Copyright 2000 Federal News Service, Inc.
Federal News Service
June 23, 2000, Friday
SECTION: PREPARED TESTIMONY
LENGTH: 3703 words
HEADLINE:
PREPARED TESTIMONY OF STEPHEN D. PAGE DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF RADIATION AND INDOOR
AIR U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY
BEFORE THE
HOUSE COMMITTEE ON COMMERCE SUBCOMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND POWER
SUBJECT - HIGH-LEVEL WASTE MANAGEMENT
BODY:
Introduction
Good morning
Chairman Barton and Members of the Subcommittee. It is my pleasure to appear
before you today to provide you with an update on the Environmental Protection
Agency's (EPA) environmental protection standards for the proposed geologic
repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. I will update you on the
status of our final standards and focus on issues of interest to the
Subcommittee.
I would like to begin by reviewing EPA's statutory
authority for issuing the Yucca Mountain standards and the
process that we are following in developing the standards. I also will discuss
the National Academy of Science's (NAS) technical recommendations, and some
important elements of our proposed standards, including the proposed ground
water protection standard for Yucca Mountain. Finally, I will
generally address the expected impact of our proposed standards on the cost of
the repository.
We believe that, as a matter of policy, the
environmental protection standards that EPA ultimately issues should consider
four primary principles: good science, cost-effectiveness, equity, and pollution
prevention. Statutory Authority
The Energy Policy Act of 1992 (Pub. Law
No. 102-486, 106 Stat. 2776, 42 U.S.C. Section 10141 n. (1994)) gives EPA the
authority to establish public health and safety standards for Yucca
Mountain. This Act states that EPA shall promulgate "public health and
safety standards for protection of the public from releases from radioactive
materials stored or disposed of in the Yucca Mountain
repository" (Section 801(a)(1) of the Energy Policy Act). The Act further states
that EPA's standards "shall be the only such standards applicable to the
Yucca Mountain site."
Prior to the enactment of the
Energy Policy Act, EPA developed generic radioactive waste disposal regulations
that applied to all radioactive waste disposal sites, including Yucca
Mountain, which was currently under consideration as the Nation's first
geologic repository for commercial nuclear waste. These regulations are found at
40 CFR Part 191 (50 FR 38066, September 19, 1985). These generic disposal
regulations were applied to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New
Mexico, which EPA certified in 1998, and is currently operating as the Nation's
first geologic disposal facility for transuranic radioactive waste produced as a
result of our Nation's defense programs.
In 1987, EPA's generic disposal
regulations were remanded by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit
(NRDC v. EPA, 824 F 2d 1258 (1st Cir. 1987)), because, among other things, we
had not properly considered ground water protection. Also in 1987, the Nuclear
Waste Policy Act was amended (NWPAA, Pub. L. 100-203), selecting Yucca
Mountain as the sole site to be characterized for high-level
radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel disposal. Then, in 1992, the WIPP Land
Withdrawal Act (WIPP LWA, Pub L. 102-579) was enacted, which directed EPA to
finalize the generic disposal regulations at 40 CFR Part 191 and certify whether
WIPP was a suitable site for transuranic waste disposal. The WIPP Land
Withdrawal Act also exempted Yucca Mountain from the 40 CFR
Part 191 generic radioactive disposal standards.
So, in 1992, with the
enactment of the Energy Policy Act, EPA was directed by Congress to set
site-specific environmental protection standards for Yucca
Mountain. In doing so, EPA was to consider technical recommendations
from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The NAS issued its Yucca
Mountain report in 1995. Between 1995 and 1999, when EPA issued our
proposed environmental protection standards for Yucca Mountain,
we held technical discussions with the NAS, as well as numerous interagency
discussions with DOE, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the Office of
Management and Budget, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and other
federal agencies to discuss important technical and policy issues associated
with the development of the standards.
Standards Development Process
EPA published its proposed standards in the Federal Register on August
27, 1999 (64 FR 46976). We are working on developing the final rule, and we
anticipate promulgating the final rule this Summer. We received extensive
comments from DOE and NRC, as well as other government entities, NAS, industrial
and environmental advocacy groups, Tribal organizations, scientific
associations, and members of the general public. We received approximately 800
public comments from 70 groups or individuals which we will be responding to in
writing at the time we issue our final standards.
