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EPA Says Higher Radiation Levels Pose 'No Harmful Health Effect' (bloomberg.com)
Readers share a report: In the event of a dirty bomb or a nuclear meltdown, emergency responders can safely tolerate radiation levels equivalent to thousands of chest X-rays, the Environmental Protection Agency said in new guidelines that ease off on established safety levels. The EPA's determination sets a level ten times the drinking water standard for radiation recommended under President Barack Obama. It could lead to the administration of President Donald Trump weakening radiation safety levels, watchdog groups critical of the move say. "It's really a huge amount of radiation they are saying is safe," said Daniel Hirsch, the retired director of the University of California, Santa Cruz's program on environmental and nuclear policy. "The position taken could readily unravel all radiation protection rules." The change was included as part of EPA "guidance" on messaging and communications in the event of a nuclear power plant meltdown or dirty bomb attack. The FAQ document, dated September 2017, is part of a broader planning document for nuclear emergencies, and does not carry the weight of federal standards or law.
The policy makers must be the 1st to respond to such a disaster.
We'll find out very quickly if they believe they did the right thing.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
There is no more EPA. It's gone. This article has no meaning and should be filtered out as noise.
Let's not bullshit here. This is about Trump's effort to get rid of every single thing Obama ever did.
Trump is your racist, senile uncle. With nuclear codes.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If you voted for the party of less regulation. Yes, there's a lot of silly laws on the books, but the really silly ones are ignored by everyone. When it comes time to cut regulations these are the ones that get cut.
This discussion came up about airport X-ray machines years ago, and sparked a debate about exposure safety.
There appears to be a linear relation between amount of exposure and number of cancers(*), but only for rather excessive levels of radiation. The debate centers on whether there is a "cutoff", where any exposure less than some amount is negligible.
It's hard to get quantitative information about this because the exposure levels are small, and the results won't be known for decades. IIRC, my calculations at the time indicated that 10 or 20 new cases of cancer *might* be caused by 9 billion airline flights. (Those 10-20 new cancers is not nothing, I'm just pointing out that finding the correlation in all that noise is all but impossible. Attention paid to more likely health threats would be a better way to spend effort and resources**.)
The prevailing opinion is that the body deals with and repairs all sorts of damage in it's day-to-day operation, so that damage smaller than a set level will get swept up along with all the other repairs.
Strangely, there is actually no menace in this recent decision, and the "party of less regulation" is doing what appears to be the right thing.
(*) I once wrote an article about airport X-ray systems, which required a bunch of research.
(**) Interestingly, that was then and this is now. Since everyone has to register to take a plane flight, we now have about 15 years of data that could be mined here. Take a cohort of plane travellers and divide them into 2 groups: people who take many flights per year, versus people who take few flights per year, and compare their rates of cancer later in life, against a similar cohort taken from the general population.
"It's a matter of risk--a highly-technical concept nobody seems to know all that much about."
Epidemiologists would probably laugh at the absurdity of this claim.
Radiation exposure is well understand and extrapolated, and has been for years. It's one of the reasons why many changes were made to the yearly chest x-ray to check for lung cancers and tb, limiting and lowering dental xrays, reducing exposure from CT scans, targeting treatments to limit exposure, and the like. They already had good studies and data extrapolating the difference in risk from exposure due to the screen and the cases they do capture versus non or limited screening based on symptomology (someone showing up with a problem), all coupled to outcome (what cases they do treat and the percent that recover).
Besides smoker exposure (radiation), radioactive iodine treatments, other radiation cancer screenings, and occupational exposures (xray techs, nuclear plants workers), radiation is well studied. Stating or suggesting otherwise is, frankly, absurd. Decisions along these lines are what you expect from an administration that doesn't believe in science, can't do math, lies all the time, and is in deep cahoots with industry.
Most increases are reported on a scale of 10k persons, so for a single increase on that scale, that's 100 new cases. You go from, say, 86/10k to 105/10k with a 80% 10 year survival/cure rate, you just abided by essentially a kill rate of the WTC bombing of 9/11 because you chose to have shit regulations.
It may also be the sort of thing you put out to keep people from being unreasonably afraid.
I work at an accelerator lab where we have dangerous radiation levels when the accelerator is on, but quite low levels when it is off. I was talking with some emergency response guys and they said "I'm not walking past all those radiation signs". These are the same guys who will walk into burning refineries to save people. The problem is that they had not been given accurate information on the relative risks of radiation and other risks.
10rem is not "safe" in that the general public should not be exposed to that level of radiation. It is also not so dangerous that people should take higher risks to avoid being exposed to that level of radiation.
The issue is giving people accurate information so that they can balance risks.
Radiation exposure is well understand and extrapolated, and has been for years.
Yes, it is. And we've known that our safety limits have been ultra conservative for quite some time. Its not been a big issue because it hasn't necessarily caused any problematic compliance costs. However, it has caused confusion among the public that would naturally but wrongly assume that 100 times the safety limit must be a high risk danger when in most cases it isn't
The easy answer has always been to always do what you can to minimize exposure, so that's how we've characterized it, lower is better. But when we talk about something like a dirty bomb, its more important to eliminate fear and over-reaction with facts. It would be extremely hard to have a dirty bomb actually harm a large number of people, and if one went off near you the biggest danger would be the physical explosion, not the radiation.
The public risk perception of radiation is so far from reality, it could possibly make us do stupid things.
No, this is nothing more than Pruitt continuing to use his newfound power at the EPA to cut costs for his corporate owners.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.