Fall 2009
Radiation Health Effects Controversy
Equivalent, effective
Maybe it’s defective
Let’s call the whole thing off.
A controversy is brewing between the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) and Professor David Brenner of Columbia University on the usefulness of the effective dose concept. Effective dose is essentially what used to be called the whole body radiation dose. It is the radiation dose that is summed over the dose to individual body organs with factors that weigh the radiation sensitivity of each organ. It is a single number supposedly proportional to the biological detriment or harm to the body. Importantly, it is not a function of age or gender. Brenner would replace the effective dose concept with effective risk. The ICRP disagrees. Is this important? Should you care?
Let’s take this from the top. What is an equivalent dose? One starts with Roentgens, the unit of measurement for ionizing radiation, the amount of radiation required to liberate positive and negative charges of one electrostatic unit of charge (esu) in 1 cm³ of dry air at standard temperature and pressure. In short, a Roentgen relates to the ionization potential in air. The radiation absorbed dose is the amount of energy absorbed in some material, in units of rads. But to finally get to human tissue, one uses the unit rem or sievert, which is the absorbed dose in human tissue, and this is the equivalent dose. In going from absorbed dose to equivalent dose, one distinguishes between the type of radiation. If alpha radiation (2 protons and 2 neutrons), one multiplies by a factor of 20 to account for the ionization potential of a positive doubly-charged alpha particle.
Moving right along here, the effective dose is the sum of the equivalent dose to each radio-sensitive organ multiplied by a weighting factor. This is also in units of seiverts or rems. It is a single number, used by regulatory agencies to limit the radiation dose the public may receive. But the effective dose may not adequately express the risk since the weight factors do not vary with age or gender. Brenner instead would replace the concept of effective dose with effective risk. The radiation risk to each organ would be summed. This would then take into account the gender and age.
For our work at RWMA on personal injury cases, we take into account the age and gender, and also the commitment period, the time between radiation intake and cancer diagnosis, to arrive at the radiation dose to a particular organ. We do this for the specific organ that became cancerous, in order to determine the likelihood that radiation caused cancer to that organ.
Yucca Mountain, 125 miles from Las Vegas, where a high-level waste repository was proposed.
Yucca Mountain Repository Kaput?
A multiple choice question. Who is opposed to the Yucca Mountain repository?
(a) Secretary Chu
(b) Senate Majority Leader Reid (hint: he’s from Nevada)
(c) President Obama
(d) All of the above
If you guessed (d), you would be right. So why is the Department of Energy application for the Yucca Mountain repository still being considered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)? While we don’t know the answer to that question, we can give you an update on proceedings before the NRC.
To retrace historical steps. In 1986, Congress ordered the Department of Energy (DOE) to begin operating a waste repository in Nevada by the year 1998. What’s the problem? Dig a hole, drop high-level waste into the hole, cover it up – problem solved. Not exactly. The problems are technical and political. The political problem is that Nevada was chosen in 1986 because it was politically weak and other potential repository states, like Louisiana, were much stronger. But the political tide has now turned - with a President and Senate Majority Leader opposed to a repository at Yucca Mountain and shrinking the DOE budget. And Nevada and its citizenry are strongly opposed. They’d rather have people gamble in the casinos, rather than with nuclear trucks on the highway. The nuclear industry’s progress toward operating a Nevada repository has slowed considerably, but the licensing process before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has continued.
Intervenors in the license proceeding include the States of Nevada and California, Native American tribes, the utilities, Nevada and California Counties and public interest groups. The technical issues raised by the State of Nevada are daunting. Almost all issues have been accepted by three hearing boards empanelled for the licensing process. The safety issues have ranged from the fact that the proposed repository is in a zone of active volcanoes (from Yucca Mountain, one can see smoke rising from a volcano), to potential contamination of groundwater, to corrosion of containers and degradation of engineered barriers, to flight dangers and aircraft accidents, to land ownership and control. The environmental issues involve transportation risks, such as sabotage and cleanup costs, and the trade-off between a repository or storing wastes at the reactor site. In all, the State of Nevada has advanced 201 safety issues, and 16 environmental issues involving transportation, a total of 1160 pages of issues, along with 21 affidavits by experts. RWMA assisted the State of Nevada on transportation issues.
The next steps involve discovery and deposition of experts, overseen by 3 hearing panels. The discovery process may go on for 2 to 3 years. When and if the Department of Energy will pull the plug is anyone’s guess. And then what? Irradiated fuel will be stored at each reactor or in regional locations in dry storage casks for the indefinite future. In halting recognition that there may be a problem here, the NRC has proposed that dry storage casks be licensed for 40 years rather than 20. That takes care of that!
Stay tuned.
The reef runway at Honolulu International Airport. Under Paina Hawaii’s plan, one million curies of cobalt-60 in a food irradiator would sit between two runways.
Irradiated Papayas at the Honolulu Airport
The last we left you Paina Hawaii proposed irradiating papayas with one million curie of cobalt-60 between two runways of the Honolulu International Airport. The likelihood of an air crash into the irradiator was on the order of one in a thousand per year. While airplanes could bring down the World Trade Center, the NRC staff remained confident the irradiator could withstand an air crash. Well, hold your papayas! The Nuclear Regulatory Commission Hearing Board has decided that the NRC Staff environmental assessment was inadequate.
