with in the United States. The proposed standards also require that the facility must withstand the effects of earthquakes, volcanoes and significantly increased rainfall while safely containing the waste during the 1 million-year period.
Congress authorized different federal agencies to perform different functions related to Yucca Mountain. EPA sets standards to protect human health and safety. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is responsible for implementing EPA's standards and determining if the Yucca Mountain facility can be safe enough to contain nuclear waste. The Department of Energy (DOE) owns, constructs, applies for licenses, and will operate the facility, should it be approved. The Yucca Mountain facility will open only if it meets EPA's standards to protect human health and the environment.
The proposed standards retain and add to EPA's original Yucca Mountain standards issued in 2001 and are also responsive to the ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued in July 2004.
EPA will accept written public comment for 60 days after the rule is published in the Federal Register. The agency will also hold public hearings during the comment period. To learn more about this action, visit: http://www.epa.gov/radiation/yucca or call 1-800-331-9477.
Release date:08/09/2005
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Guardian
August 09, 2005
EPA Proposing Radiation Exposure Limits
By H. JOSEF HEBERT
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Environmental Protection Agency, trying to overcome a court ruling that threatens a proposed nuclear waste dump in Nevada, proposed new radiation exposure limits for the project Tuesday aimed at protecting the public for up to 1 million years.
Under the proposal, people living near the Yucca Mountain waste site 10,000 years from now could be exposed to as much as 350 additional millirems of radiation annually, more than three times what is allowed from nuclear facilities today by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The maximum levels of exposure before 10,000 years would be 15 millirems per year, a little more than a standard chest X-ray.
The new EPA standard is intended to satisfy a court decision a year ago that said the EPA's initial requirements were inadequate because they didn't address exposure limits after 10,000 years, when the site is expected to contain its highest radiation levels. The ruling threatened to cripple the project at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, unless the EPA developed new rules.
Yucca Mountain is planned as a national repository for spent commercial reactor fuel and high-level defense waste. The opening date has been repeatedly delayed and is now expected in 2012 or later.
The EPA proposal, which would become final after a public comment period, will establish a two-tier standard that limits the level of radiation exposure to the public from the waste dump - one for a period of up to 10,000 years and another for after that point to 1 million years.
A federal appeals court in July, 2004, said that the EPA had violated the direction from Congress when it had earlier limited its exposure standards to 10,000 years. A National Academy of Sciences report had said such a standard should target the periods of greatest radiation levels from the waste, a period well beyond 10,000 years.
Under the revised standard, a person near the site must be exposed to no more than an additional 15 millirems of radiation over a year up until 10,000 years as a result of radiation leaking from the buried waste through groundwater or other sources.
After 10,000 years the exposure limit from the waste site is increased to 350 millirem per year.
``In short they've decided to kill a few people,'' said Joe Egan, an attorney who represented Nevada in the court fight over the project. ``This is an obvious effort to give the project a pass'' after the 10,000 year period
Egan said the standard would allow as much as 700 millirem of radiation exposure a year, when added to the 350 millirem of natural background radiation in the Yucca area. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which must still approve a permit for the Yucca waste site, limits public radiation exposure from nuclear facilities it licenses to no more than 100 millirems per year.
Jeffrey Holmstead, the EPA's head of air and radiation office, said people living near the site wouldn't be subject to ``any more radiation than millions of people routinely are exposed to from natural radiation'' in cities such as Denver where natural background radiation is high because of their elevation.
Annual radiation from natural sources varies widely depending on elevation and other factors, but averages about 300 millirems a year, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It can be as high as 700 millirems in some areas such as Denver, said Holmstead.
The Yucca Mountain waste site is being designed to accept highly radioactive used reactor fuel from commercial nuclear power plants around the country as well as some defense waste. The government had hoped to open the underground site by 2010, but that timetable has slipped to 2012 or possibly later.
Craig Stevens, a spokesman for the Energy Department, said the administration is firmly committed to pushing ahead with the Yucca project.
``This is a standard that we can certainly meet,'' said Stevens, when told of the EPA's two-tier approach.
The Energy Department hopes to submit a formal application for a license for Yucca Mountain with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission early next year, although Stevens said the department was not setting a date.
Opponents of the site said it fell short of what is needed.
``It's not a protective standard,'' said Judy Treichel, director of the Las Vegas-based Nuclear Waste Task Force, which opposes the Yucca project. ``It's a way, I guess, for the EPA to help the Department of Energy build its dump.''
