Nextgov/FCW - Authors - Douglas P. Guarino

Weapons-Grade Uranium Not a Must for Nuclear Medicine, Dutch Figure Says

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Thu, 12 Jun 2014 17:39:21 -0400

A Dutch official says he is confident that the operators of a Netherlands reactor are doing all they can to meet a goal of producing radiological isotopes used in medical procedures without the use of bomb-grade uranium.

The Netherlands -- which hosted this year's Nuclear Security Summit -- agreed at the previous gathering of world leaders in 2012 to work toward a goal of producing medical isotopes without highly enriched uranium by 2015. The United States, France and Belgium also agreed to collaborate on the objective.

Under the deal, observers expected that Dutch producer Mallinkrodt would switch to using only low enriched uranium by 2015. Just weeks before this year's March summit, a U.S. watchdog group released information suggesting that the company was not expecting to meet that goal until at least 2017, however.

Included in the release was a letter that U.S. activists wrote to Dutch government officials urging them to persuade Mallinkrodt to accept U.S. financial and technical assistance in order to speed up the switch. Activists have contended that the company diverted resources away from the conversion project in order to address reactor shutdowns and maintenance issues, and that U.S. aid could help make up the difference.

During a recent interview, Kees Nederlof, who served as deputy to the Netherlands' lead summit organizer, downplayed the role such assistance could play in speeding up the process.

"It's not a matter of money," Nederlof told Global Security Newswire and Arms Control Today. "It's a matter of solving technical problems. Of course that needs and it requires money but it's not the most important thing. Suggestions that government aid would speed up this process, I think, are based on very little evidence."

Nederlof, who will take the lead role for the Dutch government in the run-up to the 2016 summit in the United States, said he was confident Mallinkrodt was doing all that it can.

"Reports that they were lazy in doing such are utterly nonsense, really," said Nederlof, who serves as an adviser for strategic affairs at the Dutch Foreign Ministry. "We have been closely involved in what they are doing, and we have been kept informed about all the stages of the conversions, and we are absolutely convinced that they are doing whatever they need to."

As for exactly when the conversion will be complete, Nederlof said he could not offer any promises. The goal is still 2015, he said, but he acknowledged it may take longer.

"That's for me very difficult to say," Nederlof said in the interview, which took place at the Dutch embassy in Washington last month. "We cannot exclude that the process will take until 2017. I have to take that into account. Who am I, from the government, to correct this estimate by a company?"

The Dutch official stressed that ensuring patients throughout the world have adequate supplies of medical isotopes is the priority.

"You're not going to jeopardize patients for a delay of one or two years," Nederlof said.

Edited excerpts of the interview, the second piece in a two-part series, appear below:

GSN: The latest we heard was that the Dutch reactor that produces medical isotopes would likely not stop using highly enriched uranium until at least 2017. Is that still the case or can that be sped up?

Nederlof: [At the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit] in Seoul, we stated that we will do our utmost … not only the Netherlands, but also Belgium and France, to have things converted in 2015. … It's still one and half years to go, but there are some technical obstacles, technical problems that they are now well on their way to resolving. Whether that will result in having conversion completed before the end of 2015 is a little bit too early to say.

Some people here in the U.S. … were jumping to conclusions. It's really too early to say, that's the first thing. The second is we've always maintained that the position of the patients all over the world who are dependent on these medical isotopes is an extremely important part of this. … You convert as much as possible but, if there are technical obstacles, you're not going to jeopardize patients. … That was always in the joint statement made in Seoul.

GSN: The company [Mallinkrodt] said that because of the obstacles, the switch might not be complete until 2017, but you think there is still a chance it could happen by 2015?

Nederlof: That's for me very difficult to say. … We cannot exclude that the process will take until 2017. I have to take that into account. Who am I, from the government, to correct this estimate by a company? … But once again, the position of patients worldwide is very central. You're not going to jeopardize patients for a delay of one or two years. …

In 2016, the Canadians will stop producing -- there will be a huge shortage. It would be very unpleasant for the world community if all of the sudden the supply of medical isotopes was stopped.

GSN: Do you have confidence that the company is doing all it can to make this happen as soon as possible?

Nederlof: Absolutely. Reports that they were lazy in doing such are utterly nonsense, really. We have been closely involved in what they are doing, and we have been kept informed about all the stages of the conversions, and we are absolutely convinced that they are doing whatever they need to. …

It's not a matter of money. It's a matter of solving technical problems. Of course that needs and it requires money but it's not the most important thing. Suggestions that government aid would speed up this process, I think, are based on very little evidence.

This article was published in Global Security Newswire, which is produced independently by National Journal Group under contract with the Nuclear Threat Initiative. NTI is a nonprofit, nonpartisan group working to reduce global threats from nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.

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U.S. Confirms Effort to Phase Out Selected 'Dirty Bomb' Materials

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 17:44:48 -0400

U.S. officials confirmed on Monday that they will launch an effort to help limit the prospect of "dirty bomb" attacks by working to phase out certain radiological materials.

"The United States intends to establish an international research effort on the feasibility of replacing high-activity radiological sources with non-isotopic replacement technologies, with the goal of producing a global alternative by 2016," states a U.S. "progress report," released Monday at the Nuclear Security Summit in the Netherlands.

This unilateral "house gift" that U.S. officials offered at the biennial gathering of world leaders follows calls from nonproliferation advocates for the United States and United Kingdom to lead an effort that could enable a global phase-out of selected radiological materials used in the medical field.

As Global Security Newswire reported last week, a report from James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies suggested that hospitals and blood banks move away from the use of cesium chloride. The radioactive substance presently is used for irradiating blood prior to transfusion, in order to prevent a rare but lethal complication known as graft-versus-host disease.

Paired with conventional explosives, such substances could potentially be dispersed over a wide area in a dirty bomb attack, creating dangerous contamination.

The report says blood could be irradiated instead with electromagnetic radiation, such as X-rays or ultraviolet light, or by linear accelerators that many hospitals already have on hand for cancer treatments.

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Obama Budget Plan Puts Controversial Plutonium-Conversion Facility on Hold

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 15:36:12 -0500

The Obama administration is placing controversial plans to complete construction on a South Carolina facility that would convert nuclear weapon-usable plutonium into reactor fuel on hold as part of the fiscal 2015 budget plan it rolled out on Tuesday.

The facility, which is partially built, would convert plutonium into mixed-oxide fuel.

"A review of this approach has determined that the MOX fuel approach is significantly more expensive than planned and it is not viable within the FY 2015 funding levels," said a summary of the Energy Department budget proposal, released by the White House.

"The Department of Energy is developing alternative approaches to plutonium disposition and will engage with stakeholder to determine a viable alternative," the statement continued. "As a result, the MOX project will be placed in cold standby while an alternative approach is determined."

The announcement comes on the heels of a Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing board decision to uphold security plans for the controversial facility. It also follows new reports last month on the project's escalating costs.

Watchdog groups are already praising the announcement.

"Converting this plutonium to a form that would be harder to steal or reuse in nuclear weapons is an essential long-term goal," Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists' global security program, said in a Tuesday statement. "But the MOX strategy would have greatly increased near-term risks by making it easier for terrorists to steal plutonium during processing transport or storage at reactors."

Activists have argued that solidifying the plutonium in a glass-like form could be cheaper and less vulnerable to theft.

The plutonium disposition effort is part of the National Nuclear Security Administration's broader nonproliferation program. In total, the administration is proposing that the semiautonomous Energy Department agency spend $1.6 billion on nonproliferation efforts in fiscal 2015. This would be a 20 percent drop from the $1.9 billon Congress approved for fiscal 2014, which in turn was a $289 million cut from fiscal 2013 levels.

Within the nonproliferation budget, the Obama administration is proposing a 24 percent cut to the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, which aims to secure vulnerable nuclear materials around the world.

"The reduction in FY 2015 funding reflects the expected completion of a major milestone in early FY 2015 of the development of a new domestic, non-[highly enriched uranium]-based supply of the critical medical isotope molybdenum-99 … which is being executed under multiyear contracts funded in previous fiscal years," according to a summary.

The administration is also proposing a 24 percent cut to its International Material Protection and Cooperation program, which works to secure and eliminate vulnerable nuclear weapons and materials. It attributes this in part to the expiration of the longstanding Cooperative Threat Reduction umbrella agreement with Russia last year.

At the same time, it is recommending $8.3 billion for the agency's nuclear weapons programs, which is $533 million -- or 6.9 percent -- more than Congress approved for fiscal 2014. Among the items contributing to the increase is a requested boost to funds for the controversial refurbishment of the B-61 gravity bomb, according to the summary.

The news about the MOX program comes as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing board has rejected activists' claims that plans for the facility do not include adequate security measures.

Shaw AREVA MOX Services -- the federal contractor that is building the facility in question -- praised the NRC panel's ruling. Watchdog groups, meanwhile, are critical of the decision, arguing it could set a bad precedent regarding how sensitive nuclear materials are handled generally.

The timing makes the debate yet more politically relevant, coming less than a month before an international Nuclear Security Summit takes place in the Netherlands.

The groups -- including the Union of Concerned Scientists, Nuclear Watch South and the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League -- argued in their unsuccessful legal challenge that the contractor's plan relied too much on computers -- and not enough on humans -- to verify that the weapons-grade plutonium was accounted for and secure. They claimed the approach could make the facility vulnerable to theft and cyber-attack.

The NRC Atomic Safety and Licensing Board ruled last week that the contractor's plan was in compliance with the commission's regulations, however. The commission has yet to release the ruling, as its Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response is reviewing the document to determine whether any "security--related information … must be withheld," according to a Feb. 27 announcement.

Shaw AREVA MOX Services voiced its support for the ruling in a March 3 statement.

"We are very pleased with the licensing board's decision, which upholds the conclusion that the MOX facility meets the NRC's regulations for nuclear material control and accounting," said Kelly Trice, the company's president. "Safety and security are top priorities in the design, construction and operation of the MOX facility."

The company noted that NRC technical staff had concluded previously that its plan would not pose an undue risk to worker safety and health in a 2010 report. The five-member, presidentially-appointed commission itself has yet to make a final decision on licensing the MOX facility.

Lyman, the UCS senior scientist, said he remained convinced that the company's plan "is deeply deficient and [that the firm] is simply incapable of security and accounting for this incredibly dangerous material.

"The initial decision to grant this facility an operating license, allowing it to take possession of at least 34 tons of U.S. surplus plutonium, is reckless and will increase the risk that terrorists will be able to acquire enough plutonium to build a nuclear bomb without detection," Lyman said in a Feb. 27 statement.

Lyman told Global Security Newswire this week that he feared the licensing board's decision sets a bad precedent heading into the upcoming Nuclear Security Summit.

"I fear this will send the wrong signal to other countries that operate or plan to build bulk handling facilities for special nuclear material, like France, Japan, the U.K., India, China, and most notably, Russia -- which is supposed to be developing a plutonium disposition program in parallel," he said.

Lyman was referring to the agreement between the United States and Russia to dispose of surplus weapons grade material from the Cold War. The United States opted to uphold its end of the bargain by building the MOX facility, but the Obama administration may now be considering other options, due to the Energy Department program's rising costs.

Among the aspects of the MOX the security plan that worry Lyman are "claims that computer programs used to track the plant's inventory for ordinary business purposes can do double-duty to accurately account for plutonium items for national security purposes, eliminating the need for people to physically access and inspect the item," Lyman said in Feb. 28 statement released by Nuclear Watch South.

