EPA Mulling Relaxed Radiation Protections For Nuclear Power

mdsolar sends this news from Forbes: Both proponents and opponents of nuclear power expect the Environmental Protection Agency in coming months to relax its rules restricting radiation emissions from reactors and other nuclear facilities. EPA officials say they have no such intention, but they are willing to reconsider the method they use to limit public exposure—and the public's level of risk.

At issue is a 1977 rule that limits the total whole-body radiation dose to any member of the public from the normal operation of the uranium fuel cycle—fuel processing, reactors, storage, reprocessing or disposal—to 0.25 millisieverts per year. (This rule, known as 40 CFR part 190, is different from other EPA regulations that restrict radionuclides in drinking water and that limit public exposure during emergencies. Those are also due for revision.) "We have not made any decisions or determined any specifics on how to move forward with any of these issues. We do, however, believe the regulation uses outdated science, and we are thinking about how to bring the regulation more in line with current thinking," said Brian Littleton, a chemical engineer with EPA's Office of Radiation and Indoor Air."

Re:There is no "safe" amount of ionizing radiation

[khallow]

I'm sick and tired of the notion that it's OK to pollute, as long as you don't pollute "too much."

It's pretty straightforward actually. We do valuable things and sometimes they cause pollution, sometimes minor sometimes massive. Instead of being "sick and tired" about the non problem of minute pollution (especially given that there is actual large scale, heavy, life-threatening pollution out there), do a cost/benefits analysis instead.

Re:headed in the wrong direction

[Applehu Akbar]

Yours was actually an early, post-WW II fear about radiation effects, with the modern perception trending the other way, as TFA indicates.

If radiation really were 'cumulative' with no threshold, the constant drizzle of background radiation we all live in would have terminated human existence long before this argument even started.

Re:headed in the wrong direction

[Uecker]

I have no opinion about the threshold, but there are two things to correct in your post:

it is the common view of medical and general science during the century-odd that we have discovered and been able to document radiation and its effects... that no amount is "generally recognized as safe" and standards need to be tightened.

What makes your "common view" any more valid than any other "common view"? Especially given that "generally recognized as safe" is a completely non-scientific quantity. In the end, you need evidence to back up such assertions not alleged consensus of vague groups of people.

He is absolutely right though. It is the common view of the scientific community that no amount of ionizing radiation is safe. This is also the basis of all radiation protection regulation everywhere (ALARA principle). The reason is simple: Ionizing radiation creates DNA damage with a small probability which then causes cancer with a small probability (which has then a certain probability of killing you). So even a single particle has a very small probability of causing cancer. There is a minority of people that believe that there are other effects (e.g. radiation at low doses activates the immune system) which dominate at low doses, but this is a minority view point and the data we have does not support this. From atomic bomb survivors see a linear correspondence between dose and risk down to about 50 mSv. For example, from this it was predictated that CT scans cause cancer with a very low probability and this has recently been confirmed.

so a comprehensive review based on science would move the decimal point to the left, at least to .025 mS/year, and perhaps .0025 mS.

Background levels are around 1 mS/year. So why advocate thresholds more than two orders of magnitude lower than what people normally get in a year? I just don't think science has much to do with your choice of thresholds.

This is a fallacy. The threshold should be set on the estimated benefits of a higher threshold vs the estimated harm from the additional radiation. The background radiation has nothing to with it.

Re:headed in the wrong direction

[Mr D from 63]

so a comprehensive review based on science would move the decimal point to the left, at least to .025 mS/year, and perhaps .0025 mS.

Quite the opposite actually. A comprehensive review based on your assumptions might, but based on science they would use real world data with real people. Even with the decades of medical data we have today, exposure from numerous CT Scans, regional radon exposures, and other sources, there is still no evidence in the real population that there are any negative effects from low dose radiation, and it is increasingly clear that the existing safety limits are ultra conservative. Those limits are based on decades old war era studies that observed effects of huge radiation doses which dropped off at lower rates to non-observable percentages. In the interest of being conservatively safe in a world where nuclear fear was at an all time high, they simply drew an almost linear correlation from the high does cases down to zero. But it is quite clear that once you get down into ranges even several times higher than safety limits, no actual increase in cancers or similar are found.