We have made every
effort to consider all sides of the issues that have come to our attention. This
includes meetings with interested parties and discussions within the
Administration. A significant amount of this time has been spent addressing
scientific issues in coordination with NAS, the Office of Science and Technology
Policy, DOE and NRC. EPA has worked diligently with these organizations to
resolve the many complex issues. We are currently in the final stages of
drafting the final rule and supporting documents for our internal Agency review
process. These documents include the preamble and rule, extensive technical
background information document, economic impact analysis, and detailed response
to comments document. Once these documents have been reviewed within EPA, we
will begin the inter- agency review process administered by the Office of
Management and Budget, in which DOE and NRC will participate.
We are
taking the necessary time to ensure that we prepare standards that are
technically sound, legally defensible, can be implemented reasonably, and are
protective of public health and safety from potential releases from
Yucca Mountain. During the public comment period, and
thereafter, EPA staff traveled to local communities to hold public hearings and
meetings to discuss the standards, EPA's role with respect to the other
agencies' roles, and to answer general questions about the Agency's process for
setting the standards. These meetings were held with community and Tribal
leaders, as well as with state and county representatives.
National
Academy of Science's Recommendations and Comments
The Energy Policy Act
required us to contract with the NAS to conduct a study to provide findings and
recommendations on reasonable standards for protection of the public health and
safety. On August 1, 1995, the NAS released its report ("the NAS Report"),
titled Technical Bases for Yucca Mountain Standards. Since
1995, EPA has thoroughly studied the NAS report and the public comments received
on the report in order to propose the standards for Yucca
Mountain. The EPA's proposed Yucca Mountain standards
are based on and consistent with the recommendations of the NAS. Where our
proposed rule departed from a strict reading of the NAS report, we made a
special effort to explain our reasoning.
The development of the proposed
rule for Yucca Mountain was guided by the findings and
recommendations of the NAS because of the special role Congress gave the NAS and
because of the NAS's scientific expertise.
We worked very hard to
incorporate NAS's comments into our proposed rule; and, in some cases we have
used NAS's recommendations to inform our policy decisions. In its comments on
our proposed standards for Yucca Mountain, the NAS is
supportive of many aspects of our proposed rule and provides recommendations for
improvement in areas where we disagree.
Important Aspects of EPA's
Environmental Protection Standards
The three main elements proposed in
our proposed standards are the individual protection standard, the ground water
protection standard, and the human intrusion standard. Each standard must be met
for DOE to be in compliance with our rule.
Provided below are some of
the issues on which NAS and others had important comments.
The
individual-protection standard focuses on exposures to an individual whose
lifestyle is similar to people living today in the Yucca
Mountain region, and who obtains drinking water and food from local
sources. The ground water protection standard protects important natural
resources by focusing on the quality of the aquifer supplying water to
downgradient communities. The human intrusion standard focuses on evaluating the
ability of the repository to withstand a single intrusion event.
Individual Protection
In its proposal, EPA adopted an annual
dose of 15 millirem from all exposure pathways as protective. This is equivalent
to the NAS- recommended annual risk range of 1 x 10'6 to 1 x 10's, which
translates to a dose range of 2 to 20 millirem/year. The annual risk associated
with EPA's proposed 15 millirem standard and 4 millirem standard for ground
water fall within this range. In its comments on the proposed rule, NAS
determined that the individual protection standard proposed by EPA fell within
the range of values it suggested. In those comments, the NAS stated that, "EPA
appears to recognize that its standard must be written in a way that provides
appropriate protection to the individuals who have the highest potential for
exposure...while avoiding unrealistic and unnecessarily conservative assumptions
for individual exposure."
Human Intrusion
In our proposed rule,
EPA followed the NAS recommendations on human intrusion. We did this by
including a scenario for inadvertent human intrusion that is analyzed using
similar methods as the undisturbed case (i.e., without intrusion). We were
prescriptive in specifying the intrusion event in order to make implementation a
more reasonable process for DOE and NRC.
Regulatory Time Frame
We proposed that DOE meet numerical standards for 10,000 years after
repository closure. The 10,000-year limitation was set to reduce speculation
about the application of a regulation beyond 10,000 years and to be consistent
with previous regulation of the WIPP geologic repository. In its report, NAS
recommended that the period of compliance should extend to a time when the
potential peak risks may occur (this could be several tens of thousands years
for Yucca Mountain). NAS determined that there is likely little
difference between its recommendation and EPA's proposed standard because
although EPA's standard applies for only 10,000 years, EPA also proposed to
require DOE to consider the performance of the disposal system at the time of
peak dose, whenever that occurs, as part of the environmental review process.