"Given the vulnerability of computer systems to manipulation by adversaries, this data can be corrupted," Lyman said. "There is no substitute for direct physical checks."

Shaw AREVA disputed Lyman's claims in a legal brief last year. While activists "frequently refer to the [computer] systems as 'substitute[s]' or a second best choice for what they refer to as 'physical retrieval and inspection,'" they "have not articulated precisely what they mean by 'physical retrieval and inspection'" during closed-door hearings, the May 3, 2013, brief said.

The activists' "suggestion that [the company's] proposed approach is second best is plainly incorrect, given the extensive testimony on the automation, reliability and reduction of opportunities for human effort provided by" the system, the company said.

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New Group Looks to Defend Nuclear Arsenal

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Fri, 21 Feb 2014 16:23:34 -0500

At a time when discussions about how best to refurbish the U.S. nuclear arsenal are increasingly being shaped by financial constraints, a new grassroots organization is emerging that aims to convince Americans that maintaining existing weapons is essential to national security.

But the group, called the Strategic Deterrent Coalition, is not taking a position on whether the arsenal must be modernized in exactly the way the Energy and Defense departments currently plan -- not yet, anyway.

For instance, Congress is requesting additional information regarding the departments’ increasingly controversial plan to replace both the W-88 submarine-launched warhead and the W-78 ground-based warhead with a single, interoperable weapon. Lawmakers and arms control advocates have suggested it might be cheaper to simply refurbish the two existing warheads separately, but the Obama administration has been critical of the call for more study -- at least publicly.

Members of the new coalition, however, are not opposed to studying the issue more before committing.

"That decision is not yet ripe," coalition leader Sherman McCorkle told Global Security Newswireduring a recent interview. "There needs to be additional information provided around that feasibility."

McCorkle is chairman and CEO of the Sandia Science & Technology Park Development Corporation, located near the Energy Department’s Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M.

At some point in the future, McCorkle hopes the coalition will be able to take a unified stance on what items in the current modernization plan must stay and what can go. The alliance includes McCorkle's Sandia-based organization and also several other community-based groups located near Energy and Defense Department nuclear facilities, such as the Montana Defense Alliance located in Great Falls near Malmstrom Air Force Base, and the Whiteman Area Leadership Council of Warrensburg, Mo., linked to Whiteman Air Force Base.

"I think that as with any coalition, each community group is particularly concerned about what particular piece happens to be in their general vicinity and so that creates very active conversation," McCorkle said. "But part of our effort is to have that very proactive conversation and at some point in time being able to speak with one voice -- it is true that we are not yet there."

One thing the coalition has agreed on is what it sees as the necessity of maintaining all three legs of the so-called nuclear triad -- atomic warheads on land-based missiles, submarine-based missiles at sea and long-range bomber aircraft.

"The general belief is that that, yes, we do support all three legs and … keeping all three legs but hollowing out one of them is not the same as keeping all three legs," McCorkle told GSN. "So we do support the current configuration by and large, with the understanding that modernization needs to occur with the weapons themselves as well as the delivery systems. There’s not many of us driving a 1961 vehicle, but we do have 1961 [nuclear] weapons and 1961 delivery systems."

The James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies recently released a report asserting that the current modernization plan would cost at least $1 trillion over the next 30 years and be fiscally impossible to implement, but McCorkle says he doesn’t put too much stock in such studies.

"I think most people in America have learned over the last three or four decades that [for] anybody’s point of view there can be a study that would support that point a view," he said. "There are as many studies as there are points of view."

McCorkle said the coalition believes the arsenal in its current formation is essential, despite the nature of threats to national security having changed since the Cold War, when Soviet nuclear weapons were the main concern.

"The nuclear deterrent is an umbrella and there are of course situations that will occur underneath the umbrella, but it is the umbrella that creates the opportunity to engage in international diplomacy with near-superpowers" such as Russia and China, McCorkle said. "It didn’t prevent 9/11, it didn’t prevent Syria -- there are [non-nuclear] actions that will occur but I don’t think that the nuclear deterrent was conceived to prevent those sorts of [non-nuclear] conflicts."

The coalition leader acknowledged that individual community-groups may be concerned about the impacts their local economies in the event of a nuclear scale-down. But he said that would not be the new coalition’s focus and maintained that the current arsenal has merit on its own.

"I realize that in some ways perhaps it’s hard for people to separate, but I think they are two separate issues," McCorkle said.

In order to bolster its argument, the new group has enlisted the endorsements of high-profile former lawmakers, government officials and high-ranking military officials. The list of backers includes former Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), former National Nuclear Security Administrator Linton Brooks and retired Maj. Gen. C. Donald Alston, formerly a 20th Air Force commander.

"We thought it important to say these are not just the mission visions and positions of the various community groups, but of prominent Americans who have dealt with these issues as elected officials or as … senior generals who have had strategy and mission requirements in their jobs," McCorkle said.

"So the idea is this is not just the point of view of a coalition of unelected community groups,” he said, “but it is a point of view in terms of deterrence -- and the reliability and sustainability of that deterrence -- that is agreed to by these folks who have endorsed these efforts."

The coalition is not a lobbying group, however, McCorkle said. Rather, it hopes to "reeducate the American public about why strategic deterrence is still important."

He added: "The last 15 years we’ve had Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, on and on, and I honor everything about it; I’m just saying the nuclear deterrent is not a part of almost anybody’s conversation."

Below are edited excerpts from this week's telephone interview:

GSN: What brought about the formation of this new group?

McCorkle: There’s community-based groups in various states and as people kind of passed each other in the night, so to speak, the conversation became more about "maybe we should form some kind of coalition and we could have a stronger, more national voice than each of us in our communities."

GSN: So the members of the coalition are all these smaller, community-based groups that are found around various nuclear sites?

McCorkle: Yes, it is some of them, it’s a growing number, it is not yet all of them.

GSN: Your website lists several endorsers including Pete Domenici, Linton Brooks and several retired military officials. Can you tell me more about what their role is with the coalition?

McCorkle: One of the things we attempted to do was to design a mission vision and position statement, which would be common to a community group no matter what their location or what their affiliation is …

We thought it important to say these are not just the mission visions and positions of the various community groups, but of prominent Americans who have dealt with these issues as elected officials or as … senior generals who have had strategy and mission requirements in their jobs.

So the idea is this is not just the point of view of a coalition of unelected community groups, but it is a point of view in terms of deterrence and the reliability and sustainability of that deterrence that is agreed to [by] these folks who have endorsed these efforts.

GSN: Do you expect that these individuals will be speaking out on behalf of the group and the things that it is trying to lobby for?

McCorkle: We’ve been very careful that we indicate and inform rather than lobby, and we anticipate that these individuals will speak on their own behalf and, on occasion, on behalf of the coalition.

GSN: If you’re not doing lobbying per se, how do you plan on influencing decisions? What’s the strategy?

McCorkle: We are very embryonic. Calling us a start-up is almost an exaggeration. We hope to reach a point where we are able to create white papers that inform the public … with a focus on [understanding] what nuclear deterrence means in 2014 or 2015 or 2016.

For many Americans, nuclear deterrence is simply no longer part of their vocabulary; it’s not part of any conversation with any family member or any part of their societal group or anyone else at any point during the year. So we certainly want to somehow reeducate the American public about why strategic deterrence is still important.

GSN: I’m assuming you mean that it’s not as prominently discussed since the end of the Cold War?

McCorkle: Correct. The last 15 years we’ve had Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, on and on and I honor everything about it; I’m just saying the nuclear deterrent is not a part of almost anybody’s conversation.

And so yes, we’d like to have white papers, we’d like to have op-eds, we’d like to have people that appear at Kiwanis or … whatever civic function is occurring that has an understanding of -- and an appreciation for -- strategic deterrence. So it’s a pretty grand vision for this little tiny embryonic entity.

GSN: So the focus is more on educating the public, as opposed to trying to influence folks in Washington?

McCorkle: We want to influence certainly anyone who in the course of their duties would impact the direction, certainly.

GSN: What are some of the underlying beliefs or benchmarks? Is it the belief of the coalition that all three legs of the triad need to be maintained no matter what, or is there some degree of flexibility there?

McCorkle: The general belief is that that, yes, we do support all three legs and … keeping all three legs but hollowing out one of them is not the same as keeping all three legs.

So we do support the current configuration by and large, with the understanding that modernization needs to occur with the weapons themselves, as well as the delivery systems. There’s not many of us driving a 1961 vehicle, but we do have 1961 [nuclear] weapons and 1961 delivery systems."

GSN: When you say hollowing out -- that it wouldn’t be a good idea to hollow out one of the legs -- what exactly do you mean by that?

McCorkle: If you sufficiently reduce the number of delivery vehicles in any one of the three legs, you’ve somewhat hollowed out that particular leg.

GSN: There’s been a lot of talk, particularly in the past few months, about the increasingly tight budget environment. There was a study put out by one group arguing that the current modernization plan would cost about $1 trillion and that it is so expensive that it couldn’t be implemented the way it is, and that it has to be modified. Does your group have a position on that?

McCorkle: … I think most people in America have learned over the last three or four decades that [for] anybody’s point of view there can be a study that would support that point a view. There are as many studies as there are points of view…

GSN: Given the financial pressures that are upcoming, are there any areas across the nuclear complex and the nuclear deterrent within the modernization plans that you see potential areas for cost savings or compromise?

McCorkle: … On almost any project you can find a half-dozen cost estimates by various different groups, and depending on which cost estimate you choose to use as an example, you can say that there is money being wasted or you can say that it’s underfunded, which makes the conversation a little more difficult and complex because there are so many estimates. So which estimate gets credence?

GSN: To use one example, there’s been talk over the past few months about the interoperable warhead that is planned to replace both the W-78 and W-88 warheads. Congress has asked for more cost studies on that and some are expecting the administration to at least push that plan back a few years. Does your group have a position on that?

McCorkle: …That decision is not yet ripe. There needs to be additional information provided around that feasibility.

GSN: So you’re not necessarily opposed to it being delayed a bit in the interest of getting more information about the cost?

McCorkle: Right.

GSN: How about the B-61 gravity bomb stationed in Europe? There’s been talk about whether what is being done there in terms of refurbishment has more bells and whistles than is really needed -- or whether there is a cheaper way to do it. Does the coalition have a position on that?

McCorkle: Sometimes when you drill down on these, it’s a little bit like saying which is a better economy vehicle -- a Honda Civic or a Toyota … Corolla … Some of it is in the eye of the beholder and we certainly understand that.

GSN: So given that, do you think it should proceed as it is currently planned, or are you open to a relook at that, as well?

McCorkle: To some extent we would defer to those that are closest to the redesign, who have the greatest responsibility for ensuring that it is as safe and cost-effective as possible.

GSN: When you look across the complex, are there any particular areas where there are concerns that there could be substantial cuts where there really shouldn’t be?

McCorkle: I think that as with any coalition, each community group is particularly concerned about what particular piece happens to be in their general vicinity and so that creates very active conversation.

GSN: So it could be different depending on which of your members you talk to?

McCorkle: Yes. But part of our effort is to have that very proactive conversation and, at some point in time, being able to speak with one voice. It is true that we are not yet there.

GSN: So at some point down the road, you could see a scenario where the different subgroups get together and are able to make decisions on which aspects are really important and which ones can be sacrificed?

