Government issues radiation safety standards for Yucca Mountain

The government today issued long-awaited radiation safety standards for the proposed Yucca Mountain repository, putting in place another key element to judge whether the nuclear waste site should be built.

The regulation issued by the Environmental Protection Agency purports to set the acceptable levels of radiation that people could receive from the Nevada site up to 1 million years in the future — no matter that nobody can tell what the earth will look like then.

The uncertainty helped explain why the EPA took three years to finalize the standards after floating a draft version in August 2005.

Now, in order to win a construction license, the Department of Energy must prove, through complex computer modeling, that the underground tunnel system it wants to excavate 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas can meet the safety standard.

The EPA set a two-part standard.

For the first 10,000 years after the repository is filled with highly radioactive spent fuel, a theoretical farmer living 11 miles south of the Yucca site at Amargosa Valley can receive no more than 15 millirem of radiation exposure annually from materials escaping from the Yucca site.

After 10,000 years, the allowable dose would be 100 millirems.

For comparison, EPA officials say a chest X-ray exposes a patient to 10 millirem while a mammogram results in a 30 millirem exposure.