EPA radiation options for Yucca met with criticism

Benjamin Grove

Friday, March 11, 2005 | 11:35 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- The options that the Environmental Protection Agency is considering for a revised radiation standard for Yucca Mountain drew negative reviews from environmental groups that attended a closed-door EPA briefing this week.

The agency is considering several revision options that do not seem to be in line with a federal court in July that directed the EPA to set a tougher standard, the activists said.

"My impression was that they are going to do what they want to do," said Peggy Maze Johnson, director of Nevada-based Citizen Alert, who participated in the Washington briefing by phone. "They don't care about putting waste in a mountain that leaks."

EPA spokesman John Millett confirmed that officials held the Tuesday meeting to inform Yucca watchdog groups about options the agency was considering. But agency officials believe it is "premature to discuss which options under discussion are most likely to be pursued," Millett said.

After years of research, the EPA in 2001 set a radiation standard for Yucca Mountain that restricted the planned underground nuclear waste repository to emitting no more than a 15-millirem annual dose of radiation for 10,000 years, with a separate four-millirem standard for groundwater. A chest X-ray yields roughly 10 millirem of radiation.

A federal court last summer ruled that the standard did not legally mesh with a stricter standard recommended by the National Academy of Sciences. The academy said the standard should be applied during the repository's period of "peak dose" -- the time of greatest radioactive risk -- which may not necessarily occur in 10,000 years. The peak dose may not happen for 100,000 years or more, Yucca watchdogs have said.

EPA officials have worked mostly behind closed doors to revise the standard and have not said publicly what they are planning. Nevada officials have unsuccessfully sought access to the decision-making process, and to the EPA's communications with the Energy Department and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on this matter.

But EPA officials have met quietly with some stakeholders, including the nuclear power industry. The agency met with the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's top lobby group, about a month ago.

On Tuesday EPA radiation office director Elizabeth Cotsworth and an agency lawyer met with representatives from 10 environmental and public interest groups that track Yucca, according to several who attended the meeting. Two Nevada activists, Johnson and Judy Treichel, participated by conference call.

The agency is considering several options, including no change in the 10,000-year standard, meeting participants said.

Another option is leaving the 15-millirem, 10,000-year standard in place -- but with an increased allowable millirem dose level after 10,000 years, meeting participants said. An increased dose limit such as 25-millirem or 100-millirem were used as examples in the meeting, they said.

Yucca critics said that was unacceptable.

"It's obvious the EPA is trying to set a standard that would hold up in court," said Navin Nayak, environmental advocate for U.S. Public Interest Research Group. "It's not clear that the path they are headed down would achieve that."

Nevada officials want a standard that clearly adheres to the National Academy recommendation, said Joseph Egan, a lawyer working for the state.

"It's a bit disturbing that right out of the box that the EPA is working on a ballfield that is light years away from the academy and the court case," Egan said.

Nevada officials generally believe the peak dose will occur when the nuclear waste containers fail, which state officials believe will be well before 10,000 years, Egan said. But they do not agree that the dose standard should be raised, even after 10,000 years.

"We'd have a decent shot of overturning that in court," Egan said.

Among the arguments the state could make is that nuclear regulatory law doesn't generally allow for setting different standards for future generations, Egan said.

The nuclear industry generally supports raising the dose limit after 10,000 years, said NEI senior project manager Rod McCullum.

"That's an avenue that would be a credible and defensible method for addressing uncertainties," he said.

Another EPA option is pursing a more esoteric "risk-informed, performance-based" standard in which the EPA ultimately might not set a specific radiation-limit time frame or dose standard at all, meeting attendees said. A "non-numeric" performance-based standard might describe how the repository would be held to the strictest waste isolation technology available, for example.

"It gets into the murky vagueness of pencil-whipping the repository into compliance," said Kevin Kamps, a nuclear waste specialist with Nuclear Information and Resource Service, who attended the meeting.

The EPA officials told the activists that the agency would release a draft of its new standard this summer and would allow for a 90-day period of public comment.

The activists said that wasn't enough time to mobilize opposition. They asked the agency to first file a preliminary rule-making notice to give them some advanced warning. The agency isn't willing to do that, they said.

Activists fear the important decision-making is being done now, behind closed doors. They fear the EPA will rush to finalize the rule after public comment.

"If the real work on this is being done now, why can't they do it in the open?" Treichel, director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force, said.

EPA spokesman John Millett said the agency was trying to be sensitive to that.

"That's always something we strive to do while recognizing that we need to deliberate internally as we consider options," Millett said.