McCorkle: Yes, have a very proactive conversation about where the efforts are sorely needed.

GSN: Do you have any idea of a timetable?

McCorkle: I don’t. This is essentially an all-volunteer effort and is being done on something less than a shoestring. The first ever meeting was Dec. 18, 2012. … The number of communities is slowly growing and at some point we think, or at least I think, we will reach a tipping point where we will be able to grow faster than we have over these last 15 months. …

GSN: Are you planning on having any public events?

McCorkle: The answer is yes, but I don’t have any idea when or where. But it’s in the thought process, it’s in the conversation. When we have a conference call there are usually 30 to 35 people on the conference call and … you can vary the level of interest in those 30 to 35 people.

We filed for 501(c)(3) status last year. We got a tax I.D. in November. … We’ve done the very basic things that any grassroots organization needs to do.

GSN: What is the role of the seven groups listed in the "founders’ circle" on your website?

McCorkle: Those are the community-based groups who have written a check. There’s other community-based groups that have not yet written a check, but that are part of the conversation.

GSN: Does the coalition plan to look into the impact on jobs and the economy that the various nuclear sites have?

McCorkle: That is more the responsibility of the community-based organizations. But certainly we’re very cognizant that jobs are created by the strategic deterrent.

GSN: How much of this is about ensuring that those economic factors remain intact, as opposed to concerns about actual threats to the country?

McCorkle: That’s really two separate questions that are linked by coincidence. Our focus is the deterrent; a byproduct is the jobs. The community-based organizations, they do what they wish to do, but I think at the national level it really is about a safe, secure and reliable nuclear deterrent. I realize that in some ways, perhaps it’s hard for people to separate, but I think they are two separate issues.

GSN: What is the group’s philosophy on how you justify maintaining the deterrent structure that we have at a time when the types of threats appear to be a lot different than they were during the Cold War?

McCorkle: There are many hypotheses about what threats may be. The only proven fact is that the deterrent has been effective. After that any of us can hypothesize what we choose to hypothesize.

GSN: Would you say it’s been effective despite the fact that it didn’t deter things like the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks from happening?

McCorkle: Certainly. The nuclear deterrent is an umbrella and there are of course situations that will occur underneath the umbrella, but it is the umbrella that creates the opportunity to engage in international diplomacy with near-superpowers [such as Russia and China]. …

It didn’t prevent 9/11, it didn’t prevent Syria -- there are [non-nuclear] actions that will occur, but I don’t think that the nuclear deterrent was conceived to prevent those sorts of [non-nuclear] conflicts.

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EPA Abandons Major Radiation Cleanup in Florida, Despite Cancer Concerns

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 16:44:06 -0500

The Environmental Protection Agency is walking away after a decades-long battle with Florida politicians and industry officials over cleaning up phosphate-mining waste in an area that could expose more than 100,000 residents to cancer-causing radiation levels.

Under a decision quietly finalized two weeks ago, the federal agency will leave it to state officials to decide the fate of the sites in and around Lakeland, an approximately 10-square-mile residential area midway between Orlando and Tampa.

However, Florida officials have long argued that the affected area need not be cleaned up in the absence of radiation levels well above what EPA policy would normally permit. The decision not to enforce the usual federal rules could have far-reaching implications for how the United States deals with future radioactive contamination anywhere across the country -- regardless of whether it is caused by conventional industrial activities or illicit radiological weapons, critics say.

In a joint statement to Global Security Newswire, the Florida health and environment departments say they have no plans to examine the sites further, despite prior recommendations by federal officials that an aerial radiation survey of the area is needed. The state officials say they already have enough historical data pertaining to the sites, and that additional monitoring is not necessary.

The statement, provided to GSN by Florida environmental protection spokeswoman Mara Burger, suggests the EPA decision not to clean up the sites under its Superfund program indicated that the federal agency did not consider the Lakeland area "problematic" from a public health standpoint.

Under Superfund law, the federal agency is authorized to remediate contaminated sites that pose a threat to public health and the environment.

Internal documents released under the Freedom of Information Act in recent years show, however, that the federal agency's lack of action was the result of state and industry opposition, and that EPA officials did in fact believe the sites could pose a serious public health threat.

"It's probably the worst site EPA could clean up from a public health standpoint, when you consider the number of potential cancers and the size of the affected population," one source familiar with the Florida case told GSN. The source was not authorized to discuss the issue and asked not to be named in this article.

In response to questions about the matter, EPA spokeswoman Dawn Harris Young did not address whether the sites posed a health risk. She said only that the state had separate "regulatory and educational programs in place."

"EPA believes that addressing all of the former phosphate mines under one regulatory scheme would provide regulatory consistency for the landowners, businesses and residents of Florida," the federal agency spokeswoman said.

The EPA decision not to enforce its Superfund standards at the Florida sites is consistent with a controversial new guide for dealing with the aftermath of dirty bomb attacks, nuclear power-plant meltdowns and other radiological incidents that the agency published last year, Daniel Hirsch, a nuclear policy lecturer at the University of California-Santa Cruz, told GSN.

Documents GSN obtained in 2013 prompted concern among critics that EPA officials are looking to use the new guide -- which is backed by the nuclear power industry -- as a means for relaxing its radiation standards.

The agency's approach to the Florida case lends further credence to the concern that it is backing away from its long-held radiological cleanup rules generally, Hirsch said.

"The agency is lowering the EPA flag outside the building and raising the white flag of surrender," he quipped.

Three Decades of Concern

Although government officials have said little about the Florida situation publicly, federal involvement at the sites surrounding Lakeland began in 1979. That's when EPA scientists first warned their superiors that the area could pose a health threat.

The scientists noted that past phosphate mining had created elevated concentrations of radium-226 in the area's soil. Radium produces gamma rays that can penetrate the body and increase the risk for a variety of cancers. Inhaling or ingesting the uranium byproduct can increase the risk of leukemia, lymphoma and bone cancer, specifically.

In addition, the decay of radium creates radon, an odorless, radioactive gas that can increase the risk of lung cancer by seeping into homes and polluting indoor air.

Given these risks, the EPA scientists advised that no new homes should be built on the sites until further studies were completed, but the agency took no action and residential development continued.

The Environmental Protection Agency paid little attention to the Lakeland area sites until the new millennium, agency documents show. By that time, agency officials estimated that as many as 120,000 people living on 40,000 residential parcels could be exposed to unsafe radiation levels.

In 2003, EPA officials deemed the potential problem at one Lakeland subdivision -- an upscale development of about 500 homes called "Oakbridge" -- to be so bad that they considered it a candidate for emergency cleanup action. Low-income and minority communities might also be affected, internal documents show -- creating so-called "environmental justice" concerns for the agency.

Regional politics intervened, however, and the agency did little more in the way of studying the issue over the subsequent decade. Residents were not warned of the EPA concerns and no remedial actions were taken.

Phosphate mining industry officials, who represent the second largest revenue-producing enterprise in the Sunshine State, made it known in private meetings that they strongly opposed the agency declaring the parcels Superfund sites. Such a move could make mining companies liable for as much as $11 billion in cleanup costs, according to estimates of the potential scope of the contamination that the EPA inspector general included in a 2004 report.

State health and environment officials operating under Republican governorships sided with industry, taking the position that no cleanup action was necessary if residents were being exposed to less than 500 millirems of radiation per year. State officials said this approach was permissible under guidelines suggested by the privately run National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements.

However, at the 500-millirem-per-year level, the cancer risk for humans is roughly 1 in 40, the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry noted in a 2006 internal report it prepared regarding the Florida dispute.

EPA cleanup policy dictates that, in a worst-case scenario, no more than one in 10,000 people should be put at risk for developing cancer from manmade contamination.

Following 2010 news reports about the standoff, EPA officials began making preparations for an aerial radiation survey that was to enable them to get a better handle on the scope and severity of the problem. The plans stalled, however, after a group of Republican lawmakers from Florida -- siding with state and mining-industry officials -- pressured the agency not to conduct the survey.

The Agreement

Last March, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection proposed that the state -- rather than the federal government -- direct all future actions pertaining to the sites, according to a March 13 letter sent by Jorge Caspary, waste management director at Florida's Department of Environmental Protection, to Franklin Hill, EPA Region 4 Superfund director.

Hill agreed to the Florida proposal in a letter back to Caspary earlier this month.

The Jan. 14 letter suggests that after more than three decades of internal concerns about residents' health -- and years of disagreement with the state and mining industry -- the federal government is walking away from the sites permanently.

"Because the state would manage the phosphate mining sites that were historically listed in [the EPA Superfund database] under Florida's existing programs, there would be no further federal interest in these sites under Superfund and EPA would change their [database] status to ‘Archived,'" Hill wrote.

In the letter, Hill does not explicitly agree with Florida's previously stated position that cleanup action is unnecessary unless residents are being exposed to more than 500 millirems of radiation per year. In fact, the correspondence between Hill and Caspary makes no mention of numerical cleanup thresholds at all.

In their statement to GSN, the Florida environmental protection and health departments said it is "not necessarily the case" that they would take no remedial action unless residents are being exposed to more than 500 millirems of radiation per year.

For instance, residents might be exposed to gamma ray radiation through direct contact with radium-contaminated soil in their yards. Florida officials say that while they have no plans to investigate the sites further, they hypothetically would consider taking action if such exposure caused residents to receive a dose of more than 100 millirems of radiation per year. At this level, about one in 300 people would be expected to develop cancer -- a risk 30 times greater than the EPA worst-case-scenario of one in 10,000.

Even then, however, "the state would need additional site specific information in order to determine what actions may be needed, including whether work should be done to mitigate risk or otherwise remediate the site," state officials said.

Florida officials say they do not believe direct exposure to radiation from the soil is a significant risk, and that the main factor in determining whether there is a public health concern at a home should instead be the amount of radon gas polluting indoor air. Mitigating indoor radon contamination is generally cheaper than cleaning up radium-contaminated soil. Indoor radon pollution can often be addressed though the installation of ventilation systems beneath homes, while cleanup of radium-contaminated soil can require massive excavation projects.

But according to critics, focusing on radon -- and not soil contamination -- is a dramatic break from how the federal government would normally address such a site. For one thing, this approach does not account for the body-penetrating gamma rays residents might be exposed to through more direct contact with the soil in their yards. Nor does it factor in the risk of inhaling or ingesting the contamination.

In addition, the EPA reference level that state officials say they would use to determine whether action is needed to address indoor radon pollution is not based on health considerations. Instead, it is based on how much radon current ventilation technology is capable of eliminating.

According to the federal agency's website, there is no "safe" level of radon exposure. However, it can be difficult to reduce radon levels much lower than 4 picocuries per liter of air -- the level that Florida officials are using as their threshold for health concerns. Congress passed legislation in 1988 setting a goal of reducing indoor radon levels to between 0.2 and 0.7 picocuries per liter, but the technology needed to meet that goal does not yet exist.

One in 43 people would be expected to die of cancer from a lifetime of radon exposure at the 4 picocurie per liter level, the EPA website says. The average level of radon in homes is about 1.25 picocuries per liter.

A Different Approach

While the EPA Superfund program considers the amount of radon gas entering homes, its decisions regarding whether to remediate manmade radium contamination are usually driven largely by how much of the radioactive metal is present in the soil. For radium in soil, the threshold the federal agency normally uses is 5 picocuries per gram, not including the amount of radium that would occur in soil naturally. It is at this level of radium and below that the agency would consider a site to be in compliance with its cancer risk guidelines.