On the Net
Yucca Mountain project: http://www.ymp.gov
Environmental Protection Agency www.doe.gov
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Las Vegas SUN
August 09, 2005
EPA proposing 1 million year radiation rule for Yucca Mountain
By H. Josef Hebert
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - Conceding there's no way to know what life will be like in a million years, the Environmental Protection Agency nevertheless proposed limits Tuesday on how much radiation a person should be exposed to from a nuclear waste dump in that distant time.
The proposal would limit exposure near the proposed Yucca Mountain facility in Nevada to 15 millirems a year for 10,000 years into the future, but then increase the allowable level to 350 millirems for up to 1 million years.
That higher level is more than three times what is allowed from nuclear facilities today by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
A standard chest X-ray is about 10 millirems.
Asked if there was any way to assure such a standard would be relevant or be met that far in the future, the EPA's Jeffrey Holmstead replied, "That's a pretty darn good question. ... We do the best job given all the science we have."
The radiation exposure issue has threatened to cripple the government's plans to bury 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste - mostly used reactor fuel rods now at commercial power plants - beneath a volcanic ridge at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert 90 miles from Las Vegas.
A year ago a federal court said the EPA standard, which is supposed to ensure nearby residents won't be harmed by leaking radioactivity from the dump, was inadequate because it didn't establish exposure limits beyond 10,000 years.
On Tuesday, the EPA announced a revised standard that reaches out to a million years.
"That's longer, many times longer than human history," said Holmstead, adding that he's certain the rule will be protective of the public. Once the standard is made final after a comment period, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will decide whether the Yucca facility's design is adequate to meet it.
"We're setting a standard that not only protects our children, our grandchildren ... it will protect the next 25,000 generations," said Holmstead.
But opponents of the Yucca waste project, including state officials in Nevada, saw it differently.
"In short they've decided to kill a few people," said Joe Egan, an attorney who represented Nevada in the court fight over the project. "This is an obvious effort to give the project a pass" after the 10,000 year period.
Egan said the standard would allow as much as 700 millirem of radiation exposure a year, when added to the 350 millirem of natural background radiation in the Yucca area. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which must still approve a permit for the Yucca waste site, limits public radiation exposure from nuclear facilities it licenses to no more than 100 millirems per year.
Holmstead, who is the EPA's head of air and radiation office, said a person living near the Yucca site will not be subjected to radiation "higher than people are routinely exposed to throughout the country" from natural background sources.
He noted that background radiation in Denver is 700 millirems, partly because of its high elevation. The EPA in its document cited natural background radiation levels in Colorado, North and South Dakota and Iowa in some cases was well over 700 millirems a year because of elevation and geology.
But Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear physicist who has been critical of the Yucca project and other government nuclear programs, called the standard "lax" and too vague and said to link Yucca Mountain exposure standards to background radiation is misleading if - as the EPA does - you include radiation from naturally occurring radon.
Radiation from radon, which occurs naturally in some rocks, can be extremely high in some areas. The NRC says 55 percent of human exposure to ionized radiation comes from radon. The average background radiation from natural sources including radon is about 300 millirem nationwide, according to the NRC.
Craig Stevens, a spokesman for the Energy Department, said the administration is firmly committed to pushing ahead with the Yucca project. It plans to submit a formal application for a license to the NRC next year.
"This is a standard that we can certainly meet," said Stevens, when told of the EPA's two-tier approach.
Reaction to the standard in Nevada was mixed.
"It's not a protective standard," said Judy Treichel, director of the Las Vegas-based Nuclear Waste Task Force, which opposes the Yucca project. "It's a way, I guess, for the EPA to help the Department of Energy build its dump."
David Swanson, chief of the nuclear repository oversight office in rural Nye County, called it "probably appropriate"
"You take your best shot with what you have predicting what will happen in the future, and then you monitor it," he said, adding he feels "comfortable" with the requirements out to 10,000 years. "It's just ridiculous to attempt to project farther than that."
Associated Press writer Ken Ritter contributed to this story from Las Vegas.
Yucca Mountain project: http://www.ymp.gov
Environmental Protection Agency http://www.doe.gov
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Las Vegas SUN
August 09, 2005
Reaction to proposed EPA radiation standard for Yucca Mountain
ASSOCIATED PRESS
LAS VEGAS (AP) - Reaction to a proposed Environmental Protection Agency radiation safety standard for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository:
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"What the agency released today is nothing more than voodoo science and arbitrary numbers," said U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. "At the time when the public faces the highest risk of radiation exposure, EPA proposes easing the overall public health standard, including throwing out the groundwater standard."
Reid, the Senate minority leader, accused the EPA of "trying to silence voices of opposition" by limiting a comment period to 60 days.