Earthjustice, on behalf of Concerned Citizens, raised numerous safety issues, that were summarily dismissed by the Hearing Board. No safety issue passed the Board’s muster. But several environmental issues raised by Concerned Citizens were not adequately considered by NRC staff and must be evaluated. So it is back to the drawing board for NRC staff on the issues of alternative sites for the facility and alternative technologies. These are errors of omission, that is, once satisfactorily repaired, construction can proceed, providing the airport authority leases the property to Paina. This is a big “if.” RWMA showed that the risk of an air crash would go down by a factor of 1000 if the site were located 10 miles from the Honolulu airport. In addition, NRC staff must consider alternative technologies to an irradiator. One additional issue must be evaluated by NRC staff – the environmental impact of an air crash while transporting one million curies of Co-60 to Hawaii. Since the type B casks that hold the Co-60 rods are designed to withstand a 30 foot drop and planes fly higher than 30 feet, this should be a no-brainer. But this is the NRC, so the suspense will be figuring out how the NRC staff wiggle their way out of this one. Stay tuned.
La Fonda hotel in Santa Fe. The City has proposed using water from the Rio Grande river.
Isn’t it true? The problem with deserts is there is not enough water. Santa Fe is a lovely town, but water supply is a problem. The town presently gets its water from wells dipping into an underground aquifer. But with an increasing population, the aquifer is being drawn down. The Buckman Diversion Project is the town’s answer. Santa Fe intends to divert water from the Rio Grande River to supplement the town’s wells. But feeding the aquifer are recharge areas near Los Alamos laboratory and the Rio Grande river receives storm water runoff from the laboratory. The issue is – how much radioactive and hazardous substances enter the aquifer or are washed down the canyons. RWMA is joining with Sundance Environmental to craft a proposal to the City of Santa Fe to study the matter.
RWMA would evaluate the risk to local residents and the general population that use the Santa Fe water supply from the Buckman Diversion project. The calculation involves estimating how much radioactive and hazardous materials are contributed by the lab, and how much is removed by the water treatment plants, now and into the future. The answer will be available over a year from now. Sundance Environmental, a Santa Fe-based consulting company will be modeling groundwater and surface water from the Los Alamos site.
Oil production in Louisiana’s territorial seas deposit radium into sediments at concentrations that are unsafe.
Radioactivity in Gulf Coast Water
Customer: Waiter! Waiter! There’s some radium in my oysters.
Waiter: There’ll be no charge for that.
Contaminated water from oil production wells is released into the Gulf of Mexico. Now, in the interests of “streamlining” the licensing process, LDEQ would allow oil companies to drill many additional wells without applying for additional licenses. To make matters worse, the companies want no concentration limit on radium in water. In New York City parlance, this is Chutzpah.
LDEQ is proposing that NPDES permits be issued for a site, not for individual wells. 150 additional wells are anticipated to be constructed under the new NPDES permit, without an environmental assessment. The new permits have no limit on the amount of discharged radium and toxic chemicals. But radium-226 has been found to have concentrations as high as 1,565 picoCuries per liter, far higher than what EPA considersg a hazardous concentration, 50 pCi/L. The concentrations in sediments are similarly high.
The public interest group LEAN has recommended that radiation limits be set, and that LDEQ consider the cumulative effect of produced water on aquatic biota. Increased concentrations of biota may seriously affect the oyster industry. LDEQ has not evaluated the buildup of radium in sediments. They don’t even have the advanced software to model the accumulation of walls.
RWMA has researched this issue for LEAN. Send us a note and ask for the White Paper we produced for LEAN. And check out LEAN’s web site at leanweb.org.
The proposed PEF nuclear reactors on the Gulf Coast have no equivalent outhouse for their low-level waste.
Imagine building a home without bathrooms. Who would buy it? Apparently this is not a problem for Progress Energy Florida (PEF) who wants to build two reactors on the Levy site north of Crystal River on the Gulf Coast, but has no method to dispose of its low-level radioactive waste. In the construction permit/license hearings before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Green Party and the Ecology Party of Florida, along with Nuclear Information and Resource Service have intervened and questioned the lack of a nuclear bathroom approach.
It is clear that no low-level waste facility presently exists for the proposed reactors. Low-level waste consists of every form of radioactive waste that is not high-level, that is, nuclear fuel itself. The recently licensed Waste Control Specialists facility in west Texas (with a buffer zone in New Mexico), near Eunice, New Mexico, may only dispose of waste from Vermont and Texas. And greater than class C waste, the hottest and long-lived low-level waste must go to a deep geological repository, the proposed Yucca Mountain facility in Nevada.
The Environmental Impact Statement says nothing about these problems, like they don’t exist. The decommissioning plan assumes all low-level waste is gone from the reactor site. The plan says nothing about the environmental implications of storing low-level waste on the Levy site for the indefinite future. The plan says nothing about leakage from the waste processing building as occurred at the Connecticut Yankee reactor, where high concentrations from the waste processing building contaminated the aquifer with strontium-90. Maybe if you don’t say anything, the problem doesn’t exist. RWMA is assisting NIRS on the low-level waste issue, contention 7.
RWMA is a New York City-based consulting firm established in 1989. Our expert team of scientists and engineers evaluate the impact of proposed and existent radioactive waste facilities to assist organizations that are faced with nuclear waste management issues.
Radioactive Waste Management Associates
526 West 26th Street, Room 517, New York, NY 10001
Ph. 212-620-0526 Fax 212-620-0518
