Washington (Platts)--10Oct2008

The state of Nevada has sued the Environmental Protection Agency over
EPA?s radiation standard for a nuclear waste repository DOE wants to build in
the state at Yucca Mountain, claiming the regulation will not protect the
health and safety of people in the area.
Nevada, which has spent decades trying to kill the project, filed a
petition for review October 10 with the US Court of Apeals for the District of
Columbia Circuit. The state filed its lawsuit 10 days after EPA issued its
final radiation standard for the proposed disposal facility and 31 days after
NRC docketed DOE's repository license application.
In an October 10 press statement, Nevada Attorney General Catherine
Cortez Masto said, "EPA has obviously worked closely with DOE to adjust its
radiation standard in an attempt to steamroll this project through licensing,
but has failed to protect Nevadans from cancer-causing radioactive
contamination." She said that "DOE's own data shows that water infiltration
will corrode nuclear waste packages and radioactivity will inevitably leak
into Nevada's groundwater, delivering lethal doses of radiation to the public
and irreparably contaminating the groundwater."
Nevada has long been expected to sue EPA over the standard. The state
has maintained that Yucca Mountain cannot safely contain the radioactive
waste.
The two-tiered regulation EPA issued last month retained its proposed
average 15 millirem a year limit on radiation from a Yucca Mountain repository
during its first 10,000 years of operation. The second-tier's average 350 mrem
a year limit in the 2005 draft was reduced to a more stringent 100 mrem a year
limit in the final standard for the period from 10,000 years to 1 million
years. EPA said that the average annual radiation exposure from both naturally
occurring and manmade sources to a person living in the US has been estimated
at 360 mrem a year.