"This is the latest attempt by the Bush Administration to ignore sound science and disregard the health and safety of Nevadans."
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"It's a positive step forward and we can meet the standard," said Allen Benson, spokesman for the Energy Department and the Yucca Mountain project in Las Vegas.
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"I guess Nevadans are expendable," said Bob Loux, director of Nevada's Nuclear Projects Office and Gov. Kenny Guinn's chief anti-dump spokesman.
Loux called the standard "100 times more lenient than for people living next to the 103 (commercial nuclear) reactors around the country, and three and a half times more lenient than even the nuclear power industry was asking for."
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"The standard is probably appropriate," said David Swanson, chief of the nuclear repository oversight office in rural Nye County, which hopes for jobs and other economic benefits as host of the Yucca Mountain project.
Swanson said he expected officials would strictly oversee safety and operating rules at the dump.
"You take your best shot with what you have predicting what will happen in the future, and then you monitor it," he said. "I feel comfortable with the standard up to 10,000 years. We're dealing with such an incredibly long time period here that, to me, it's just ridiculous to attempt to project farther than that."
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"They said it was their intention to provide protection to the environment and to the people," said Judy Treichel, director of the Las Vegas-based Nuclear Waste Task Force. "They have not done that."
Treichel said she and other anti-Yucca advocates met recently with EPA officials who toured southern Nevada to collect opinion about the standard. She said she intends to marshal opposition to the standard during the 60-day comment period.
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"I think it's probably safe," said Jan Cameron, chairwoman of the five-member town advisory board in Amargosa Valley, about 15 miles from Yucca Mountain. "We're talking about projected science. That's a very difficult area."
Cameron said many of the farm community's 1,200 residents lived through decades of nuclear weapons testing at the nearby Nevada Test Site, and most were more concerned about jobs than radioactivity from Yucca Mountain.
The federal government and the EPA "have to look at ways not only to protect us from possible dangers, but to make sure that if we are going to have it in our backyard that we get some 'plus' stuff," Cameron said.
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The EPA rule represents "a sound scientific approach that employs common sense," said Steve Kerekes, spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry lobbying group in Washington, D.C.
"It's going to provide ample protection for public health and safety," he said.
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"This is obviously another example of the Bush administration trying to ram through another environmental policy that threatens the health and safety of not only everyone in Nevada but everyone in the United States," said Sierra Club of Nevada spokeswoman Tara Smith.
"If this standard is OK for Nevada, then pretty soon it's going to be OK anywhere they want to store nuclear waste temporarily or permanently."
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"The standard released by the EPA today is arbitrary and grossly misguided," said Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev. "EPA has an obligation to protect public safety today, tomorrow, and in a million years."
Gibbons said the EPA had no scientific evidence that increasing its radiation standard from 15 millirem to 350 millirem after 10,000 years was "warranted or safe."
"The EPA should not speculate that a standard which is not deemed safe today could miraculously become a safe standard in the future," he said. "Public health and safety standards should not be based on speculation and supposition."
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"This proposal is but the latest in a long line of attempts by the Bush administration to jump-start stalled efforts to bury the nation's nuclear waste in Nevada," Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said in a statement.
"The EPA can propose any number it wants, but the real trick will be proving this new standard can be met, and it remains to be proven that can be done."
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"The EPA's so-called 'health standard' projections for determining what is a safe level of radiation exposure for Nevadans are irrational and misguided," said Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev. "Where's the proof that an additional 350 millirem per year of radiation won't have a negative impact on a human being?"
Porter said the only way to protect the health and safety of Nevadans was "to make sure Yucca Mountain never becomes a repository for the nation's nuclear waste."
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"I am appalled at the complete arrogance of the EPA in announcing these standards," said Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev. He called the standard "a blatant disregard for science, the law and the health of Nevadans."
"We've been down this road before," Ensign said. "The federal appeals court already determined that the 10,000-year standard violated the law. This new standard is no better, and the EPA has provided no scientific basis for the 350 millirem figure."
Ensign also called a 60-day comment period too short.
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Las Vegas SUN
August 09, 2005
New EPA radiation standard is called outrageous
EPA says revised limits would protect public for 1 million years
By Suzanne Struglinski
Sun Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- The Environmental Protection Agency's change in its radiation protection standard, announced this morning, is shocking and outrageous, members of Nevada's team opposing the Yucca Mountain nuclear dump said.
The EPA is keeping the 10,000-year radiation protection standard for the proposed dump at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, while creating a different exposure limit after 10,000 years, for up to 1 million years.