In its 2006 report, the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry noted that the federal government has relied upon the 5 picocurie per gram of soil standard at many sites, and listed some in Pennsylvania, New Mexico, New York and Michigan as examples. However, Florida officials considered the threshold to be "overly conservative," the federal agency's report noted.

At the time, Florida officials were pushing for the 500 millirem per year radiation dose limit to be used as a threshold, though they now say they would focus largely on radon in indoor air, with the possible 100 millirem per year dose threshold for exposure to gamma rays from radium in the soil.

Either way, not relying on the 5 picocurie per gram of soil threshold as a trigger for remedial action is a major departure from normal EPA policy, critics say.

Until now, "I've never heard of them abandoning their 5 picocurie per gram limit -- that's used all over the place," Hirsch told GSN. "What EPA ought to face is that it looks as though, under political pressure, they've undermined their entire regulatory structure for cleanup of radium-contaminated soils."

Political Concerns

According to EPA documents released in recent years under the Freedom of Information Act, a lack of financial resources has contributed to the agency's reluctance to enforce its usual public health standards at the Florida sites.

Normally, the agency can conduct cleanups on its own terms and then sue the companies it believes are responsible for the contamination in order to recoup its costs.

However, a tight budget environment -- along with the anticipated enormous scope of the contamination in Florida -- gave the agency little leverage in negotiations with the phosphate mining industry, according to the EPA documents.

Industry officials made clear they were not interested in assisting with a cleanup conducted along the lines of the agency's usual Superfund protocols. Without sufficient federal funds available, EPA officials could not credibly threaten to force industry's hand.

Meanwhile, Florida Republicans in Congress argued that the phosphate industry was too important to the state's economy to risk harm by undertaking costly cleanup actions they thought unnecessary.

Faced with a difficult political situation, it appears that EPA officials tried to word the new agreement with Florida in a way that would defer oversight of the contaminated area to the state without acknowledging the difference between the state and federal public health standards, Hirsch said.

He suggested that the omission of numerical standards in the Hill and Caspary correspondence this month appears to be a veiled admission by EPA officials that the amount of radioactive contamination the state would allow would not be considered safe under federal policy.

"What the agency doesn't say speaks volumes -- they know these numbers are outrageous," Hirsch said. "The fact that they capitulate without even discussing them is further evidence of their dirty hands."

The source who asked not to be named said it was doubtful the exclusion of specific numbers in the correspondence would actually stop parties responsible for radioactive contamination from trying to cite the Florida case as a justification for not cleaning up to normal EPA standards, however.

"I would make that argument if I was on that side," said the source. "You'd be stupid not to."

(Image via B. Brown/Shutterstock.com)

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Lawmakers, DHS Weigh How to Secure Ports Most Vulnerable to WMDs

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Thu, 17 Oct 2013 17:58:21 -0400

Lawmakers are working with the Homeland Security Department to determine whether it is feasible to establish a U.S. presence at the foreign ports it considers most vulnerable to the smuggling of illicit weapons of mass destruction.

According to a report the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office released last month, the DHS Container Security Initiative does not have a presence "at about half" of the ports U.S. Customs and Border Protection considers "high risk." Meanwhile, "about one fifth" of the ports where the container program does have a presence are considered "lower risk locations," the report says.

This does not mean that high-risk containers are not inspected before they are unloaded at U.S. ports, according to an aide to the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which requested the report. DHS officials track such containers electronically and order inspections upon arrival, said the Senate staffer, who was not authorized to discuss the issue and asked to not be named.

Still, it would be preferable to establish a U.S. presence at the higher-risk ports so that more of the riskier containers could be checked before setting sail, according to the aide.

"A dirty bomb going off in the port of Long Beach is better than it going off in downtown Los Angeles but it's still pretty bad," the staffer said. "If we can find it [at a foreign port] we're much better off."

Shifting program resources from one port to another is not necessarily easy, however, the GAO report says. Negotiations are not always successful with potential host countries where higher-risk ports are located. In addition, removing DHS personnel from lower-risk ports could negatively impact U.S. relations with current host countries.

Starting up the container-security program in new ports is also expensive, and particularly difficult "in an era of constrained budgets," the Senate aide said. The committee currently is working with DHS officials to study the issue further and determine what, if any, practical steps the department can take toward prioritizing the security of higher-risk ports, according to the staffer.

The aide said it was not yet clear whether the committee would take any further actions, such as conducting oversight hearings on the issue or addressing it through legislation.

One way to address the issue would be to move back to the United States DHS officials stationed at foreign ports who are primarily responsible for "targeting," a process by which the officials review computer assessments of which shipping containers at a port are potentially high risk and determine which containers require manual inspection. Much of this targeting work can be done remotely, the staffer said, particularly for ports where DHS officials have a well-established relationship with the host country and are confident of its ability to properly conduct the manual inspections.

Stationing more DHS officials who do mostly targeting work at home in the United States could save the program money, according to aide, who estimated that it could cost three times as much to station such officials abroad, because of the price of lodging, transportation and cost-of-living adjustments. These savings could free up enough funds to allow the program to expand into new, higher-risk ports.

Such a move has its drawbacks, however. In addition to potentially angering host countries where the U.S. presence would be pared down, the approach could be seen as contrary to a strategy the department has embraced since the failed bombing of a commercial airline flight bound for Detroit in 2009. After the Christmas Day incident, in which the perpetrator was not apprehended until he reached U.S. soil, "DHS recommitted to this idea of having people overseas where they can facilitate inspections," the Senate aide said.

According to the GAO report, there also could be legal obstacles.

"For example, according to [U.S. Customs] and government officials in one country, a national law precludes the transmission of electronic scanned images other than to host government officials," the report says. "As a result, [DHS] officials must be present at each [Container Security Initiative] port in that country to view the scanned images."

The GAO report recommends that the department periodically assess the risks from all foreign ports that ship to the United States in order to "inform any future expansion of [the container-security program] to additional locations and … determine whether changes need to be made" at ports already participating in the program.

The department in a Sept. 4 letter concurred with this recommendation, saying that it would formulate a process for conducting such assessments. DHS officials expect to complete the first assessment by August 2014 and to decide on any changes to the container-security program by December 2014, according to the letter.

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Lapse in Chemical Security Effort Cited as Another Reason to End Shutdown

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Tue, 08 Oct 2013 10:10:27 -0400

The Obama administration is adding the closure of the Homeland Security Department's chemical security program to its list of reasons why Congress should end the partial government shutdown that began last week.

The Chemical Facilities Anti-terrorism Standards program, which is in the middle of a multi-year effort to approve security plans for high risk chemical plants in the United States, ceased most operations last week as a result of the congressional stalemate over fiscal 2014 spending and health-care reform, Global Security Newswire reported. Congress has yet to permanently authorize the CFATS program, so the failure to pass a spending bill means the initiative not only lacks funds but also the legal authority to operate.

"This underscores the need for the shutdown to end, and for Congress to pass a permanent reauthorization of the CFATS program," DHS spokesman Clark Stevens said in a statement to GSN. Stevens confirmed that employees of the Infrastructure Security Compliance Division, which runs the chemical security program, have been furloughed.

However, "chemical facilities should continue to comply with the requirements of CFATS, including continuing to comply with the existing and planned security measures in any approved site security plan or alternative security program," Stevens said. A Democratic Senate aid previously told GSNthe administration is making a legal determination that it is not the intent of Congress to cancel the program, given that proposed spending bills in both chambers would have extended the initiative.

The indefinite shutdown of the program, however, is causing concern among lawmakers regarding how the government will improve safety and security in the wake of chemical disasters in Texas and Louisiana this year. The government had just begun work under an executive order President Obama issued in response to the incidents. Chief among the concerns the order was meant to address was that the DHS program was unaware of the Texas facility's existence when it exploded in April, killing 14 people and leveling nearby homes.

"Over the past few days, we have seen the harmful impact the federal shutdown has had across our nation, from furloughed federal workers to halted programs that impact millions of Americans, including our chemical security program," Senator Thomas Carper (D-Del.) said in a statement toGSN. "As we saw earlier this year with the tragic explosions at chemical facilities in Texas and Louisiana, it's important that we make sure that chemicals are being produced, distributed and stored in a manner that is both safe and secure."

Previously, Rep. Bennie Thompson (Miss.), the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee," called the CFATS shutdown an "unconscionable … result of Republican gamesmanship."

Industry supporters of the program also had strong words. Bill Allmond, vice president for government relations at the Society of Chemical Manufacturers and Affiliates, told GSN that as a result of the shutdown, Congress would have to turn questions regarding the pace of CFATS implementation "back on itself."

Carper, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said he would work with his colleagues to not only end the partial government closure but also to ensure that the CFATS program "isn't as vulnerable to these reckless shutdowns" in the future.

Efforts to pass legislation permanently authorizing the program have gone nowhere in recent years, however. The Republican leadership of the House Energy and Commerce Committee has effectively blocked such bills, citing concerns the program has not completed site inspections and security plan reviews fast enough.

Labor and environmental groups, meanwhile, have argued the program lacks the teeth needed to ensure facilities are safe and secure, and have called on the Environmental Protection Agency to fill the perceived void -- a prospect strongly opposed by industry officials.

Early in July, DHS program head David Wulf argued the initiative had "turned a corner." He noted that as of last July, the effort had only given preliminary approval to 50 site-security plans, conducted only 10 inspections and had not granted final approval to single security plan since the CFATS program was first authorized by Congress in 2007.

One year later, the program had preliminary approved "upwards of 500" security plans, conducted more than 50 inspections and granted final approval for 160 plans, he said.

However, later the same month, House Republicans hinted this was not good enough. In a July 22 letter threatening to try to reduce funds for the program, GOP lawmakers complained of a "backlog of approximately 3,120 facilities" where security plans still needed review.

(Image via Jiri Vratislavsky/Shutterstock.com)

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Lawmaker Blasts Shutdown of DHS Chemical-Security Program

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Fri, 04 Oct 2013 16:30:41 -0400

The Homeland Security Department's chemical-security program ceased most operations this week as a result of the federal shutdown, prompting concerns about how the government will improve security in the wake of this year's fatal explosion in Texas.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said in a statement to Global Security Newswire Friday that the incident at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, "brought into focus the need to secure dangerous chemicals against accidental or malicious release or detonation." He noted that President Obama in August issued an executive order calling on the DHS Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism program -- along with the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal entities -- to do more work on the issue.

"It is unconscionable that today, as a result of Republican gamesmanship, CFATS as a program is effectively dead -- it has no funding or authorization," said Thompson, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee. "The speaker needs to stand up for what is right and let the House vote on a clean [continuing resolution] that funds the entire government and renews authorization for CFATS."

House Republicans -- who have majority control of the chamber -- have been particularly critical of the Chemical Facilities Anti-Terrorism Standards program since an internal memo reporting numerous problems with the initiative was leaked to the press in late 2011. GOP lawmakers repeatedly have sought to reduce funding for the program, citing the program's struggles to complete site inspections and security plan reviews.

Industry officials who support the program argue that as a result of the government shutdown, Congress itself will be to blame for further delays.

