At the heart of what should be the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s prime mission is protection of the public and nuclear workers from exposure to radiation. Unfortunately, current NRC radiation protection regulations allow exposures at levels so high that its own official excess risk estimates associated with the permissible radiation doses generally exceed by orders of magnitude allowable risks for any other carcinogen. The NRC’s radiation protection standards are desperately in need of being markedly tightened.
Read the full Rad Comments by clicking here.(.pdf)…
10/30/2008: Plans to greatly increase permissible public exposures from a wide range of events resulting in release of radioactivity were condemned today by scores of organizations and individuals in a letter to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson.
A detailed report by Committee to Bridge the Gap reveals, radionuclide by radionuclide, the astronomical concentrations of radioactive contamination in drinking water proposed, which are orders of magnitude higher than EPA’s longstanding drinking water limits. MORE . . .
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Would Produce 1 Cancer Per 125 People Exposed
10/12/2008: EPA has now finalized the radiation protection standards for Yucca at 15 millirem/year for the first 10,000 years and 100 millirem/year thereafter. The 100 millirem figure is a breathtaking break with decades of EPA strenuous positions that permitting that high an exposure is “nonprotective of health.”
Click here for CBG’s Press Release (pdf)…
The Department of Energy could not be trusted to find pollution it had created and had a conflict of interest in that it would have to pay to clean up any contamination located. Twenty years ago, EPA had found that DOE had been washing off the radioactivity off vegetation samples before monitoring them, and driving off the volatile radioactivity by heating to high temperature. More recently it was found that DOE was filtering out the radioactivity from groundwater samples before monitoring them. So an independent survey was necessary.
Congress appropriated up to $13 million for a comprehensive survey and directed …
Politicized, Anti-Science Effort to Set Lax Radiation Protection Standards
The EPA requested (and funded) the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to study the state of scientific knowledge on the risks to human health of “low doses” of radiation. NAS found that there is no safe level of radiation; all doses increase the risk of cancer; and “low-level” radiation is about a third more dangerous in inducing cancer than EPA currently presumes in setting radiation standards to protect the public. You would think EPA would now tighten its regulations accordingly. You would be wrong. EPA staff has now proposed ignoring the …
Bridge the Gap and the Sierra Club recently discovered a proposed contract by which radioactive wastes from decommissioning the Rancho Seco nuclear plant would be sent out of state for disposal in landfills not licensed or designed for radioactive waste. This would effectively bypass a victory by CBG in state court several years ago that overturned a regulation that would have permitted such unlicensed dumping in California, and an administrative moratorium on such practices in the state that we got adopted. CBG and the Sierra Club filed a complaint with the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District (SMUD) Board [click here to …