The problem is the old issue of proving the negative combined with a societal mus-perception of radiation exposure risk. There is little incentive in society to improve on the outdated basis we are using.

Re:headed in the wrong direction...riiight!

[Chas]

Never mind that, even were all nuclear power stations (and their accumulated waste waste), and the effects of every nuclear test in history to disappear from the planet TODAY, you'd STILL be living in an environment FILLED with radiation.

And how do you explain places like Guarapari Brazil, with its naturally radioactive beaches? Where the average exposure a year is 175 mS? Yet they don't have higher instances of cancer and radiation-related disease?

I'm sorry, your views of radiation, and its place in nature are uneducated, fear-driven and have no real basis in "science".

Re:headed in the wrong direction

[Uecker]

It is the common view of the scientific community that no amount of ionizing radiation is safe.

That is incorrect. It is one of several common views. Argument from consensus is not scientific, especially when the consensus doesn't actually exist.

Here is a relative new review: http://dx.doi.org/10.1259/bjr/... [doi.org]

This is a fallacy. The threshold should be set on the estimated benefits of a higher threshold vs the estimated harm from the additional radiation. The background radiation has nothing to with it.

I agree. But a high natural background radiation indicates that the estimated harm is likely very overstated.

No, you didn't get it. I will try with a car analogy: There are about 30000 fatal accidents with motor cycles per year in the US. This does not mean that the harm (16 deaths total or so) from GM's ignition key issue was overstated. The harm was huge relative to the minor cost savings. The other deaths are simply irrelevant to this consideration.

Re:headed in the wrong direction

[Uecker]

The other deaths are simply irrelevant to this consideration.

No, they indicate that society accepts a certain level of harm from automobiles. The "minor cost savings" is capped from above before it is just not worth doing.

The overall harm society accepts for mobility is unrelated to the question whether a couple of lifes are worth the cost of an improved ignitation key.

Re:About time

[Solandri]

It's good to see the EPA finally considering relaxing some of its uptight, business-hostile regulations. No wonder the US is losing ground to the developing world when for a few decades it has pushed this regulatory regime that holds industry back and has really harmed wider adoption of nuclear energy.

You're trying to be sarcastic, but your words are quite literally true. 0.25 mSv is [xkcd.com]:

• 12x the radiation you get from a chest x-ray
• 6x the radiation you get from a 5 hour airliner flight
• 3.5x the radiation you get from living in a stone, brick, or concrete house for a year
• about half the radiation dose from a mammogram
• an eighth the radiation dose from a head CT scan
• 1/28th the radiation dose from a chest CT scan

If the 0.25 mSv limit were applied consistently to other aspects of our lives, we'd ban mammograms and CT scans, limit people to a dozen chest x-rays in a year, restrict pilots and stewardesses to just 30 hours of flight time per year, and severely curtail brick, stone, and concrete as building materials. If the proposal someone made below to reduce the limit to 0.025 mSv were carried out, we'd have to ban air travel and chest x-rays altogether.

Re:headed in the wrong direction

[Uecker]

I see your point, but I do not agree to the idea that society, by tolerating fatalities from traffic accidents, has accepted a universal trade-off between risk of death and cost. (There are many problems with this idea: how would you quantify the total value of mobility? Also society is not one single entity but consits of many different people with different interests. Cost and risks are also not equally distributed, e.g.. why should society trade a cost to GM with a risk of death to others?). But this is also irrelevant to the original question: The natural background radiation is nothing society has voluntarily accepted.

Re:There is no "safe" amount of ionizing radiation

[Solandri]

Yep, I think we can all agree that it's worth a few punkin' headed babies and/or a couple of deaths so the rest of us can have brighter colors and whiter whites.

