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Nevada Official Tells Congress Yucca Mountain Project is Flawed and DOE 'Incompetent'

Posted on: Tuesday, 28 February 2006, 09:00 CST

The head of Nevada's agency overseeing plans for a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, plans to tell a congressional committee Wednesday that the repository and its radiation standards are as flawed as the federal agency pushing the project.

Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, has been battling the proposed nuclear waste dump for 25 years. He testifies Wednesday afternoon before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, during a hearing on the Environmental Protection Agency's revised radiation standards for the project.

Loux said Nevada opposes EPA's efforts to relax its standards regulating how much radiation Nevadans may be exposed to if and when the repository is built.

He said Congress required EPA to set radiation standards "based upon and consistent with" recommendations from the National Academy of Sciences, which called for exposure limits of 2 to 20 millirems per year. EPA proposes new standards limiting radiation doses to 15 millirems per year during the first 10,000 years of a repository's operation. But after that, when leaks are more likely, EPA would allow 350 millirems, which is 23 times more lenient.

"We have concluded that EPA's proposal is unlawful. It's not consistent with the findings and recommendations of the NAS and therefore in violation of the Energy Policy Act of 1992," Loux said. "It has no justifiable scientific or ethical basis in its cavalier flaunting of all human radiation protection regulation worldwide."

Loux said EPA should follow NAS recommendations and stop its "statistical gerrymandering."

"Humans must be protected from the maximum radiation risk from a nuclear waste repository, whenever that risk is projected to occur," he said. "If this protection cannot be reasonably assured at the outset, the problem is with the repository site and design, not with the premise."

Offering another example of why Nevada opposes the dump, he said the U.S. Department of Energy is now "condoning falsified scientific data and bypassing quality assurance controls" on the project.

"Basically, Yucca Mountain is on its last legs because the site can't be made safe and because DOE has proven again and again that it is incompetent and relying on politics to overcome its flawed science," Loux said.

Source: Business Wire

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