"Every day that Congress keeps the government closed, it is going to make it harder for Congress to then blame DHS on its lack of progress on CFATS," Bill Allmond, vice president for government relations at the Society of Chemical Manufactures and Affiliates told GSN. "The next time Congress calls DHS up to testify on why it hasn't been quicker to implement the CFATS process, Congress is going to have to turn it back on itself and say, 'Did we think about the implications of closing the government on the progress of implementing CFATS?'"

A Republican aide for the House Appropriations Committee -- which has been consistently critical of the program -- said the panel attempted to address the issue by initially filing a continuing resolution that explicitly extended funding and legal authority to run the CFATS program. The initiative needs to be reauthorized annually due to a lack of a permanent Congressional authorization.

Other House Republicans later added amendments to the bill that would have prevented funding for health-care reform, prompting the Democrat-controlled Senate to reject it, however. As a result, most government operations shut down Tuesday, the first day of fiscal 2014.

The Republican committee aide, who asked not to be named due to not being authorized to discuss the issue, said DHS officials were looking for ways to work around the shutdown.

According to Allmond, however, chemical companies that had DHS inspections scheduled for this week received notice that the site visits would be postponed indefinitely. Review of security plan documents is also expected to be frozen, as DHS employees who normally do this work have been furloughed.

Industry officials were scheduled to meet with DHS, EPA and Occupational Safety and Health Administration officials this week regarding how those entities might respond the president's executive order, according to Allmond. The meeting was canceled as a result of the government shutdown, which Allmond says creates prolonged uncertainty for industry regarding what new regulations they might have to comply with and whether companies will have another opportunity to weigh in on possible changes.

A key issue the executive order is meant to address is why CFATS officials were not aware of the West, Texas, facility's existence at the time it exploded and how to prevent such lapses in the future.

A Democratic Senate aid confirmed CFATS employees are not exempt from the shutdown and are furloughed. The Senate aid, who asked to be unnamed due to not being authorized to discuss the issue, said that employees could be recalled in the event of a chemical incident.

Companies are being encouraged to still comply with CFATS regulations because the administration interprets that it is not the intent of Congress to terminate the program, according to the Senate aid. Continuing resolutions passed by both the House and Senate, along with fiscal 2014 appropriations bills authored by both chambers, would have extended authorization for the program, the aide noted.

DHS officials did not respond to requests for comment by press time. An email to David Wulf, who heads the CFATS program in his capacity as DHS Infrastructure Security Compliance Division director, received an automatic reply stating he would be out of the office as of Tuesday and would not be able to return emails or telephone calls until he returns to duty "upon conclusion of the federal funding hiatus."

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Shutdown May Further Delay Nuclear Power Plant Approvals

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Thu, 03 Oct 2013 07:00:00 -0400

Nuclear power plant licensing decisions -- already delayed by a 2012 court ruling -- could be pushed back further by the federal government shutdown, Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials said this week.

If Congress does not approve funding to run the federal government by Friday, the NRC likely will have to reschedule a series of meetings that kicked off this week on a proposed new “waste confidence” rule that is meant to address the ruling, Keith McConnell, head of the NRC waste confidence directorate, said Tuesday.

Most of the federal government shut down on Oct. 1, the start of fiscal 2014, because Democrats and Republicans in Congress cannot agree on a temporary funding bill. Democrats are rejecting GOP attempts include in the budget a repeal of the health-care reform law Congress approved in 2010.

Last year, a federal appeals court sided with the states of New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont, which argued the Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrongly assumed spent reactor fuel eventually would move to a permanent waste repository, even though the Obama administration canceled the Yucca Mountain project in Nevada.

The court ruled in New York v. NRC that the commission must examine the potential consequences of fires in spent fuel pools -- where much of the waste currently is stored. Critics have argued the pools are vulnerable to terrorist attacks given that they are located outside reactors’ containment structures, and in some cases in an elevated area they claim is more susceptible to air attacks.

In response to the ruling, the commission on Sept. 13 proposed a new “waste confidence” rule that it claims addresses the court’s concerns. Between now and Nov. 27, NRC staff planned to collect public comments on the new proposal, including by hosting a series of public meetings throughout the country.

Many of the meetings, which began this week, could have to be rescheduled if Congress does not appropriate funds by Friday, McConnell said Tuesday. As a result, the public-comment deadline, and consequently the commission’s final decision on the matter, also could be pushed back. Prior to the shutdown, the decision was expected by September 2014.

“Our objective is to allow for ample opportunity for public comment so we’ll have to revisit,” the schedule, McConnell told Global Security Newswire. “If we do get an appropriation [from Congress for fiscal 2014] this week then there is no impact at all…If we don’t then we’re going to have to look at what we need to do make sure we achieve that goal” of ample opportunity for public comment.

As it is, the commission has already directed its staff not to issue any final decisions pertaining to the relicensing of existing plants or approval of proposed new facilities until the waste-confidence issue is resolved. License reviews could continue up until the point of making a final decision under that order, but if the government shutdown extends beyond Friday, even that work could come to a halt, NRC spokesman David McIntyre told GSN Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the commission’s approach to addressing the 2012 court ruling is under fire. In May, the same group of states that prevailed in the case filed a petition with the commission arguing that the scope of the new review of the impacts of leaving the waste at plant sites is not as broad as the court mandated.

The petition said NRC staff refused to consider the possibility of forbidding the creation of more waste until a repository is constructed -- an option the states said the court “explicitly recognized to be reasonable.” Commission staff also declined to look at the potential for requiring plant operators to move spent fuel that has already been cooling in pools for more than five years into dry cask storage units that the states argue are more secure, the document said.

The commission in July decided to continue the rulemaking proceedings and not respond the states’ petition in a separate forum. Kyle Landis-Marinello, assistant attorney general for Vermont, told GSN Wednesday that the states still have the same concerns they raised in May.

During a public meeting at NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md., Tuesday, commission staff also faced criticism from activist groups and a former NRC employee.

Janet Phelan Kotra, who worked for the commission for more than 28 years and served as project manager for the waste confidence issue for 14 years, said the proposed new rule is improperly based on the idea that the commission has confidence in the safety of long-term storage at reactor sites rather than on confidence that a permanent repository will become available in a reasonable time frame.

Kotra said she did not question whether a permanent repository was technically feasible, but argued the commission in the proposed rule does not address whether it is politically realistic given the history of the Yucca Mountain project.

“NRC is dodging the question the public most cares about when it says disposal will become available ‘when necessary,’” Kotra said.

Diane D’Arrigo, of the watchdog group Nuclear Information and Resource Service, suggested it was disingenuous for the commission to say it has confidence in safe long-term storage of nuclear waste at the same time it is recommending that strict EPA cleanup rules should not be applied in the event of a nuclear incident. Some state and EPA officials wanted the new response guide the agency issue in April to include a statement saying those rules would be adhered to, but NRC and other government officials opposed such language, she noted.

The government shutdown itself calls into question the commission’s ability to ensure safe storage, D’Arrigo argued.

“The shutdown of the government is an indication that it can’t be trusted to have institutional controls over radioactive materials for as long as they remain dangerous,” D’Arrigo said. “It seems incredible to me that the NRC is seriously talking about being able to afford and have institutional controls indefinitely.”

Industry representatives meanwhile argued the new rule addresses all the issues raised by the court and in some cases goes further than necessary. Tim Matthews, an attorney who represents nuclear utilities for the law firm Morgan, Lewis and Baucus, said the new rule “overstates the environmental impacts of used fuel storage” by assuming waste would have to be repackaged in new casks every 100 years.

Matthews urged the commission to resume licensing proceedings that had been delayed because of the waste confidence issue as quickly as possible.

(Image via Denton Rumsey / Shutterstock.com)

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New York Wonders Where Nuclear Cleanup Funds Would Come From

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 10:37:19 -0400

Who -- and what pot of money -- would drive cleanup after a severe nuclear-power-plant incident is a question still left unanswered by the federal government, New York state officials say in a recent legal filing with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Under the Price-Anderson Act, which Congress first passed in 1957 and has renewed several times since, the nuclear-power industry’s liability in the event of a catastrophe at one of its facilities is limited. The industry pays into an insurance account -- which NRC officials say has a current value of $12 billion -- that would be used to compensate the public for various damages incurred as the result of an incident. Those costs could be related to hotel stays, lost wages and property replacement.

However, how actual cleanup of the contaminated area surrounding a compromised facility would be paid for remains unclear, the New York state attorney general’s office notes in the Sept. 13 filing with the commission. In 2009, NRC officials informed their counterparts at the Homeland Security Department and the Environmental Protection Agency that the Price-Anderson money likely would not be available to pay for offsite cleanup -- a revelation made public a year later when internal EPA documents were released under the Freedom of Information Act.

Another three years have gone by and the federal government has yet to provide a clear answer, the New York AG office says. Last year, NRC Commissioner William Magwood acknowledged in a presentation to the Health Physics Society that “[t]here is no regulatory framework for environmental restoration following a major radiological release.”

Magwood’s presentation touched on the fact that it is not only the issue of where the money would come from and which agency would take charge, but also how that federal entity would define “clean.” Environmentalists, along with some EPA and state officials, have argued that EPA Superfund protocol -- under which a site is considered clean when no more than one in 10,000 people would be expected to develop cancer from exposure to residual contamination -- should apply in such a situation.

NRC officials have argued the Superfund law was not intended for this purpose, a position Magwood reiterated in his presentation. Industry, meanwhile, backs suggestions in a new EPA nuclear-response guide that it might not be feasible to clean up to Superfund standards.

Then-Representative Edward Markey (D-Mass.), now a U.S. senator, pressed President Obama on the issue following the onset of the Fukushima crisis in Japan in 2011. Steven Chu, then the Energy secretary, responded on behalf of the president, saying that Superfund law contained an exemption for certain radioactive materials covered by the Price-Anderson Act that could prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from responding to such an incident in its usual way.

“If such a release were determined to consist of only these specified radioactive materials (i.e., no commingling with other [Superfund]-regulated hazardous substances), than the [Superfund] exclusion could limit EPA’s response authority,” Chu said in a July 2011 letter to Markey. Normally, the agency can sue companies responsible for pollution under the Superfund law.

While the relevant requirements for how thorough a cleanup must be are obviously a factor in determining how much it would cost, there continues to be confusion over the issue of where funds would come from. The Illinois Emergency Management Agency, for instance, assumes in Sept. 13 comments on the new EPA response guide that “a revenue is stream is in place” to pay for cleanup and waste disposal after a nuclear-power-plant incident -- despite the NRC statements to the contrary.

New York officials suggest the federal government should resolve the issue before the commission renews licenses for the Indian Point nuclear power plant, located just north of New York City.

Based on what has come to light so far, it is “not clear that NRC has the desire, capability, or financial resources to respond to a severe accident at Indian Point and ensure the thorough decontamination of the New York metropolitan area including, but not limited to, its water sources -- and drinking water sources -- in the wake of such an accident,” the state’s AG office says.

According to the Sept. 13 filing in the Indian Point license-renewal proceedings, the state -- which is challenging renewal on several grounds --- has asked the commission to address the issue in multiple forums in recent years, and has yet to receive a response it considers satisfactory.

In March 2012, NRC staff announced it was going to supplement its previously issued review of the potential environmental impacts associated with the facility. The state responded by proposing the supplemental review address how the commission “deals with severe nuclear events that lead to significant environmental impacts including land contamination.” In doing so, the state cited the 2010 FOIA release of the EPA documents.