That's the tradeoff we make with vaccination programs. A small percentage of kids who are vaccinated get sick, and a few of them die every year. But we still vaccinate everyone because the benefits far outweigh those costs.

The flaw in your reasoning (it's a pretty common flawed line of reasoning, not just yours, so I'm not picking on you) is that you're trying to compare against a nonexistent zero state. Radiation can cause death. If there were no radiation, there would be no deaths. Therefore we must avoid radiation. Likewise, if we didn't vaccinate, those kids who died from vaccination wouldn't die. Therefore we shouldn't vaccinate.

To do a correct comparison, you can't compare to a zero state. You must take into account opportunity costs; you have to compare with alternative equivalent states. Without vaccination, far more people would die from the diseases we're vaccinating against. Without nuclear power, the world loses 13% of its electricity. The harm from that far exceeds the few deaths from even Fukushima-level accidents. Or if you replaced that nuclear generation with the next most-viable alternative (coal/gas), the emissions from those are far more harmful than the radiation hazards from nuclear. Even if you managed to replace them with wind and solar, the number of deaths installing and maintaining all those turbines and rooftop panels (roughly 11,000 turbines for a Fukushima-level plant, or 4.8 million homes with 40 m^2 of panels installed on each of their roofs) far exceeds the number that nuclear has killed.*

* Math for the wind/solar comparison:

• The Fukushima plant had 4696 MWe of nominal generating capacity.
• Nuclear has a capacity factor of 0.9, so in a year it produced on average 90% of that, or 4226.4 MW.
• Average wind turbine generates about 1.5 MWe peak.
• Onshore wind's capacity factor is about 0.25 on the high end, so in a year that turbine produces an average 375 kW.
• You'd need 11270 1.5MW turbines to equal Fukushima's output.
• PV Solar using high-end 20% efficient panels generates about 150 W/m^2 peak.
• Average rooftop installation is about 20 m^2, but the roof size is about 40 m^2. So 6 kW peak.
• Solar's capacity factor in the U.S. is 0.145. So on average the rooftop would generate 870 Watts.
• You'd need 4.86 million rooftops to equal Fukushima's output.
• Working in high places is dangerous. Roofing is the 5th most dangerous job [cnn.com] in the U.S., at 34.7 fatalities per 100,000 workers each year.
• If a solar installation requires 3 roof-top workers and they can do 100 installs per year, you'd expect 51 deaths per year vs. an estimated about 30 deaths from cancer caused by Fukushima's radiation release in a once-per-25-year accident.
• I can't find stats for turbine worker fatality rates, but wind already kills about 5-10 maintenance workers per year while providing less than 1/10th the world's electricity that nuclear does.

Re:About time

[AmiMoJo]

Solar is already way cheaper than nuclear, has been for a few years now. Wind, geothermal and hydro even more so.

I agree we need diversity, but the massive drain nuclear is placing on the available funding distorts the market. It's so bad that in the UK we have to guarantee well above the normal selling price of electricity for the lifetime of the plant just to get some Chinese guys to build it for us, because no-one here wants to. They know that Scotland's wind and eventually other renewables making it a losing proposition otherwise, and even with the vast subsidy it only works if the Chinese build and run it at a knock-down price.

Re:About time

[Applehu Akbar]

In 1988 when the big nuclear three-holer went in near Phoenix, utility ratepayers were aghast at the idea of paying $2 billion apiece for the reactors. Today, we're all thankful now that the plant is the state's lowest cost provider of power.

Meanwhile, just across the line, the People's Republic of California just paid $2.2 billion for the Ivanpah solar thermal plant, which will generate 0.4 GW compared to our 6 GW, and at much higher operating cost. Ivanpah's cost was also grossly inflated by a slightly less maniacal version of the same useless lawsuits and regulatory delays that plague nuclear construction. The Luddite strategy for any type of energy construction is delay, delay,. delay. As bonding interest steadily ticks upward with time, you can eventually make any project cost too much.

The problem isn't subsidies. we need to fix our legal system to strip Luddies of the legal standing to interfere with vital infrastructure.