One part of the new proposed standard has a 15 millirem radiation exposure for up to 10,000 years, the same limit a federal court threw out last year. Another part of the standard limits exposure to 350 millirem per year for 10,000 to 1 million years, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The proposed standards "limit the maximum radiation from the facility so that people living close to Yucca Mountain for a lifetime during the 1 million-year time frame will not receive total radiation any higher than natural levels people currently live with in other areas of the country."
Joe Egan, a lawyer who represents Nevada on Yucca issues, said he was shocked by the new numbers.
"That is far more outrageous than anything we even expected," Egan said. "If more than 15 millirems is harmful now, it is going to be equally harmful 50,000 years from now. People aren't just going to develop an immunity to radiation."
Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency Director Bob Loux said the new standard was "outrageous" because 350 millirem is so high.
EPA spokesman John Millett said the 350 millirem standard was an appropriate number given the uncertainties of calculating radiation standards so far into the future.
Other Nevada officials initially withheld comments. They said they wanted a chance to examine the EPA's proposal.
Attorney General Brian Sandoval said the state must "have the opportunity to review" the proposed standard to see "if it meets scientific muster."
He noted the EPA originally said the 10,000 years was a safe standard, but a federal appeals court found it violated the law. Gov. Kenny Guinn is expected to issue a statement later today about the EPA announcement.
Egan said it will be up to Sandoval to decide what legal option to pursue, but he would not be suprised if more litigation came out of this.
Egan said the proposed standards are worse than those suggested in a study done by the Electric Power Research Institute earlier this year. The state strongly objected to the study.
EPRI is an energy and environmental research group that promotes the benefits of nuclear power. Its study advocated that the federal government keep the 10,000-year standard as it stands now and consider the uncertainties that exist when trying to measure things out beyond that time frame.
It recommended a "two-tiered dose limit," which means one level for the first 10,000 years and a higher one for after that time consistent with "the increased uncertainty." It did not recommend a specific dose beyond the 15-millirem per year limit now, a little more than a chest X-ray, but the report says a 100-millirem per year dose would be "considered protective under all potential exposure situations."
Egan said the 100-millirem recommendation was bad enough. The proposed standard announced today is a "lawyer's dream."
"This is a total abdication of science and the law," Egan said.
A federal appeals court said last year that the 10,000-year time period previously established by the agency did not follow the law. That ruling threw the proposed nuclear waste dump off schedule until a new standard could be established. The court said the earlier standard was not "based upon and consistent with" a National Academy of Sciences recommendation. Congress wanted the standard to follow what a panel of the academy's experts wanted.
The EPA originally set a 10,000-year radiation standard for Yucca in 2001. Under that standard, the department would have to prove people would not be exposed to more than 15 millirems of radiation, a little more than a chest X-ray, each year for 10,000 years.
The National Academy of Sciences said it would be better to go to "peak dose" when the radiation levels would be at their highest. This could come 100,000 years into the future or more.
Now that the proposed standard is complete, it will have to go through a public comment period before becoming final. EPA will have to evaluate the comments and can make changes before implementing the final standard.
Rod McCullum, senior project manager for waste at the Nuclear Energy Institute, could not comment specifically on what EPA proposed, but said he had always believed a two-tiered standard was a "sound, scientific approach."
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., sent a letter to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson Monday reminding him of a promised public hearing in Las Vegas once the agency issues the rule. The senators also want the agency to hold hearings in Reno and Amargosa Valley and want a public comment period of no less than 180 days.
"Because of the enormity, time span and risk of the proposed project, any standard must err on the side of caution in order to guarantee the protection of public health and the environment for hundreds of thousands of years," the senators wrote.
Reid spokeswoman Tessa Hafen said the senators got EPA to agree to hearings during talks on Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell's confirmation hearing. She said the office had heard the proposal would be coming out in the next two weeks, so they wanted to make sure a formal request for the meetings had been sent.
In May, the agency said it would put finish the proposed new standard by September.
Peggy Maze Johnson, director of Nevada-based Citizen Alert, and Judy Treichel of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force met with EPA officials a few weeks ago to discuss how to inform the public about the new standard, they said.
Johnson said she asked for details about public protection and the compliance period as they relate to the new proposed standard, but the EPA people she met with "sidestepped" her questions.
The new EPA standard is what Johnson feared, she said. She and many other Yucca critics objected to a two-tiered standard.
"We don't believe that it's safe,' she said.
Treichel said that last time opponents gave comments on a radiation standard, they wanted to see "zero exposure forever" but instead saw 15 millirem for 10,000 years.
"I am not sure if this would be any different now," Triechel said.