Ground Water Protection
The NAS report concluded that an
individual protection standard is sufficient for the protection of public health
from radiation releases from the Yucca Mountain repository. The
NAS did, however, state that, under the Energy Policy Act, EPA has the authority
to set a separate ground water standard as a matter of policy. EPA has proposed
the ground water standard as an implementation of policy which we plan to
articulate more clearly in the final rule.
Ground Water Protection
Ground water is one of our Nation's most precious resources; more than
50 percent of the U.S. population draws on ground water for its potable water
supply. If radionuclides migrate into this valuable resource, there are multiple
routes of exposure. In addition to serving as a source of drinking water, ground
water may be used for irrigation, stock watering, food preparation, showering,
and various industrial processes. Ground water contamination is also of concern
to us because of potential adverse impacts upon ecosystems, particularly
sensitive or endangered ecosystems. For these reasons, we believe it is a
resource that needs special protection. Therefore, we proposed a level of
protection of ground water at Yucca Mountain at the same level
as the maximum contaminant levels (MCLs) for radionuclides that we established
previously under the authority of the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA).
As
you know, EPA has a long-standing policy of emphasizing the protection of ground
water resources in other contexts from all sources of pollution. We developed a
formal Agency strategy in 1990. Key elements of our ground water protection and
cleanup strategy in other contexts are the overall goals of preventing adverse
effects on human health and the environment and protecting the environmental
integrity of the Nation's ground water resources. Ground water should be
protected to ensure that the Nation's currently used and reasonably expected
drinking water supplies do not present adverse health risks and are preserved to
present and future generations. It should also be protected to ensure that
ground water does not interfere with the attainment of surface-water-quality
standards that are necessary to protect the integrity of associated
ecosystems.The pollution prevention approach to protecting ground water
resources avoids requiring present or future communities to implement expensive
cleanup or treatment procedures. This approach also protects individual ground
water users. Moreover, absent the protections in our proposed rule, EPA believes
the ground water in aquifers around the repository itself could be subject to
expensive cleanup by future generations if releases from the repository
contaminate the surrounding ground waters at levels that exceed the drinking
water standards. A guiding philosophy in radioactive waste management, as well
as waste disposal in general, has been to avoid polluting resources that
reasonably could be used in the future rather than imposing cleanup burden on
future generations.
Virtually every state has taken steps toward
comprehensive ground water protection. Forty-nine states have developed programs
to protect current ground water sources of drinking water through the Wellhead
Protection Program. Forty-one states have numeric or narrative ground water
standards to protect their ground water supplies. As EPA has said in testimony
to this Subcommittee before, the people of Nevada should not be exposed to
higher risks than the people in any other state in the U.S. EPA believes that
ground water in a region growing as rapidly as the Las Vegas metropolitan area
should be protected from pollution "up front," rather than becoming polluted,
and then forcing the residents to bear the cost of the environmental cleanup
afterwards.
An important question that has been raised by some
commenters is the need for the separate ground water protection standard, in
addition to the all pathways individual protection standard. Our proposed rule
contains two standards for disposal of spent fuel and high-level radioactive
waste in the Yucca Mountain repository: a 15 millirem all-
pathways individual protection standard, and a 4 millirem ground water
protection standard. It is critical to understand the relationship between these
two separate, but complementary, standards. We proposed an all-pathways
individual protection standard and a separate ground water protection standard
because it was our view that it was appropriate to do so in order to comply with
our statutory mandate to promulgate "public health and safety standards for
protection of the public from releases from radioactive materials stored or
disposed of" in the Yucca Mountain repository (Section
801(a)(1) of the Energy Policy Act).
The 15 millirem standard is an
all-pathways standard that directly protects individuals who may receive
exposure (through any pathway) from radionuclides released from the repository.
The 15 millirem all pathways standard is the same standard that we included
previously in our generic standards for geologic repositories (40 CFR Part 191).
Should any pathways including a ground water pathway prove to be significant,
the all-pathways standard serves to limit radiation exposures to affected
individuals. However, should the ground water pathway be the most significant
source of exposure, then an all pathways standard would allow groundwater
concentrations that exceed 4 millirem/year.
The 4 millirem standard is
the MCL, promulgated pursuant to the Safe Drinking Water Act, and is used to
define the allowable level in drinking water. If ground water that is or could
be used for drinking water, among other uses, is a significant pathway, present
and future users of the ground water resource would be protected at the level of
the current drinking water standard by a ground water standard. By extension, a
ground water standard would provide this protection (albeit indirectly) to the
individuals who now live, or who may live in the future, in the vicinity of
Yucca Mountain. In its report on the technical bases for
Yucca Mountain standards, NAS identified ground water as the
pathway likely to lead to the greatest exposure of the public and the
environment to releases from the Yucca Mountain repository.