When NRC staff released a draft of the supplement in June 2012, it did not address New York’s request, the state says. The state reiterated the request in August 2012 comments on the draft, to which NRC staff responded in June 2013:

“NRC staff stated that ‘NRC has technical leadership for the Federal government’s response to the event,’ but it also listed eight other federal agencies ‘who may respond to an event at an NRC-licensed facility, or involving NRC-licensed material,’” the state says, quoting the NRC response.

“Staff’s response did not address Commissioner Magwood’s statement regarding the lack of a regulatory framework for environmental restoration following a major radiological release,” the state continues. “Nor did Staff explain which agency is responsible for decontaminating the New York metropolitan area following a severe accident at Indian Point, or which agency’s decontamination standards will apply to a cleanup.”

In the new filing, the state again asks the commission to identify which federal agency would be responsible for cleaning up radiation released by the Indian Point reactors and spent-fuel pools, as well as whether Price-Anderson funds would be available to support such a cleanup.

“Given the unique characteristics of Indian Point, the State believes it is especially important that the public have access to this information,” the New York AG office says, adding that more than 17 million people live within 50 miles of the facility.

“The communities within the 50-mile radius around Indian Point also contain some of the most densely-developed and expensive real estate around the country, critical natural resources, centers of national and international commerce, transportation arteries and hubs, and historic sites,” the state says. “Thus, the decontamination costs of a severe accident at Indian Point have the potential to be larger than an accident at any other reactor in the country.”

Asked to comment, NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said the commission’s general counsel office would respond directly to the New York AG office “as appropriate.”

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EPA Nuclear Event Guidance Draws Heat From Industry, Lawmakers

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 13:48:41 -0400

The nuclear-power industry and some Senate Democrats are at odds over the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s new nuclear-response guidelines, with some lawmakers concerned the benchmarks don't protect public health while industry officials want to relax the guidance further.

The new protective-action guide, which the agency issued in April and accepted public comment on through Sept. 16, is meant to advise federal, state and local officials following a wide range of radiological incidents, such as “dirty bomb” attacks, nuclear power plant meltdowns and problems at U.S. weapons facilities. It is controversial, in part due to suggestions that long standing public-health guidelines pertaining to drinking water and long-term cleanup could be relaxed dramatically in some circumstances.

Some Senate Democrats are concerned the guide may not be protective enough, according to a congressional aide. While the lawmakers did not file comments during the formal public comment period, they intend to make their concerns known to the agency -- likely through some form of commentary on the new guide or in a letter to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy -- said the aide, who asked not to be named due to not being authorized to discuss the issue.

The nuclear-power industry, meanwhile, argues the document does not relax guidelines for responding to radiological incidents enough. Comments the Nuclear Energy Institute, which represents the industry, submitted Sept. 16 say the agency needs to do a better job balancing efforts to protect the public from radiation exposure with other considerations.

“This importance was highlighted by events in Japan following the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident in 2011,” the industry comments say. “Some of the decisions taken for a single purpose (in this case, with the primary intent to protect against radiation exposure) were extremely disruptive and may have resulted in more social harm than good.”

In an effort to back this claim, the industry group cites two papers published this year, one by members of the private International Commission on Radiological Protection and another by the World Health Organization. Neither document provides any direct evidence that scaling back any specific protective actions would have caused a net benefit for the Japanese population, however.

Much like the industry comments, the paper by the ICRP members only discusses the concept of balancing protective actions with other considerations in general terms.

“For instance, evacuating people from their homes obviously results in serious disturbance to normal life,” the ICRP members say. “Not all decisions were as clearly justified and it is unclear whether they really produced more harm than good.”

The ICRP members, however, do not elaborate on which specific actions in Japan were not clearly justified. Nor do they offer any data showing that leaving evacuated people in place would have improved their overall well-being.

Similarly, the report by the World Health Organization says “both radiological and non-radiological risks,” such as those related to mental health, should be considered when making decisions on protective actions. Based on a preliminary study, the WHO report says “the health effects of radiation exposure resulting from the Fukushima … accident inside and outside Japan are likely to be less ominous than the socioeconomic impact.” It does not say, however, that limiting any specific protective actions following the meltdown would have improved the situation overall.

Environmentalists, meanwhile, argue it is premature for the organization to even suggest the health impacts from the Fukushima meltdown will be limited over the long term, given that new information about the amount of radiation released into the environment is continuing to come to light.

“Look at what’s going on now: They’re dumping huge amounts of radioactivity into the ocean -- no one expected that in 2011,” Daniel Hirsch, a nuclear policy lecturer at the University of California-Santa Cruz, told Global Security Newswire. “We could have large numbers of cancer from ingestion of fish.”

Even if the preliminary estimates of health effects prove reliable, they would not justify a relaxation of protective actions, argued Hirsch, whose criticism of the new EPA guide has been endorsed by more than 100 watchdog groups. If anything, it would suggest that the actions were successful and should be repeated in similar situations, he said.

Ralph Andersen, NEI senior director for radiation safety and environmental protection, acknowledged in a statement to GSN that the WHO report does not directly state that protective actions in Japan may have been counterproductive. Instead, it infers this as a possibility, he argued.

“Our point is not that authoritative organizations have firmly concluded that actions taken in Japan have led to more harm than good … it is not about second-guessing or assigning blame,” Andersen said. “Rather we are noting that the lessons-learned from Fukushima reinforce the need for balance and flexibility in protective action decision-making.”

One way industry says the new EPA guide should achieve this is by relaxing advice on when it is necessary to relocate the general population following a radiological incident.

The new guide says such decisions should be based on efforts to prevent individuals from being exposed to more than 2,000 millirems of radiation during the first year after an incident and no more than 500 millirems per year in subsequent years. Industry calls this “conservative” and recommends instead adopting a range of 2,000 to 10,000 millirems per year, pursuant to the guidelines of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The NEI comments also back the new guide’s elimination of the agency’s prior recommendation that protective actions aim to cap exposure at 5,000 millirems over 50 years, along with the document’s suggestion that long term cleanup “must take into account a wide variety of factors” and that following the agency’s normal cleanup rules might not be workable.

Environmentalists, along with some EPA and state officials, have opposed this, arguing the agency should stick to its normal Superfund rules under which long term cleanups are designed so that no more than one in 10,000 people would be expected to develop cancer from radiation exposure in the worst case scenario. Superfund’s ideal risk is one in 1 million.

“These risk levels have been accepted as reasonable for even huge, heavily contaminated Superfund sites [such as the Manhattan project site at Hanford, Washington] that are half the size of a state, and thus should not be relaxed in the PAGs,” say the comments signed by more than 100 groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Sierra Club.

“The main reason for the reduction in protection is to save money and liability for industries and agencies that carry out practices that could result in large radioactive contamination, mainly the nuclear power industry and the atomic weapons fuel chain agencies and their contractors,” the Sept. 16 comments argue.

By most official estimates, about one in 20 people would be expected to develop cancer if exposed to 2,000 millirems of radiation per year for 30 years, while 10,000 millirems per year over the same time period would have a risk of roughly one in five.

When it comes to making decisions about contaminated drinking water, the new EPA guide references the agency’s normal rules, which are designed to prevent people from being exposed to more than 4 millirems of radiation per year. It says, however, that far less stringent guidelines might be worth considering after a radiological incident however, and directs the reader to IAEA recommendations that in some cases are 27,000 times less strict.

Industry says the agency should not use its normal drinking-water rules, not only during the immediate aftermath of a radiological incident, but also during the intermediate and late phases of response, which can last years. The NEI comments complain the normal EPA drinking-water rules are based on the linear no-threshold model for cancer risk, which assumes there is no safe level of radiation exposure and that the risk of cancer is directly proportional to the level of exposure.

The agency uses the model pursuant to the recommendations of the National Academies of Science, which rejected other theories and based its suggestions largely on studies of atomic-bomb survivors in Japan and some other data. Industry argues, however, that the development of drinking-water guidelines “may consider but should not rely upon” the NAS model and should use “health effects data from actual radiological contamination experience of drinking water.”

Environmentalists oppose straying from the NAS model for projecting cancer risk and fear the new guide could allow the agency to do so. In Sept. 16 comments on the new guide, Diane D’Arrigo, of the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, raises concerns that some EPA officials who favor relaxing the agency’s normal rules have also appeared to challenge the model in presentations to international officials. Citing GSN reporting on the presentations, D’Arrigo notes one presentation compared the model to hormesis, a model previously rejected by EPA and NAS scientists that suggests low levels of radiation exposure is actually beneficial.

Reaction to the new EPA guide from state and local government officials is mixed. Comments from the Washington Health Department’s radiation office say drinking-water guidelines should be relaxed for a short time following an incident, but not as much as they would under the IAEA guidelines referenced in the document.

The Sept. 10 comments suggest a threshold for water contaminated with iodine-131 of 2,700 picocuries per liter, 900 times less strict than the normal EPA rule of 3 picocuries per liter. The Washington office argues that, had it followed the enforceable EPA rule during the initial aftermath of the Fukushima accident in Japan, it would have had to implement protective actions due to rainwater contaminated by radioactive fallout that crossed the Pacific Ocean.

During that time, rainwater in the state was contaminated by radioactive iodine-131 at levels that exceeded the legal limit “by at least 50 times,” the state office argues. It insists “no health risk existed” at this level, arguing that the normal EPA drinking water rules assume 70 years of exposure.

Similarly, the Illinois Emergency Management Agency says it believes the normal EPA drinking water rules are too strict following a radiological incident but that the IAEA recommendations are too lax. It recommends guidelines aimed to prevent exposure to more than 500 millirems per year, noting that the normal EPA rules are based on 4 millirems per year and that the IAEA recommendations are based on 10,000 millirems per year.

Like industry, the Illinois and Washington offices back the new guide’s deletion of a recommendation that protective actions aim to cap radiation exposure at 5,000 millirems over 50 years. The Illinois agency, however, supports a “risk-informed regulatory approach to cleanup,” an apparent reference to the way long term cleanups are normally conducted pursuant to Superfund rules.

The California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services has said the usual Superfund guidelines should be made the rule for long-term cleanup after radiological incidents, rather than being presented as an option. It also supports the use of normal EPA drinking-water rules.

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Does U.S. Advice on Disposing Fukushima Waste Apply Back Home?

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Fri, 13 Sep 2013 11:16:10 -0400

A presentation the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency made to Japanese officials dealing with the aftermath of the Fukushima power plant disaster is adding to critics’ concerns that the federal government may be looking to relax disposal rules for the type of radioactive waste a nuclear attack or accident in the United States could generate.

In recent months, watchdog groups, along with some state-government agencies, have been raising concerns over language in a new EPA guide for dealing with the aftermath of such an incident.

The so-called “protective action guide,” which the agency is accepting public comments on through Monday, suggests it may be necessary to dispose some radioactive waste in conventional landfills rather than in nuclear waste-specific facilities built pursuant to Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules.

The disposal issue is one of several concerns that activists and some state officials have with the document, which is meant to give advice to federal, state and local officials following a broad range of radiological incidents -- such as "dirty bomb" attacks, nuclear power plant meltdowns and industrial accidents. The guide is also creating controversy for suggesting that standards for drinking water and long-term cleanup could be relaxed after such incidents.

EPA officials have argued in statements to the press that they are not looking to retreat from their conventional rules, but critics say other agency documents obtained by Global Security Newswire suggest otherwise.

