Mortgaging the future: Dumping ethics with nuclear waste |
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Authors: | Email author" target="_blank">Kristin?Shrader-FrechetteEmail author |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Philosophy and Department of Biological Sciences, University of Notre Dame, 100 Malloy Hall, 46556 Notre Dame, IN, USA |
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Abstract: | On August 22, 2005 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued proposed new regulations for radiation releases from the
planned permanent U.S. nuclear-waste repository in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. The goal of the new standards is to provide public-health
protection for the next million years — even though everyone admits that the radioactive wastes will leak. Regulations now
guarantee individual and equal protection against all radiation exposures above the legal limit. Instead E.P.A. recommended
different radiation exposure-limits for different time periods. It also recommended using only the arithmetic mean of the
dose distribution, to assess regulatory compliance during one time period, but using only the median dose to assess compliance
during another period. This piece argues that these two changes — in exposure-limits and in methods of assessing regulatory
compliance — have at least four disturbing consequences. The changes would threaten equal protection, ignore the needs of
the most vulnerable, allow many fatal exposures, and sanction scientifically flawed dose calculations. |
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Keywords: | atomic dose energy nuclear public health radiation regulation waste Yucca Mountain |
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