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
August 09, 2005
Senators ask EPA for public hearings
Government must revise radiation standards
By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- Nevada's senators Monday urged the Environmental Protection Agency to hold public hearings in the state after it announces new radiation safety standards for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.
Agency administrator Stephen Johnson promised the EPA would gather comments in Las Vegas, Sens. Harry Reid and John Ensign said.
The senators asked Johnson in a letter to add public hearings in Reno and in Amargosa Valley, the community closest to the Yucca site.
"It is important that those members of the public potentially most affected by the radiation standard be given the opportunity to meaningfully participate in the decision-making process," the letter said.
EPA spokesman Dale Kemery said the agency was reviewing the letter.
The EPA has said it plans to disclose revised radiation safety standards by the end of the summer. Its previous standards were declared invalid in July 2004 by a federal appeals court panel.
The standards set limits for radiation exposures from waste-containing canisters that are expected to decay over time within Yucca Mountain.
Contents of the rusted containers are expected to filter through the mountain and into groundwater over thousands of years.
The agency had set a dose limit of 15 millirem per year -- roughly the dose from three chest X-rays -- for individuals living in the vicinity of Yucca Mountain for up to 10,000 years after the repository is filled with nuclear waste and closed.
The EPA set a separate standard of 4 millirem per year for groundwater.
Judges said the 10,000-year time period was inconsistent with the findings of a National Academies of Science panel that suggested the safety standards should cover a much longer time frame.
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Environment News Service
August 09, 2005
Million Year Yucca Mountain Safety Standards Proposed
WASHINGTON, DC, August 9, 2005 (ENS) - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is proposing public health standards for the planned high-level radioactive waste disposal facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada that the agency says will protect public health for one million years. If built, the facility would contain 77,000 tons of nuclear waste from U.S. nuclear power plants and weapons production facilities across the country.
The EPA issued standards in 2001 that are supposed to protect the public from the nation's highly radioactive waste for 10,000 years. The standards proposed today retain and add to these original standards issued in 2001.
Aerial view of Yucca Mountain, Nevada located on the Nevada Test Site about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. (Photo courtesy DOE)
The new standards are required as the result of a July 2004 ruling by the DC Court of Appeals in a lawsuit brought by the state of Nevada. The court ruled that the EPA's original standards did not conform to those recommended by the National Academy of Sciences as Congress mandates in the Energy Policy Act of 1992. The Academy said the most dangerous peak radiation levels from nuclear waste isotopes would persist for 300,000 years.
"It is an unprecedented scientific challenge to develop proposed standards today that will protect the next 25,000 generations of Americans," EPA Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation Jeffrey Holmstead said. "EPA met this challenge by using the best available scientific approaches and has issued a standard that will protect public health for a million years."
The EPA says that under the new one million year standards, people living close to the facility would not receive total radiation higher than natural levels of background radiation people experience routinely in other areas of the country.
For the first 10,000 years, the proposed standards:
Retain the original 15 millirem of radiation exposure per year individual protection standard. By comparison, 15 millirem is equivalent to the radiation exposure of a passenger who took three coast to coast round trip flights in a year.
Ensure that people living near Yucca Mountain are protected to the same level as those living near the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico , currently the only operational deep geologic radioactive waste disposal facility in the U.S.
From 10,000 years up to one million years, the proposed standards:
Add a limit of 350 millirem per year.
Limit the maximum radiation from the facility so that people living close to Yucca Mountain for a lifetime during the one million year time frame will not receive total radiation any higher than natural levels people currently live with in other areas of the country. The University of California - Davis gives 300 millirem as the average yearly dose of background radiation to which people in the United States are exposed.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada (Photo courtesy Office of the Senator)
U.S. Senator Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat and Senate Minority Leader, said, "I am astounded that the EPA actually put those recommendations on paper. What the agency released today is nothing more than voodoo science and arbitrary numbers. At the time when the public faces the highest risk of radiation exposure, EPA proposes easing the overall public health standard, including throwing out the groundwater standard."
The EPA states in its new standards document that, "The groundwater protection standards were a subject of the Court decision, were upheld, and are not a subject of today´s proposal."
There are two major aquifers beneath Yucca Mountain. Regional ground water in the vicinity of Yucca Mountain is believed to flow generally in a south-southeasterly direction. The DOE plans to build the repository about 300 meters below the surface and about 300 to 500 meters above the water table.
Senator Reid is still opposed to the Yucca Mountain project. "This is the latest attempt by the Bush Administration to ignore sound science and disregard the health and safety of Nevadans, and I vow to continue fighting on behalf of Nevadans against this ill-conceived project.’
