The Constitution says that the Federal Government is charged with the task of taking care of the public welfare. Top on the list of definitions for welfare is health. The EPA is the division of the U.S. Government that is supposed to be watching out the environment for possible threats to human health. As such, the issue of radioactive contamination from a nuclear accident or deliberate incident is definitely within their purview.
Toward the end of the Bush administration, the EPA was talking about new guidelines about the release of radioactivity into the environment with respect to what levels of radiation should trigger what levels of response on the part of authorities. When the Obama Administration took over, they held up the release of the new guidelines. Part of the reason for the delay was that nuclear activists had raised serious concerns that the new guidelines would raise thresholds for acceptable amounts of radiation in the environment.
After several more years of controversy, the EPA recently released draft proposals of new turned out to be valid. The new guidelines do not explicitly spell out radiation levels but instead refer to numbers from other agencies and institutions which say that much high levels of radiation should not merit a strong response.
One of the main problems is that the EPA had previously recommended that water that contained a certain level of radioactivity should not be consumed without being decontaminated. The new guidelines make reference to recommendations that if decontamination is not practical it would be alright to consume water with thousands of times the radioactive contamination of the previous EPA limits.
Another problem with the new guidelines proposal has to do with environmental remediation to restore the natural environment after contamination with radioactive materials. The new guidelines suggest that it is not necessary to restore a contaminated landscape to the point where it would not violate the previous guidelines for declaring a site to be contaminated. In other words, some remaining contamination could be ignored. Homeland Security suggests that a possible future cancer rate of one person in twenty would be acceptable. The old EPA guidelines set the limit of a possible future cancer rate of one in ten thousand people.
The new guidelines proposal also says that it might be OK to dump nuclear waste into ordinary landfills if there are not other repositories available. This could result in widespread contamination of ground and surface water. The other option would be to burn it in incinerators which would contaminate the air that we breath. A great fear of nuclear activists is that the guidelines are too broad. There might be a nuclear explosion which would disperse so much radioactive material that no thorough cleanup would be possible. On the other hand, the activists are afraid that adoption of the guidelines might make the relaxed standards acceptable for dealing with more ordinary and manageable levels of radioactive contamination and waste.
The EPA claims that they are not relaxing their current standards for dealing with environmental radioactive contamination. They say that the new guideline proposal is an attempt to develop a broader range of option to help deal with major radioactive catastrophes. I agree with the activists that the new guidelines are too broad and vague in drawing important distinctions in how to deal with different levels of radioactive contamination.
