EPA rule for Yucca Mountain faces two lawsuits

ENN 3jul01

The state of Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency and a coalition of national and Nevada-based environmental and public interest groups filed separate lawsuits June 27, challenging the new radiation protection standards for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's radiation protection rule, which takes effect July 13, sets the standards by which the site's suitability to contain radioactive waste will be determined. At issue is where the standards will apply and for how long.

The petitions for judicial review were filed in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, by the state agency and the Citizen Action Coalition of Indiana, Citizen Alert, Natural Resources Defense Council, Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force, Nevada Desert Experience, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, and Public Citizen.

They allege that the EPA was wrong to set radiation protection standards for Yucca Mountain that last for only 10,000 years. The standards should be set for hundreds of thousands of years because the waste will be radioactive for at least that long, the plaintiffs claim.

Department of Energy scientists have estimated that peak emissions of radiation can be expected up to 800,000 years into the future.

John Hadder, northern Nevada coordinator with plaintiff group Citizen Alert, said, "This undermines the purpose of radiation protection standards, by presuming that a repository at Yucca Mountain will not contain nuclear waste throughout the thousands of years it remains dangerous."

Another source of contention is the 11 mile radius from the site where a dose of no more than 15 millirems per year is mandated. The 11 mile radius allows repository designs "to rely on dilution and dispersion rather than containment of radioactive waste," the groups said.

They don't want the repository in Nevada at all, but as standards are set, the radius of containment should be much smaller, they believe.

"Exposure limits are built around expected levels of radioactive contamination leaking from the dump, thus establishing a regulatory framework for legalized nuclear pollution in Nevada," Hadder said.

In the state's lawsuit, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects Robert Loux, says the EPA's standards fail to satisfy the agency's duty to protect the health and safety of the people of Nevada from releases from radioactive materials stored or disposed of at the Yucca Mountain repository.

Loux said the rule ignores Nevada's advice to the EPA that people may one day live much closer to Yucca Mountain than they do now. "It is not reasonable to assume that for even hundreds of years into the future that people will continue to live only where people live today," the suit says.

Loux's suit complains that EPA language expressing the "intent of isolating it [radioactive waste] for as long as reasonably possible" in the Yucca Mountain Rule "is arbitrary and capricious and violates the letter and intent of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to the detriment of public health and safety."

Yucca Mountain is the only site under consideration by the Department of Energy as a potential repository for high-level nuclear waste from weapons facilities and commercial nuclear power plants across the country. The waste is now stored on-site at these facilities.

If the Yucca Mountain repository is built, the hot waste would be transported by road and rail to Nevada. Nevada Congresswoman Shelley Berkley, a Democrat, has begun a campaign to learn the exact routes by which nuclear waste would travel on its way to Yucca Mountain.

"We have advocated a protective standard at all stages of the process leading up to this rule being finalized. We are now bringing this issue before the courts because our concerns have not been addressed," said David Adelman, senior attorney with the plaintiff Natural Resources Defense Council.

"We cannot accept a rule that sets artificially weak standards to allow a fundamentally flawed project to move forward," he said.

Meanwhile, the EPA's national ombudsman, an independent investigator within the agency, began an inquiry June 25 into the scientific basis for the EPA's Yucca Mountain radiation health standards.

Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn is opposed to the location of the repository in Nevada as are most state elected officials. In April, the governor said a new report by the U.S. Inspector General's office showed evidence that the process to find a scientifically suitable site for the storage of high-level nuclear waste has been tainted by bias targeting Yucca Mountain.

"The idea that political concerns could, in any way, affect a process with such severe health and safety ramifications for the people of Nevada is shocking and disheartening," Governor Guinn said. "The only acceptable standards for the evaluation of high-level nuclear waste storage are scientific."

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