The EPA will accept written public comment for 60 days after the rule is published in the Federal Register. The agency will also hold public hearings during the comment period.
But Senator Reid says the public comment period is inadequate. “In addition to risking the health of the public, EPA is also trying to silence voices of opposition by limiting the comment period," he said "It took EPA more than a year to put together this proposal, but the agency is giving the public less than two months to review hundreds of pages of documents and put their concerns on record."
Senator John Ensign of Nevada (Photo courtesy Office of the Senator)
Reid and fellow Nevada Senator John Ensign, a Republican, wrote in a joint letter to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson on Monday, "The comment period for this proposal must be no less than 180 days." The senators wrote that evaluation of the EPA standard "may depend on assessments in DOE's draft license application that to date DOE has been unwilling to provide. Nevadans may not be in a position to respond fully to the EPA rule until DOE releases this key information."
The Nevada senators reminded Johnson of the EPA's agreement to hold a public hearing in Las Vegas and urged him to attend in person "so that you can hear and see the depth of Nevadans´ opposition to a weak radiation standard that does not meet the National Academy of Sciences guidelines, thus needlessly exposing them to public health risks."
Congress authorized three federal agencies to perform different functions related to Yucca Mountain.
EPA sets standards to protect human health and safety, and the Yucca Mountain facility will open only if it meets EPA's standards to protect human health and the environment.. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is responsible for implementing EPA's standards and determining if the Yucca Mountain facility can be safe enough to contain nuclear waste. The Department of Energy owns, constructs, applies for licenses, and will operate the facility, should it be approved.
Under the new proposed standards, the Department of Energy (DOE) is required conduct analyses covering a one million year time frame to assess the potential effects of natural processes or disruptive events that could affect how well Yucca Mountain contains the waste.
These include:
Earthquakes, which could affect the facility tunnels and breakdown of the waste containers
Volcanic activity, which could affect the waste containers directly or cause releases of radionuclides to the environment
Climate change, which could cause increased water flow through the facility, resulting in the release of radionuclides to the environment
Corrosion processes, which could cause breakdown of the waste containers
In its new standards document, the EPA emphasizes how difficult it is to accurately predict what conditions will be like for long periods of time into the future.
Alpine mining machines are used in the Yucca Mountain tunnels to excavate alcoves and niches for scientific testing. (Photo courtesy DOE)
"Clearly, we believe that calculations beyond 10,000 years have value, or we would not have previously required DOE to include them in its EIS [environmental impact statement]. However, we also believe that over the very long periods leading up to the time of the peak dose, the uncertainties in projecting climatic and geologic conditions become extremely difficult to reliably predict and a technical consensus about their effects on projected performance in a licensing process would be very difficult, or perhaps impossible, to achieve."
This is one of the major reasons that the 10,000 year time frame was originally selected in the generic standard for land disposal of the types of waste intended for the Yucca Mountain repository, the EPA document explains.
The EPA relies on the concept of "reasonable expectation" to rescue the situation from the dilemma that the uncertainties create - either giving little or no weight to highly uncertain projections as a basis for a licensing decision - or - precluding the possibility of licensing at all.
"We believe that the performance projections at Yucca Mountain, if constructed and interpreted consistent with the concept of “reasonable expectation,’ can provide useful information on the facility´s performance and can form a key part of the basis for a licensing decision," the EPA says.
The agency cites the opinion of National Academy of Sciences in its report, "No analysis of compliance will ever constitute an absolute proof; the objective instead is a reasonable level of confidence in analyses that indicates whether limits established by the standard will be exceeded.’
The Yucca Mountain site was approved by Congress and President George W. Bush signed the bill into law in February 2002. However, the site is still opposed by the State of Nevada and the Nevada Congressional delegation.
Plans are to transport the waste by road and rail from the power plants and Department of Defense sites where it is stored through 44 states to Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Reid says this is perhaps the most dangerous part of the project. "The Achilles heel of the Yucca Mountain proposal is transportation," the senator says on his website. "The tragic events of September 11, 2001 showed us what terrorists can do. Transporting thousands of shipments across our country would provide thousands of targets for terrorists, and putting the millions of Americans along the transportation routes in danger is irresponsible."
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Environment News Service
August 09, 2005
Bush Signs Energy Bill Into Law to Mixed Reviews
ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico, August 8, 2005 (ENS) - "The Energy Policy Act of 2005 is going to help every American who drives to work, every family that pays a power bill, and every small business owner hoping to expand," President George W. Bush said today, as he signed the energy bill at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque.
But House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said, "As oil prices reached another new high today, President Bush signs into law an energy policy that his own Department of Energy says actually increases gas prices."
