State sues EPA over radiation rules at Yucca

Friday, June 29, 2001 | 10:28 a.m.

Nevada filed a lawsuit Wednesday opposing radiation standards set at Yucca Mountain, the first legal salvo in what Gov. Kenny Guinn hinted could become the state's strategy in fighting a proposed high-level nuclear waste repository.

The state challenged the Environmental Protection Agency's new rule in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. A coalition of national environmental groups filed a separate action in the same court Wednesday.

"This is the first opportunity the state has had in over 15 years to legally challenge EPA's rule-making process for the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain," Guinn said after requesting that Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa file the suit.

The Nevada Legislature approved $4 million for legal defense and a national education campaign against the Yucca Mountain project.

The state is challenging two details of the EPA rule that sets limits on how much radiation would be acceptable to leak from a repository, if it is built.

The lawsuit maintains that the length of time the regulation is in effect -- 10,000 years -- is not long enough, and that the boundary at which radiation would be measured is too close to nearby farms.

In order to build a repository, the DOE has to prove that it would be safe within the EPA guidelines.

Those guidelines also require the repository to limit radiation leakage to 15 millirems of exposure to residents 12 miles from its center, with a total of 4 millirems of that allowed to come through ground water.

If the lawsuits are successful, the Department of Energy would have to delay its fall deadline for recommending whether Yucca Mountain is a safe repository site, said Bob Loux, director of the state's Agency for Nuclear Projects.

"Their (DOE's) projection of their schedule at Yucca Mountain does not consider legal actions," Loux said. "If the state is successful in court, there can be no site recommendation and no licensing rules."

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., second most powerful Democrat in the Senate, agreed with the state's action, adding he was pleased with the EPA guideline as far as it goes.

"However, the state of Nevada has an obligation to ensure its residents and resources are fully protected," Reid said. The state's suit also maintains that by measuring radiation exposure 12 miles from the repository site, where the farming community of Amargosa Valley lies, the EPA allows the Energy Department to use the aquifer to dilute the exposure. By law the mountain itself and engineered barriers must keep the radiation inside the repository.

Amargosa Valley, the closest community to the site, is home to Nevada's largest organic dairy, Ponderosa Farms, which supplies milk to 30 million people in Nevada, California and other Western states. Its aquifer is also a drinking water source.

Guinn and Del Papa said that to establish a standard that allows DOE to use a portion of one of the most important aquifers in Nevada to disperse radiation not only violates state law, but is "simply unconscionable and unacceptable."

For a similar ground-water standard set for the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, a site in New Mexico accepting defense nuclear wastes laced with plutonium, EPA set a boundary of three miles from the repository, the lawsuit notes.

The environmental groups' lawsuit echoes the state's arguments. Citizen Alert, Citizen Action Coalition of Indiana, Natural Resources Defense Council, Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force, Nevada Desert Experience, Nuclear Information and Resource Service and Public Citizen are the groups filing the petition.

"We cannot accept a rule that sets artificially weak standards to allow a fundamentally flawed project to move forward," Natural Resources Defense Council senior attorney David Adelman.

The Department of Energy had not seen the suits and had no comment, DOE spokesman Joe Davis said. The DOE is planning to move forward with its Yucca Mountain site recommendation and could not speculate on impacts from legal actions, Davis said.