With respect to radioactive waste disposal, we believe the fundamental
principle of inter-generational equity is important. We should not knowingly
impose burdens on future generations that we ourselves are not willing to
assume. Disposal technologies and regulatory requirements are developed with the
aim of preventing pollution from disposal operations, rather than assuming that
cleanup in the future is an unavoidable cost of disposal operations today.
Designing a disposal system, and imposing performance requirements that avoid
polluting resources that reasonably could be used in the future, therefore is a
more appropriate choice than imposing cleanup burdens on future generations. The
approach to ground water protection in our proposed regulation is consistent
with our overall approach to ground water protection: it limits the
contamination of current and potential sources of drinking water in the vicinity
of Yucca Mountain.
In designing our proposed ground
water protection standard, EPA offered as much flexibility as possible, while
still ensuring adequate environmental protection. For example, to facilitate
implementation of the standard, we proposed the concept of a "representative
volume" of ground water in which DOE and NRC would project the concentration of
radionuclides released from Yucca Mountain for comparison
against the MCLs. In addition, we proposed the concept of a "point of
compliance" whereby EPA would establish the area where the concentration of
radionuclides would be measured. Our proposed standards offered several options
and explained the rationale for each in detail.
Our proposed standard
requires that DOE provide a reasonable expectation that, for 10,000 years of
undisturbed performance after disposal, releases of radionuclides from the
disposal system will not cause the level of radioactivity from combined beta and
photon emitting radionuclides in the representative volume at the point of
compliance to exceed 4 millirem per year to the whole body or to any organ. Put
simply, under our proposal, DOE must provide a reasonable expectation that the
Yucca Mountain disposal system will meet the same levels as the
current MCLs for radionuclides under the Safe Drinking Water Act (42 U.S.C.
Sections 300f to 300j-26). We frequently require compliance with the MCLs in our
regulations.
When we developed the current MCLs in 1975, we based them
on the best scientific knowledge regarding the relationship between radiation
exposure and risk that existed at that time. In the near future, we intend to
update the existing MCLs based on a number of factors, including the current
understanding of the risk of developing a fatal cancer from exposure to
radiation; pertinent risk management factors (such as information about
treatment technologies and analytical methods); and applicable statutory
requirements. Particularly relevant statutory requirements, in this context, are
the requirements (1) that MCLs be set as close as feasible to the Maximum
Contaminant Level Goal (MCLG) (42 U.S.C. Section 300g-1(b)(4)(B)) and (2) that
revised drinking water regulations provide for equivalent or greater human
health protection than the regulations they replace (42 U.S.C. Section
300g-1(b)(9)).Our preliminary analysis of the current MCLs, which are being
revised under a separate Agency rulemaking, indicates that, when updated for the
latest scientific understanding, the radionuclide concentrations to meet the
current MCLs mostly fall within the Agency's range of acceptable risks of 10-4
to 10-6. This means that there will be no more than one in 10,000 to one in
1,000,000 chance of excess cancer deaths. This is not unique to Yucca
Mountain, as it is the risk range that has governed the Nation's
drinking water regulations for the last 25 years. Based on the statutory
requirements and the factors identified above, we proposed allowable
concentrations for the radionuclides of concern at Yucca
Mountain at levels that are comparable to current standards.
Effects of Our Rule on the Repository's Costs and DOE's Schedule
An EPA draft study (which will be available when the final rule is
issued) indicates that EPA's proposed standards will not have a significant
impact on the cost of the repository. We support DOE's efforts to design the
repository in such a way as to prevent or to the extent possible limit any
releases from the repository in order to avoid passing on the costs of clean up
to future generations. We understand that DOE still has to undergo the NRC
licensing process; however, to date, DOE's ongoing studies show compliance with
the proposed ground water standard, although EPA is still considering options
and alternatives for the final rule.
As our economic impact analysis for
our final standards will illustrate, DOE's costs for the facility are driven by
many external influences, including EPA's proposed standards, the
recommendations of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board and the rigorous NRC
licensing process, all striving to enhance repository safety. A primary concern
relates to minimizing the technical uncertainties of modeling and enhancing
repository performance through certain engineered enhancements to the repository
design (e.g., an improved canister, drip shields).
Conclusion
Thank you again for inviting me to testify before the Subcommittee
today. I would be happy to answer any questions that you may have.
END
LOAD-DATE: June 27, 2000 