President Bush stressed the "unprecedented commitment to energy conservation and efficiency" made in the bill, which sets higher efficiency standards for federal buildings and for household products, the bill relies heavily on coal and nuclear energy.
President George W. Bush at Sandia National Lab today for the energy bill signing ceremony. In the background is Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman. (Photo courtesy DOE)
"This bill will allow America to make cleaner and more productive use of our domestic energy resources, including coal, and nuclear power, and oil and natural gas," the President said. "By using these reliable sources to supply more of our energy, we'll reduce our reliance on energy from foreign countries, and that will help this economy grow so people can work."
"The challenge is to develop ways to take advantage of our coal resources while keeping our air clean," said Bush. The bill authorizes new funding for clean coal technology with the goal of building the world's first zero emission coal-fired power plant.
The United States has 103 operating nuclear power plants, but has not built a new nuclear plant since the late 1970s. "We will start building nuclear power plants again by the end of this decade," the President said.
"To coordinate the ordering of new plants, the bill I sign today continues the Nuclear Power 2010 Partnership between government and industry. It also offers a new form of federal risk insurance for the first six builders of new nuclear power plants," Bush said.
The Bush administration and Congressional Republicans took care to avoid mentioning the stalled nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada as moved the energy policy bill forward, a senior Energy Department official told the "Las Vegas Review Journal" on Friday.
The strategy was to avoid stirring Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, a leading critic of the proposed nuclear waste repository who could have caused problems for the bill, one of President Bush's top priorities, said DOE Deputy Secretary Clay Sell.
"Energy politics are tough. Yucca Mountain politics are really tough," said Sell, who called Reid "a tough character to deal with."
"There was a conscious decision not to roll [Yucca Mountain] into the energy bill, and I can't disagree," Sell said.
Nevada Senator Harry Reid, together with the rest of the Nevada Congressional delegation and Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn, is opposed to the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository. They contend it will not safely contain the nation's nuclear waste. (Photo courtesy Office of the Senator)
Senator Reid did not stand in the way of passage of the energy bill, but he does not support the legislation in its final form. Reid says he voted for the Senate version, which included "tax incentives for renewable energy resources, a renewable electricity standard, reducing our dependence on foreign oil, reducing global warming, and installing a federal ban on MTBE," an additive that makes gasoline burn cleaner, but has contaminated groundwater across the country.
“Unfortunately, House Republicans working on the final version of the bill rejected the provisions that would have led us towards energy independence, and I will not support this version of the bill," said Reid. “I believe we have missed an incredible opportunity to establish a renewable electricity standard, provide help to consumers facing record prices at the gas pump, and most importantly, to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.’
The legislation pleased Skip Bowman, president and chief executive officer at the Nuclear Energy Institute, who represented the nuclear energy industry at the signing ceremony. "As a result of this legislation we have many of the tools necessary to move forward to new nuclear power plant construction in this country, along with pursuing the potential for the hydrogen economy, protecting our security though enhanced non-proliferation policies, and contributing to better public health and our environment by limiting air emissions."
The energy bill streamlines oil and gas permitting to encourage new exploration in what the President says will be "environmentally sensitive ways."
The bill authorizes research into extracting oil from shale and tar sands. It provides incentives for oil refineries to expand their capacity, and Bush says "that's consumer-friendly. The more supply, the more reliable your gasoline will be and the more - less pressure on price."
The bill includes tax incentives to encourage new construction of natural gas pipelines and clarifies federal authority to site new receiving terminals for liquified natural gas.
A wind turbine is installed at the National Wind Technology Center, a facility at the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado. (Photo courtesy NREL)
There are some measures in the bill that encourage alternative and renewable energy sources. The bill extends tax credits for wind, biomass, landfill gas and other renewable electricity sources. The bill offers new incentives to promote clean, renewable geothermal energy. It creates a new tax credit for residential solar power systems.
"By developing these innovative technologies," the President said, "we can keep the lights running while protecting the environment and using energy produced right here at home. When you hear us talking about less dependence on foreign sources of energy, one of the ways to become less dependent is to enhance the use of renewable sources of energy."
The legislation includes language that would create an industry-led, self-regulatory organization that will set and enforce mandatory electricity reliability standards throughout North America.
"The bill removes outdated obstacles to investment in electricity transmission lines in generating facilities," said President Bush. "The bill corrects the provision of the law that made electric reliability standards optional instead of mandatory."
The bill directs the federal Transportation Department to study improvements in fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks and SUVs, but does not set new efficiency standards.
