A.G. files challenge to Yucca radiation rule

By Mary Manning

Published Friday, Oct. 10, 2008 | 12:56 p.m.

Updated Friday, Oct. 10, 2008 | 1:31 p.m.

Nevada is filing suit in the U.S. District Court of Appeals seeking to invalidate the radiation rule for a proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository issued by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto said.

The Environmental Protection Agency recently issued its final radiation standard for the proposed Yucca Mountain repository, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, after Nevada's successful 2004 challenge invalidated an earlier EPA radiation limit.

EPA issued the final standard on Sept. 30, roughly three weeks after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission formally placed the Energy Department's repository application for licensing review on its docket.

Nevada is challenging the radiation standard because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's own repository licensing requirements must reflect the EPA standard and has said it cannot license a repository until the final EPA standard is in place.

Like the draft EPA standard issued nearly three years ago, the final standard is a two-tiered regulation. It establishes the levels of radiation allowed from a Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste repository for 1 million years.

The EPA's final rule retains its earlier proposed 15 millirem annual dose limit for the first 10,000 years after the waste is entombed, but allows up to a 100 millirem dose after 10,000 years. The average person in North America currently receives about 360 millirem from all sources of radiation each year, including solar, cosmic and medical exposures.

"We'll be reviewing the suit and responding appropriately," said EPA spokeswoman Catherine Milbourn.

The Energy Department declined to comment on the lawsuit, but has previously stood by the new standards. "The EPA's recently established final radiation standards for Yucca Mountain are consistent with well established domestic and international radiation protection standards and there is broad concensus on the protectiveness of the dose limits," said Energy Department's Healy Baumgardner.

"The chances of getting cancer from the level of exposure the EPA has established for releases from the proposed repository are negligible compared to ordinary risks experienced by society on a daily basis," Baumgardner said.

The Energy Department said cancer risk estimated compiled by watchdog groups are a "far stretch from reality." Watchdogs say the amount of radiation exposure allowed from Yucca Mountain in the far-off future, 10,000 years from now, means 1 in every 125 people living a 70-year lifetime near the site could get cancer.

But the EPA says the risk would be less, in part because its calculations assume residents would live fewer years near the site.

The Energy Department further maintains that it is designing Yucca Mountain so that far less radiation will come from the site than is permitted under the EPA's rules. Less exposure means less risk. The Energy Department says the estimates compiled by watchdogs represent the maximum risk, "and do not reflect exposure of the entire population."

"The new EPA standard once again fails to protect the health and safety of Nevada citizens, and the environment," Masto said. "EPA has obviously worked closely with DOE (Department of Energy) to adjust its radiation standard in an attempt to steamroll this project through licensing, but has failed to protect Nevadans from cancer-causing radioactive contamination."

The lawsuit, filed in the District of Columbia, said that DOE's own data shows that water infiltration will corrode nuclear waste packages and radioactivity will leak into Nevada's groundwater, "delivering lethal doses of radiation to the public and irreparably contaminating the groundwater."

"Instead of working to protect the health and safety of Nevadans and striving to find reasonable solutions to the nation's nuclear waste problem, EPA and DOE are ignoring science in favor of a project which presents unacceptable risks to the public and presents American taxpayers with a $90 billion liability they can ill afford," Masto said.