Wall Street Journal – by John R Emshwiller
In the wake of a nuclear emergency, the Environmental Protection Agency thinks it would be acceptable for the public to temporarily drink water containing radioactive contamination at up to thousands of times normal federal safety limits.
The agency is proposing this in new drinking-water guidelines for use in the weeks or months after a radiological event, such as a nuclear-power-plant accident or terrorist “dirty” bomb.
The EPA has been looking for years at issuing drinking-water guidelines as part of a broader set of recommendations about what to do if radioactive material is released into the environment. Agency officials have said the 2011 accident at the Fukushima nuclear complex in Japan, where radiation was released, influenced their thinking on the matter.
Public comments on the proposed drinking-water guidelines are still being evaluated and the EPA expects to release a final document sometime this year, an agency spokeswoman said.
In written filings, the EPA said its normal radiation-safety limits, which are based on presumed exposures over decades, can be relaxed for a relatively brief period in the wake of emergencies without unduly increasing people’s risk of harm. The new guidelines would help officials decide when protective actions, such as bringing in bottled water, are needed.
Opponents of the EPA drinking-water proposal, including the New York attorney general and environmental groups, say the initiative represents a drastic departure from normal protection limits and could endanger people’s health. Internal EPA documents written by agency officials and obtained by environmentalists under the Freedom of Information Act, also raised concerns.
In its written comment, the New York attorney general’s office expressed concern regarding a possible accident at the Indian Point nuclear power plant, about 24 miles north of New York City. The EPA’s proposal “would potentially allow millions of New York residents to ingest drinking water containing concentrations of radionuclides that are well in excess of what has been considered to pose an acceptable risk,” it said.
The proposed guidelines have gotten supportive comments, including from the American Water Works Association, a nonprofit group with over 4,000 water utilities as members. Kevin Morley, the security and preparedness program manager, called the EPA proposal a “reasonable approach” during times when “it is not an everyday, business-as-usual situation.”
EPA officials declined to be interviewed but in written responses to questions, the agency said it took a “conservative approach,” including setting lower exposure numbers for pregnant women and children, who are more vulnerable to radiation.
In January 2009, during the last days of the Bush Administration, the EPA floated a draft drinking-water guide with proposed allowable radioactive-contamination levels, measured in picocuries per liter, for over 100 radioactive isotopes. Some of those levels were thousands of times or more above the contamination levels allowed by the EPA during normal periods.
Under that draft guide, a person would have been allowed to drink water contaminated with enough picocuries of radioactive material to give up to 500 millirems of exposure in a year. The EPA’s normal drinking-water annual limit is 4 millirems. The average American gets about 300 millirems annually from natural background radiation, such as the sun.
One internal EPA document written by an agency radiation specialist, and obtained by environmental groups through the FOIA process, criticized the 500-millirems number as too high. It included a chart indicating that some of the contemplated contamination levels for specific isotopes could give a person in days or weeks enough radiation to equal a 70-year lifetime exposure under normal conditions.
When the Obama administration came into office in early 2009, it moved to review the guidelines before issuing them.
A 2011 memo by a senior official at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the EPA had recently provided “a significantly revised version” under which the agency was looking to use the 4-millirems annual protection limit instead of the 500-millirems number. The NRC memo criticized the revision in part for possibly prompting unnecessarily drastic actions, such as population relocations, after a radiological release.
However, the EPA proposal made public in June contained a 500-millirems annual target during emergency situations for adults along with a 100-millirems one for children and pregnant and nursing women.
EPA declined to comment on the NRC memo.
In its written response, the EPA said its thinking on the drinking-water guidelines was influenced by the 2011 Fukushima accident. In the U.S., public water systems would be expected to return to meeting normal standards “as soon as practicable.”
Relaxing the 4 millirems annual standard following a radiation release “could result in a much higher cancer risk, which is not acceptable,” wrote Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, in a July letter.
While the Bush Administration proposal listed allowable contamination levels for over 100 isotopes, the latest document listed only three with generally higher levels, at least for most adults, than in the 2009 document.
Levels for other isotopes can be calculated using formulas in the latest guide, the EPA said. Higher allowable contamination levels than those in the 2009 document are possible, the agency said, because it has lowered its assumptions of how much water people drink each day. That move, said Daniel Hirsch, director of the environmental and nuclear policy program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, would leave above-average water consumers facing greater risks.
Listing only a few isotopes is part of a transparency problem at the EPA, said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Silver Spring, Md.-based Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which filed a suit to obtain the internal EPA documents. “We have heard of hiding the ball but this is hiding the whole basketball court,” he said.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/epa-proposes-new-water-rules-for-nuclear-emergencies-1473725010