The documents, some of which the agency released to GSN under the Freedom of Information Act, suggest agency officials are advocating for cleanup and disposal procedures that ordinarily would not be permitted in the United States, critics say. They fear language in the new EPA response guide could enable such exceptions to the normal rules.

In the United States, materials that have become radioactively contaminated normally cannot be categorized as anything less than “low-level radioactive waste,” or “LLRW,” a distinction that requires disposal at tailor-made nuclear-waste sites designed to prevent the release of radiation into the environment.

A May 2012 EPA presentation to Japanese officials grappling with the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster suggests, however, that some contaminated debris could be classified as “very low-level waste,” or “VVLW.”

Such a category does not exist in the United States, but International Atomic Energy Agency guidance documents describe it as one that would allow some radioactive waste to be subject to less stringent disposal regulations than LLRW materials -- a prospect that environmentalists in the United States have long opposed and argue is not accepted by U.S. policy.

The May presentation was led by John Cardarelli, an official in the EPA emergency management office who has led the agency’s efforts to assist the Japanese since the onset of the Fukushima crisis in 2011.

It suggests that some lesser-contaminated materials could even be deemed “non-radioactive waste” and therefore become eligible for recycling, potentially for use in consumer products, which critics also argue is currently illegal in the United States.

In a statement provided to GSN, the agency says the presentation was meant to “broadly discuss options for possible consideration for the Japanese in the aftermath of Fukushima.” It nonetheless defends the disposal and recycling options offered in the presentation, suggesting they are backed by U.S. government and industry officials.

The American National Standards Institute -- a private organization whose members include the Nuclear Energy Institute and other nuclear industry groups -- supports the idea that some contaminated items should receive “clearance” from all regulation in a 1999 report, according to the EPA statement, provided to GSN by agency spokeswoman Julia Valentine.

In addition, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission “does specify exempt and unimportant quantities of radioactive material in [its] regulations,” the EPA statement asserts.

Further, the prospect of recycling certain radioactive materials in the United States “has been discussed and analyzed over the years,” most recently in a draft environmental assessment by the Energy Department that contemplates lifting a ban on recycling radioactive scrap metals, the agency says.

“Nearly all soil and materials have some amount of naturally occurring and/or anthropogenic radioactivity associated with it,” the EPA statement argues. “At some point a contaminant will be present in a media where it is not a significant risk or dose contributor, either on its own or compared to other naturally occurring anthropogenic contaminants.”

Daniel Hirsch, a nuclear policy lecturer at the University of California-Santa Cruz, says the EPA argument is contrary to U.S. policy.

Federal policy “doesn’t say there is a contaminant at a level where there is not a significant risk and we can therefore ignore it,” he said. “Current law says that anything that’s radioactive has to be disposed of appropriately.”

Hirsch called the American National Standards Institute report the agency cited “a proposal by industry” that is “at variance with the EPA policy [that Cardarelli] is sworn to carry out.” In addition, the agency’s claim that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission already allows some radioactive waste to be disposed outside of purpose-built facilities is misleading, he said.

The commission -- which primarily deals with commercial power plants and some research reactors and medical facilities -- has opted not to regulate certain items containing radioactive elements such as luminous watch dials and gas lanterns. However, U.S. policy does not grant the type of broad exemptions that would allow materials contaminated with radioactive substances from a nuclear-power-plant meltdown or radiological attack in conventional landfills not specifically created for nuclear waste, Hirsch argues.

The commission has a rule that permits nuclear power plants to apply for exceptions, but it is rarely used, said Hirsch. As president of the watchdog group Committee to Bridge the Gap, he currently is involved in litigation aimed at preventing radioactive waste from a meltdown at the DOE Santa Susana Field Laboratory in California from being recycled or sent to conventional dumps.

Past NRC proposals to create a waste category “below regulatory concern” that would be subject to less stringent rules was rejected by Congress in the Energy Policy Act of 1992, he noted.

Meanwhile, the pending environmental assessment by the Energy Department cited in the EPA statement, which contemplates lifting a ban on recycling radioactive scrap metals, has yet to be adopted by the department and so far is facing broad opposition. It is opposed by not only public health activists, but also the recycling industry.

If the type of radioactive materials the department is considering deregulating “enter the scrap supply stream, they would make their way to metal recycling facilities where they would disrupt mill operations, contaminate the mill, impose significant response costs and potentially expose workers and the public to radiation,” the Metals Industry Recycling Coalition says in February comments on the DOE proposal.

The EPA statement says that Cardarelli’s presentation to Japanese officials was meant to “generally discuss waste classifications in the international context.” But the suggestions in it -- along with the agency’s defense of them -- causes concern over the type of practices the government might allow under the new nuclear-response guide, said Hirsch.

“Why would EPA go in to make a presentation on what others do?” said Hirsch. “They’re supposed to be making a presentation on what we do. If you’re going to say something that violates the U.S. policy, you should say so.”

The new disaster-response guide that EPA issued in April does not go as far as to recommend recycling of radioactive materials, but suggests in some circumstances that the sheer volume of waste may force state and local governments to dispose of it in conventional landfills.

This idea is being opposed by state and local officials in California and Pennsylvania, on the grounds that only the federal government has the authority to dispose of radioactive waste -- and only at purpose-built sites.

Editor’s Note: This is the second story in a two-part series on issues related to the new EPA response guide.

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EPA Documents Raise Doubts Over Intent of New Nuclear-Response Guide

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Fri, 13 Sep 2013 11:10:00 -0400

Newly obtained government documents are prompting concern among critics that Environmental Protection Agency officials are seeking to use the organization’s new guide for nuclear-incident response to relax public health standards, but the agency is denying the claim.

The Freedom of Information Act release comes as the agency has yet to finish collecting public comments on the so-called protective-action guide, which it issued in April after years of internal infighting and public controversy. The document is meant to give federal, state and local officials advice on responding to a wide range of radiological incidents, such as “dirty bomb” attacks, nuclear power plant meltdowns and industrial accidents.

The documents obtained by Global Security Newswire show EPA officials have suggested at meetings around the world that the new guide could allow for the use of long-term cleanup standards dramatically less stringent than those the agency has enforced for decades at hundreds of sites throughout the United States, critics say.

In some cases, EPA officials have not only suggested that a drastic event akin to the Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown in Japan would necessitate more flexible guidelines, but also have made statements that critics say challenge the very science behind the agency’s everyday radiation rules.

“I think [EPA Administrator] Gina McCarthy has an out-of-control agency,” Daniel Hirsch, a nuclear-policy lecturer at the University of California-Santa Cruz, told GSN after reviewing the documents. “She has some people who are acting as nuclear cowboys, on behalf of EPA, undermining EPA’s policies and I think the public could get very badly hurt by it.”

One of the documents obtained by GSN is a presentation that Mike Boyd, an official in the agency's radiation office, gave about the new protective-action guide during a May meeting of the Paris, France-based Nuclear Energy Agency, a division of the intergovernmental Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The presentation suggests the approach to cleanup described in the new EPA guide “recall[s] the concept of optimization,” a controversial term the Obama administration had stripped from prior, Bush-era drafts of the document, even though “the word may be going out of style.”

The slides continue: “It is a flexible approach in which a variety of dose or risk benchmarks may be identified from various regulatory agencies, state governments, or other stakeholders.”

The EPA document goes on to list reports of the private National Council on Radiation Protection and the nongovernmental International Commission on Radiological Protection as among the potential sources for such benchmarks.

It is the recommendations of these very groups that EPA and state cleanup officials, along with environmental activists, have criticized in the past on the grounds they suggest remediation goals thousands of times less rigorous than what has ever been permitted in the United States.

Most recently, a February NCRP report funded by the U.S. Homeland Security Department suggested implementing ICRP cleanup goals under which an annual radiation dose of up to 2,000 millirems per year is permitted -- a rate at which as many as 1 in 20 people would be expected to develop cancer from long-term exposure. Normally, EPA does not permit actions that would leave more than 1 in 10,000 people at risk for cancer from 30 years of exposure, pursuant to rules its Superfund program established in the 1980s.

“It’s bait and switch,” said Hirsch, who as president of the watchdog group Committee to Bridge the Gap has been tapped by numerous environmental organizations throughout the country to critique the agency’s handling of the new guidance. “They took out the horrible language, left it vague enough and then you’ve got [EPA officials] acting as though the language is still there.”

A ‘fundamental shift’

As it was, watchdog groups already were raising alarms over comments that Paul Kudarauskas, an official with the EPA Consequence Management Advisory Team, made earlier this year suggesting events like Fukushima would cause a “fundamental shift” to cleanup.

Kudarauskas in March said that U.S. residents are used to having “cleanup to perfection,” but would have to abandon their “not-in-my-backyard” mentality in such cases. “People are going to have to put on their big-boy pants and suck it up,” the EPA official said.

The Chicago-based Nuclear Energy Information Service, a critic of the new EPA guide, cited GSN’s reporting of Kudarauskas’ remarks in Aug. 1 comments on the new guide. The activist group’s comments ask that the agency rescind the document and fire Kudarauskas.

In a statement to GSN, the agency maintains that the new guide “does not supersede or alter environmental laws or regulations,” however. While Boyd’s presentation in France “cited NCRP and ICRP documents as useful resources ... to an international audience from leading organizations in the field of radiation protection,” the guide itself notes that the Superfund cancer risk guidelines are “generally considered protective” in the United States, according to the EPA statement agency spokeswoman Julia Valentine provided to GSN.

Critics of the guide have argued, however, that such language does not overtly rule out the use of less-strict guidelines, and have asked that the document explicitly state the agency will stick to its regular cancer-risk rules following a radiological incident.

The EPA response to GSN acknowledges that the new guide says “the [Superfund] risk range may not be achievable in a large radiological incident.” Over the objections of activists and some local officials, the new document also eliminates a recommendation that appeared in the agency’s prior nuclear-response guide from 1992 that stated people should not be exposed to more than 5,000 millirems of radiation over 50 years. This benchmark would appear to have precluded the possibility of following the NCRP recommendation that people could be exposed to as much as 2,000 millirems per year.

Boyd’s presentation, meanwhile, says long-term cleanup conducted under the guide could only “potentially” strive to meet EPA’s traditional rules.

Detractors have long feared the guide is part of an effort to chip away at those standards, noting that industry and government officials are already arguing against the use of Superfund protocol at several sites. Those include the site of a nuclear reactor meltdown at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in California and an area in central Florida where EPA officials fear some 40,000 people living on former phosphate mines may be exposed to dangerous radiation levels.

Exposure vs. cancer risk

Now presentations EPA officials are making regarding cleanup after radiological incidents suggest some agency staffers are looking to challenge the cancer-risk science underlying nearly all of the agency’s radiation regulations by suggesting there are scientifically valid alternatives, activists say.

A May 2012 presentation to Japanese officials dealing with the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster led by John Cardarelli -- an official in EPA’s emergency management office and a colleague of Kudarauskas on the EPA Consequence Management Advisory Team -- says officials should “candidly acknowledge [the] limitations of risk-analysis mechanisms.” That is a reference to mathematical models scientists use to project the correlation between cancer incidents and radiation exposure.

In accordance with the recommendations of the National Academies of Science, official EPA policy endorses what is called the “linear no-threshold” model, which -- based largely on studies of atomic-bomb survivors in Japan and some other data -- assumes there is no safe level of radiation exposure. The model presupposes that cancer risk increases proportionally with the size of the radiation dose an individual receives.

