by Art Myatt, SEMG Chair and Alliance to Halt Fermi 3 board member.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently published their proposed drinking water “Protective Action Guide (PAG) for Radiological Incidents.”
The purpose, according to them. is “to guide planning and decision-making efforts by local and state officials” in response to “a large-scale emergency.” They further say this would apply for “any radiation incident, such as spills of radioactive material, the detonation of a radiological dispersion device (RDD) or “dirty bomb,” or an accident at a nuclear power plant.”
The reason for this new standard is given as “lessons learned from actual radiological emergencies, including the Fukushima nuclear power plant.” In Japan, 5 years of effort have demonstrated it is impossible to clean up the areas contaminated by fallout to anything like a safe condition. EPA obviously has learned the wrong lessons; drastically lowering standards instead of increasing efforts to prevent similar contamination.
What are their standards? Well, they will be aiming for “500 mrem projected dose, for one year, to the general population.” Explaining what this means will get confusing. A “rem,” or “Roentgen Equivalent [for] Man,” is a calculated unit which attempts to compare different radioactive elements to whole-body radiation such as an x-ray, in terms of their effect on human health.
If you want to get into the details of what exactly a “rem” is, you might start with the Wikipedia article – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roentgen_equivalent_man.
We would be wrong to assume that all the calculations have been done accurately. The current standard for safe drinking water allows a maximum dose of 4 mrem (0.004 rem) per year. The 500 mrem per year new standard, in other words, is 125 times the safe limit for drinking water. The 4 mrem dose was based on old calculations, while current research shows radionuclides in drinking water are significantly more harmful than previously believed.
Diane D’Arrigo, an expert on the staff of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, said “under these proposals, people would be forced to get the radiation equivalent of a chest X-ray 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year, for up to several years, with no medical benefit or informed consent, just from drinking water. This is immoral.”
Once an area is contaminated with long-lived radioactive isotopes, it will not be safe in several lifetimes. This is clearly demonstrated in the global disaster zones of Chernobyl and Fukushima. In the United States, it’s demonstrated on a smaller scale at Hanford, Three Mile Island, Fermi 1 in Michigan, and literally hundreds of other sites that were used for nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
We should learn from all these examples that nuclear operations create areas hostile to life that cannot be fixed, and that the way to avoid creating these areas is to avoid nuclear operations. Instead, the people in charge of our government, now working through the agency that is supposed to protect our environment, want us to accept these areas regardless of contamination hundreds or thousands of times more than safe levels.
Worse, the new unsafe standards are part of a long-term pattern. When the EPA was created over 40 years ago, there was reason to expect it might actually protect us from degradation of the environment. Instead, it has steadily been transformed into the Energy (industry) Protection Agency. Under the Bush Administration, the oil and gas industry was exempted from complying with the standards for clean air and clean water. Now, the Obama Administration is doing the equivalent for the nuclear industry.
Simply writing to the EPA or bringing it up with your Congressional representative can’t hurt, but reversing the long-term pattern will take a substantial change in what the public demands from our government.
This article appeared in the December 2016 edition of “The Activist,” a publication of the Southeast Michigan Group of the Sierra Club.