Zero tolerance urged for Yucca Mountain radiation

Monday, March 12, 2001 | 11:50 a.m.

Environmental groups called today for standards that would prevent any radiation from escaping a proposed high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.

The 35 groups, primarily from Nevada and California, sent the four-page letter to the Bush administration asking it to reject any proposed standards that allow radiation to be released in air, water or soils from a respository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed a 15-millirem limit for radiation escaping from 77,000 tons of buried nuclear waste from commercial reactors and defense activities. That is roughly 1 1/2 chest X-rays. The EPA standards also would restrict radiation in ground water to 4 millirems.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the agency that will have to license a repository if the site is scientifically sound, has offered a 25-millirem total radiation standard without a ground water limit.

The entire project is "dangerous and a horrendous waste of American tax dollars," the environmental groups' letter said.

The DOE's environmental studies indicate that ground water would be the major carrier of radiation escaping the repository.

But the environmental groups are not comfortable with the government's assurances.

"Our children's children are the 'acceptable' deaths under consideration in the proposed standards," the letter stated.

Citizen Alert, a Nevada environmental watchdog group, and other concerned consumer groups, including the Nuclear Information and Resource Service of Washington, D.C., are asking the new administration to guarantee the repository won't leak any radiation, said Kalynda Tilges, nuclear waste coordinator for Citizen Alert's Las Vegas office.

"We would like to see zero radiation discharged," Tilges said.