The legislation will provide up to $3,400 per vehicle in tax credits to consumers for purchase of energy-efficient hybrid, clean-diesel, and fuel-cell vehicles based on their fuel savings potential.
The bill also expands research into developing hydrogen technologies and establishes a flexible, national Renewable Fuels Standard to encourage greater use of renewable fuels like ethanol and biodiesel.
Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, a Democrat who co-chairs the Senate Energy Committee with fellow New Mexican Republican Pete Domenici, said the bill will help Native Americans. The bill creates an Office of Indian Energy Policy & Programs at the Department of Energy that will use grants, technical assistance, and loan guarantees to assist Pueblos and Tribes with the production of energy resources; increasing the supply of electricity to Indian homes and businesses; and managing energy development and use in a manner that protects tribal lands and communities.
"This new energy policy will give Indian Country a voice at the Department of Energy and will help tribes cut through the bureaucracy that has held up energy development on Indian lands," Bingaman said. "This is a major step forward."
While Republicans and some Democrats were pleased with the Energy Policy Act of 2005, other Democrats and environmentalists were less pleased.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois supported the ethanol provisions of the energy bill. Here he inaugurates the National Corn-To-Ethanol Research Center at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. September 23, 2003. (Photo courtesy Office of the Congressman)
House Speaker Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican said the bill, "addresses the burden that higher gasoline prices place on American consumers by eventually reducing our dependence on foreign oil and encouraging diversification of our energy supply. It also encourages domestic production of oil; establishes a Renewable Fuel Standard that will double the use of clean-burning and renewable ethanol; provides incentives for developing clean energy technologies; and enhances our electricity transmission infrastructure. It also contains several important provisions which will help with energy conservation."
Congresswoman Pelosi said, "This energy policy is yet another example of Republicans catering to corporate special interests at the expense of the public interest. Billions of dollars are going to the oil, gas, and nuclear industries and nothing is going to consumers paying more at the pump.
"Democrats are fighting for an energy policy for the future that will reduce gas prices, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and reduce pollution," she said.
Jeff Rickert, executive director of the Apollo Alliance, a new coalition of foundations, business, labor, environmental, social justice and faith-based organizations, said the legislation, "hands over billions in subsidies to oil companies but does nothing to reduce our dependence on foreign oil."
"The Energy Bill represents a failure of leadership by the administration and leadership in Congress," said Rickert. "We urgently need a crash program to move America toward energy independence, while capturing the green markets of the future. In the absence of federal leadership, states and cities are taking on this issue, and for now our hopes for progress will rest there."
New Mexico Congressman Tom Udall, a Democrat, said the bill is not flawless, but it is an improvement over the status quo. "I am pleased that the bill does include renewable energy and energy efficiency incentives. However, I would have written a more ambitious bill that would have more aggressively reduced our reliance on foreign oil, addressed global warming, added tough automobile fuel efficiency standards, and revitalized the nation's railroads."
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers International President Edwin Hill said the legislation "represents a crucial first step in unifying the nation's haphazard energy policy, and presents real opportunities for broad cooperation on the road to common-sense energy reform."
Edwin Hill heads the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers International (Photo courtesy IBEW)
The bill will expand the use of nuclear, wind, solar and clean coal energy, and further solidify the union's wide reach in traditional and renewable technologies, Hill said. The IBEW will also gain from mandatory electricity reliability standards and initiatives to study the utility worker shortage and expand the electricity transmission infrastructure.
"After several years of squandered opportunities, the United States finally has set a clear path to address the nation's inadequate energy infrastructure," Hill said.
The IBEW is pleased with language in the bill that calls for raising the penalty for manipulating the electricity market, as Enron traders did during the California deregulation crisis from $5,000 to $1 million per violation.
The grassroots group Republicans for Environmental Protection wanted an energy bill that would "Raise fuel economy standards for cars and SUV's to 40 miles per gallon over the next decade - thereby saving more than 15 times the estimated yield of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, saving fuel America must now import and saving drivers billions of dollars at the pump."
REP America also wants the Bush administration to "Take global climate change seriously by capping carbon dioxide emissions (as pledged in the presidential campaign) and increase the use of natural gas as the "bridge" to a clean energy future."
After the signing ceremony at Sandia National Laboratory, officials talk with the President. (from left:) Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, unidentified, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, President Bush, Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico. (Photo courtesy Sandia)
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) says that while the legislation was five years in the making, it still fails to address America's most pressing energy needs.
"Growing oil dependence. Soaring gas prices. Destructive energy development. Huge subsidies for polluters. Global warming. Not one of these problems is seriously addressed in the energy bill," said NRDC Legislative Director Karen Wayland.
"Because Congres