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On April 2nd, in an article entitled "White House Advances Controversial Nuclear Incident Response Guide," Douglas Guarino of the National Journal Group's Global Security Newswire (GSN) reported that the Obama White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has cleared for approval an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) weakening of "protective action guides" for cleaning up radioactive poisons, after "dirty bomb" attacks or nuclear power plant disasters, by orders of magnitude. 60 environmental groups, including Beyond Nuclear, led by Dan Hirsch at Committee to Bridge the Gap, successfully resisted the George W. Bush administration's attempt to approve similar regulatory weakenings in late 2008/early 2009. The Obama administration, as one of its first acts in office, put a hold on the Bush proposal. Ironically, though, President Obama's nominee for EPA Administrator, Gina McCarthy, has overseen the development of this imminent regulatory rollback in recent years, as director of EPA's radiation division. Watchdog groups are urging U.S. Senators on the Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) to question McCarthy about this outrageous regulatory rollback, which she has overseen, during her confirmation hearing on April 11th.
On April 5th, Guarino, in an article entitled "White House-Backed Study Gets Scathing Criticism, More Review," reported on an environmental coalition's demand for a 60-day extension to the April 4th deadline for making comments on the 587-page draft report prepared by the National Council on Radiation Protection (NCRP) on behalf of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The demand was spearheaded by Diane D'Arrigo, Radioactive Waste Project Director at Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), and endorsed by 17 organizations, including Beyond Nuclear. However, the NCRP agreed to grant only an 11-day comment deadline extension, till April 15th. "Tax Day" is an ironic deadline for the tax-paying public to comment on this outrageous proposed radiation protection regulatory rollback -- most of the NCRP panelists who drafted it are federal officials, on the taxpayer payroll, from various agencies, such as DHS, DOE, and EPA. However, EPA's Superfund division -- whose cleanup standards would be so dramatically gutted -- were not invited to take part on the panel.
Guarino quoted Mary Lampert, director of Pilgrim Watch, who commented on the Orwellian nature of the proposed regulatory rollback: “NCRP’s response to lessons learned is simply to redefine ‘clean’ by lowering the cleanup standard [and] is frankly criminal. Just as ‘wrong’ does not become ‘right’ by rewriting the Commandments to ‘Though shall’ from ‘Thou shall not;’ dirty does not become clean; nor harmful become harmless by a stroke of the pen to change the definitions.” She added, the “only humane and sane approach would be for NCRP to recommend measures to reduce the risk of nuclear disasters in light of the potentially real and potentially devastating economic and human consequences; and then to recommend policies and a framework to deal with short and long-term off-site consequences.”
On April 8th, in an article entitled "EPA Relaxes Public Health Guidelines for Radiological Attacks, Accidents," Guarino reported that the White House, its OMB, and EPA, have approved, for immediate implementation, a regulatory weakening of radiological cleanup standards in the aftermath of a "dirty bomb" attack, nuclear power plant catastrophe, or nuclear weapon explosion. Previous EPA regulations are weakened by orders of magnitude. EPA justifies this by citing recommendations made by regulatory agencies in the international arena.
Guarino reports: "For example, the new EPA guide refers to International Atomic Energy Agency guidelines that suggest intervention is not necessary until drinking water is contaminated with radioactive iodine 131 at a concentration of 81,000 picocuries per liter. This is 27,000 times less stringent than the EPA rule of 3 picocuries per liter."
I-131 is a vicious radioactive poison that can be released in large quantities during nuclear power plant disasters such as at Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011. Although I-131 has a short half-life (8 days) and hence hazardous persistence (80 to 160 days), it can do tremendous health damage during that time period. An epidemic of thyroid pathology -- especially in exposed children -- has erupted in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia in the aftermath of the Chernobyl catastrophe, because the USSR did not carry out a protective potassium iodide (KI) distribution. Non-radioactive KI saturates the thyroid gland, causing radioactive I-131 to pass through the body and be excreted. Poland did do so, and thereby averted a thyroid pathology epidemic.
The Japanese government warned parents not to use tap water to prepare formula for their infants in the days and weeks after the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe began, as drinking water reservoirs near Tokyo had been contaminated with I-131 fallout at dangerous concentrations.
Guarino quotes Jeff Ruch, executive director for the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER): “This is public health policy only Dr. Strangelove could embrace. If this typifies the environmental leadership we can expect from Ms. McCarthy, then EPA is in for a long, dirty slog.” PEER issued a scathing press statement on April 8th, accusing the Obama EPA of using "weasel words" and "punting" on controversial issues. Ruch concluded “No compelling justification is offered for increasing the cancer deaths of Americans innocently exposed to corporate miscalculations several hundred-fold.”
Dan Hirsch of Committee to Bridge the Gap agreed with Ruch. Guarino reports:
'Daniel Hirsch, a nuclear policy lecturer at the University of California-Santa Cruz who led a coalition of some 60 watchdog groups against the Bush-era incarnation of the EPA guide, argued the Obama guide is worse than the Bush document in not only ultimately referencing many of the same controversial recommendations, but by forcing the reader to dig through a myriad of other documents to find them.
“What I find particularly tragic is, because it is so corrupt, it now is a useless document,” Hirsch told GSN. “If you have an emergency, you want to go to a protective action guide, look up tables, and know what you’re supposed to do.”
In Hirsch’s view, McCarthy, along with acting EPA Administrator Bob Perciasepe, “moved the most horrible stuff into references” so that “they could somehow claim that it is not identical to the Bush-era PAG.”'
Guarino also reports that attempts to dispose of radiological contamination in the aftermath of a nuclear power plant disaster or "dirty bomb" attack could overwhelm certified radioactive waste dumps in the U.S.:
'Suggestions in the new EPA guide that some radioactive waste might have to be dumped in conventional landfills due to a lack of sufficient space at specially designed sites has also sparked concern among activists.
Diane D’Arrigo, of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, read these suggestions as “an admission that a nuclear power accident could cause major devastation and create enormous amounts of nuclear waste that would exceed all radioactive disposal capacity in the country so would need to go to regular landfills or be burned to disperse into our air and lungs.” She said the new guide was a “step toward making this an ‘acceptable’ practice,” in more routine situations.'
The Japanese government has encouraged local municipalities across Japan to "share the burden" of tsunami-ravaged prefectures, by importing massive amounts of debris for incineration. However, some of the debris is radioactively contaminated. Incinerators are not fitted with adequate -- or any -- radiological filters. This results in a re-suspension of radioactivity into the air, which then falls out, contaminating new areas. The leftover ash -- still radioactively contaminated as well -- has been dumped in such places as Tokyo Bay.
Guarino won journalism awards for his November 2010 revelation that a debate is raging behind closed doors within the federal government over which agency -- NRC? EPA? FEMA? -- would be responsible for post-radioactive release catastrophe cleanup, as well as over where the funding for such a cleanup would come from.