NRC takes 32 years to respond to petition on radiation
MONTPELIER, Vt.—For the nuclear watchdog group New England Coalition, getting the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission to pay attention to its concerns can be a slow and frustrating process. But this may be a new record.
The NRC has just replied to a petition from the coalition about safety and radiation exposure -- more than 32 years after it was filed in 1975.
"No petition before its time," said NRC spokesman Eliot Brenner.
The battle began during construction of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, which opened in 1972. The coalition had been urging the federal regulators to consider, as part of their environmental review of the plant, the full effects of nuclear power -- from mining uranium to burying radioactive waste.
After two federal court decisions favoring nuclear critics, the NRC developed a table detailing its estimates for radiation exposures from various parts of the nuclear "fuel cycle," including mining and processing uranium fuel.
The coalition filed a petition on Nov. 19, 1975 saying the commission's table "'seriously underestimates' the impact on human safety and health by disregarding the long-term effects of certain long-lived radionuclides," especially radon-222 released from uranium mining and milling waste, an NRC document said.
NRC spokesman Neal Sheehan said his agency had addressed the issues raised in the petition in other contexts, including a generic environmental review of nuclear plants seeking license extensions. But it wasn't until the agency began reviewing a batch of applications for new reactors in the last two years that it began to address the coalition's concern head-on.
The NRC formally denied the coalition's petition March 11 and issued a notice about the denial in the Federal Register of March 20. Sheehan said the petition was denied because the agency did not see a "high safety significance" in connection with radon.
Raymond Shadis, technical adviser with the coalition, said knowledge about radon had grown in recent decades and that there was more reason to worry about it now than was known in 1975. The Environmental Protection Agency said in 2003 that radon from natural sources can accumulate in buildings and is responsible for an estimated 21,000 deaths from lung cancer in the United States each year.
"At least the NRC is, if not prompt, consistent," said Shadis, "They got it wrong the first time and after 32 years of sleeping on it, they got it wrong again."
Both Sheehan and Brenner attributed 32-year delay to the need for the NRC to respond to what it considered more pressing matters. They said government agencies have limited resources and have to prioritize what to do with them.
"I was just in a meeting where I heard that something took EPA 16 years to kick out," Brenner said. "Some folks might argue they're twice as fast as we are."
Shadis argued that the First Amendment's right of the people to "petition the government for a redress of grievances" isn't worth much if the government doesn't respond. "It's supposed to be sometime soon, not 32 years down the road," he said.
"It's funny up to the point where you start to consider the seriousness of the subject," he added. "The question is, are you hurting the environment, are you hurting people?"
