IEER Science for Democratic Action Vol. 4 No. 4

Calculating Doses from Disposal of High-Level Radioactive Waste:
Review of a National Academy of Sciences Report:

By: Arjun Makhijani

Editor's note: This is a lamentably long article, but possibly the most important so far published in Science for Democratic Action. So please read it, and send us your comments. This on-line version of this article is divided into seven sections. You can also view this article as one long document, with a separate document for notes.
Introduction
Some radioactive materials in nuclear waste will continue to pose threats of environmental contamination and disease for hundreds of thousands of years. The most dangerous of these wastes is called "high-level" waste, consisting of spent fuel from nuclear power plants and the most highly radioactive wastes from plutonium separation. Setting standards for disposal of these wastes to protect human health and the environment for the long time periods necessary is an exercise unprecedented in human history. Indeed, since the periods involved are far longer than any human institution and even civilization itself, creating a reasonable framework for setting the standards has itself been problematic.

The most recent in a long list of studies on the setting of standards was prepared by an ad hoc committee of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), chaired by Robert Fri of Resources for the Future in Washington, D.C. The NAS committee's report was mandated by the 1992 Energy Policy Act, in which Congress directed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop a set of standards for high-level waste disposal specific to Yucca Mountain in Nevada.(1)

In the NAS report, Technical Bases for Yucca Mountain Standards,(2) fourteen of the committee's fifteen members recommend a method for assessing risk to future populations that has never been used before in radiation protection. (3) One committee member, Professor Thomas H. Pigford, among the country's leading nuclear engineers and one of the founders of the nuclear engineering department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, disagreed with the recommendation and filed a vigorous dissent.

The recommendations of the committee majority and the dissent by Pigford are an important part of the current national debate over science, risk, and environmental policy. In this article, I will review both the majority view and the dissent as they concern some aspects of radiation protection standards and the technical assumptions underlying the standards. The centerfold in this issue contains additional information on the report and related matters.

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Revised March 21, 1996