Cardarelli’s presentation, however, presents alternative theories previously rejected by NAS and EPA scientists, including one, called “hormesis,” which argues that low levels of radiation exposure are actually beneficial.

The EPA statement to GSN defends the presentation, arguing that “technical information is available to support all of the models” it cites -- including hormesis, another theory that assumes radiation is less harmful than NAS scientists have found, and a third that suggests it could be more harmful. The “scientific community is not unified on radiation health effects,” the EPA statement claims.

Hirsch slammed the EPA defense of the presentation, calling the cited alternative theories “kooky stuff from the margin of science.

“The scientific community is not united on this?” Hirsch continued. “It went to the National Academies of Science, which unanimously concluded: Yes, [the correct model] is linear no-threshold. If you pardon the expression, it is a little bit like the climate deniers saying that the science community is not united on this matter. … They’re making it sound like the National Academies of Science are just one little player in this and that EPA is just one little player.”

A separate September 2012 presentation by Cardarelli to an interagency group led by the Homeland Security Department appears to suggest that EPA regulations are the opposite of science and that complying with EPA cancer risk rules is the opposite of conducting a “practical cleanup.”

Echoing Kudarauskas, the presentation says the Fukushima disaster has necessitated “a fundamental shift in our thinking” and cites a 100 millirem per year radiation dose limit as an alternative. About 1 in 300 people would be expected to develop cancer if exposed to this level for 30 years, according to calculations performed using the NAS and EPA-approved risk figures.

Even the International Commission on Radiological Protection’s projections would put the risk at roughly 1 in 400, which is about 25 times greater than what EPA rules would normally allow under the worst circumstances.

‘Many considerations’

The agency response to GSN says, however, that there “was no intent to discredit EPA regulations” in the Cardarelli presentation. The EPA statement said the presentation referenced “the many considerations that need to be made when dealing with complex large scale incidents such as Fukushima” and that the 100 millirem per year dose limit is the target used in Japan.

This dose limit also represents the low end of the 100-2,000 millirem per year cleanup-target recommended by the February NCRP report that Boyd’s presentation to the Paris-based Nuclear Energy Agency implies could be acceptable under the new EPA response guide. Jonathan Edwards, director of the EPA radiation office and Boyd’s superior, helped draft the NCRP report, as did Cardarelli.

Boyd's presentation, meanwhile, appears to misrepresent the criticism that state cleanup officials and environmental activists have levied against the new EPA guide, Hirsch says. Boyd says those opposed to the new guide advocate for “a single cleanup number” that would dictate the amount of radioactive contamination that can be left behind at all sites and that lacks “any flexibility” to accommodate for differing circumstances.

However, most state officials and environmental groups that have offered public criticism of the guide have actually called for the use of Superfund protocol. Hirsch notes the Superfund methodology does not provide a single, rigid cleanup number. Rather, it presents a series of sophisticated calculation tools that can be adjusted to accommodate for the expected use of a particular site, how much time people are likely to spend at a given location and under what conditions. It also includes a range -- rather than a single target -- for cancer incidents, with a 1 in 10,000 risk considered the worst case scenario and a 1 in 1 million risk considered the ideal.

The EPA response to GSN insists that “some state and local government partners have indeed expressed a preference for a prescribed single cleanup number.” The agency declined to identify which state and local officials made such requests, however, saying they were made “during informal conversations” and were “not recorded … official state positions.”

Activists contend officials in the agency’s radiation and emergency-management offices are looking to marginalize the Superfund program and its supporters. They argue that documents the two offices helped develop misrepresent how the cleanup program works and the types of problems it is meant to address.

Like the February NCRP report that he and Edwards helped develop, Cardarelli’s presentations portray the Superfund program as one that deals primarily with small, residential cleanups, which he contrasts with the widespread contamination facing the area surrounding Fukushima, activists say.

Hirsch argues these assertions omit the fact that the Superfund approach is used for cleaning not only small residential areas, but also massive nuclear weapons sites, such as the 586-square-mile Manhattan-project site at Hanford, Washington. In contrast, the government has said some dirty-bomb attacks and other radiological incidents that the new guide is meant to address might only affect sites spanning less than a few square miles.

Some EPA officials agree

Based on April EPA comments on the February NCRP report that GSN obtained under a separate FOIA request, it would appear some agency officials share activists’ concerns that the Superfund approach to cleanup is being misrepresented.

The comments, unlike the NCRP document and EPA presentations, were developed with input from the agency’s Superfund and drinking-water offices. They reject the NCRP authors’ use of the term “simplistic in nature” to describe the Superfund program’s approach to risk assessment and urge deletion of the language.

The EPA comments say the language in the NRCP report, to which Edwards and Cardarelli contributed, should be replaced with a detailed discussion of the numerous calculations that Superfund officials perform in order to determine remediation goals.

Likewise, in internal emails from 2011 that GSN also obtained under a FOIA request, EPA Superfund official Stuart Walker suggests to Cardarelli that information about how the program selects cleanup goals could be helpful to Japanese officials grappling with the Fukushima contamination.

Walker also recommends sharing guidance documents the Superfund program developed on specific topics about which Japanese officials were seeking information. The focus of Japanese interest, according to Cardarelli’s e-mails, included how to talk to the public about radiation risk, how to reduce the volume of radioactive waste and how to temporarily store contaminated materials.

The materials released under FOIA also show that Walker, the EPA Superfund official, developed a detailed presentation explaining how the Superfund methodology could be used specifically to clean up after major radiological events, including dirty-bomb and nuclear-weapon attacks.

Left out of the mix

None of this information appears on a website that Cardarelli, who has led EPA efforts to assist the Japanese, created as a repository for information that could be useful to those involved with the Fukushima cleanup. It is also largely absent from the new EPA guide for mopping up after such events in the United States.

A common theme among public comments the agency has so far received on the new guide is that the document lacks specific details that would tell responders exactly what they should do during and after a crisis. Instead, respondents say it provides a largely theoretical overview that is largely unhelpful. Even commenters who support relaxation of the agency’s usual standards after such an event complain that the guide is short on practical information.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection -- which in its comments suggests a 100-fold relaxation of EPA drinking-water standards after a radiological incident -- says the section of the document that deals with long term cleanup “is of modest value as a general reference.” The criticism is based on the lack of “numerical cleanup criteria or limits” and a view that the guide only “sketches the broad issues involved in cleanup.”

The July 10 comments were co-authored by Pennsylvania radiation bureau director David Allard, who -- along with Edwards and Cardarelli -- contributed to the February NRCP report advocating for relaxed cleanup guidelines.

The Pennsylvania comments also take aim at the portions of the guide that deal with the more immediate aftermath of a radiological crisis. They complain that rather than provide numerical limits on the amount of specific radioactive substances people should be exposed to, the EPA guide instead directs readers to other resources maintained by the Energy Department and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

This “will result in uncertainty and ambiguity over the best values to use, and cause confusion and delay in evaluating accident/emergency conditions,” the Pennsylvania state entity says.

The Orange County, Calif., Sheriff’s Department similarly complains the document does not provide tables of numerical limits, “only the algorithms to work them out.” It maintains that such an approach would be particularly problematic in the event that computers fail during a crisis.

“This makes the [protective action guide] manual much less useful as a one-stop document, and will be very difficult to use in an emergency,” the July 3 comments say. “This will cause significant delay in calculations and thereby create an undue risk to the health and safety of the public.”

The Orange County comments further complain that the EPA guide includes references to Energy Department calculators that “are not available from any source.”

Unlike their Pennsylvania counterparts, the Orange County officials do not support the relaxation of conventional EPA standards, however. Their comments say the agency should use its usual drinking-water rules following a radiological incident.

The California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services is taking a similar position. It says leaving out numerical limits for specific contaminants “and directing the reader to myriad additional references reduces the usefulness” of the guide.

“In addition, some of the referenced reports are copyrighted materials and require a fee to access. In an emergency the ability to obtain the many referenced documents may be severely limited, causing an undue risk to the public,” the California office states.

As far as cleanup is concerned, California says the Superfund guidelines, under which no more than 1 in 10,000 people are to be put at risk for cancer, should be made the rule for long-term recovery rather than simply being presented as an option, as the guide currently does. And like its counterparts in Orange County, the governor’s office also recommends using existing EPA drinking-water rules after a radiological incident.

The drinking-water issue has been one of the most contentious aspects of the new guide since an earlier draft of the document leaked in 2007. Unlike the Bush-era version, the April guide does not include directly in its text drinking-water guidelines thousands of times weaker than standard EPA rules. Instead it suggests that similar recommendations by the International Atomic Energy Agency and other groups might be worth considering.

The Ohio Department of Public Safety supports relaxed drinking-water guidelines, arguing “the contention that alternate sources of clean water can be obtained and shipped to an area assumes the infrastructure around the affected area is intact.” Its June 24 comments say the “Fukushima accident demonstrated that areas affected by the radiological emergency could suffer severe infrastructure challenges and that outside sources of water and supplies may not be available.”

Environmentalists have rejected this argument, in the past noting that the 2007 draft of the guide suggested relaxed drinking-water guidelines could remain in place for months, or even years, after a radiological incident.

In July 15 comments, the Natural Resources Defense Council states, “Given that bottled water is widely available commercially through the country, NRDC sees no necessity in relaxing the established enforceable drinking-water standards for radionuclides under the Safe Drinking Water Act.”

The NRDC comments also oppose departing from Superfund guidelines during long-term cleanup. The organization further suggests that the new document’s radiation-dose limits for the immediate aftermath of an incident be more stringent, given that the National Academies of Science in 2005 determined that radiation is more harmful than the agency previously assumed.

The agency is accepting public comments on the new guide through Sept. 16.

Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part series on issues related to the new EPA response guide.

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Report Flags Weapons Lab Oversight

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 16:11:42 -0400

A new National Academies of Science report released Tuesday flags some concerns about how the Energy Department oversees its nuclear-weapons laboratories, rekindling debate over controversial proposals by some House Republicans to scale back that oversight.

The assessment identifies some issues “that, if not addressed, have the potential to erode the ability to perform high-quality work at the laboratories,” which include the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.

Overall, though, the “science and engineering capabilities that underpin the nuclear weapons stockpile stewardship and nonproliferation missions at the nation’s three national security laboratories are ‘healthy and vibrant,’” according to a summary of the report.

The NAS panel that authored the document “found no problems with the quality of science and engineering that would prevent” the labs from ensuring that the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons is reliable.

Since the United States declared a moratorium on nuclear-weapons testing in 1992, one of the key functions of the labs has been to ensure that the country’s atomic arms remain safe and reliable without actually detonating warheads.

The NAS report says the cost of doing some of the experiments necessary to perform this function is rising, and it blames this in part on what it says is excessive oversight by the DOE National Nuclear Security Administration on the private contractors that run the labs.

“If the current degree of operational oversight continues, too many experiments will be unaffordable, and that would be very damaging to the quality” of science and engineering at the labs, the report says. “Factors driving experimental costs include the loss of trust, excessive duplicative oversight, formality of operations, and a culture of audit and risk avoidance.”

The NAS panel suggests that when determining the necessary amount of oversight, “the risks inherent in doing an experiment need to be brought into balance with the benefits of doing the experiment and the associated risks of not doing the experiment.” It notes a related NAS report issued last year made similar findings.

The Republican leadership of the House Armed Services Committee cited that prior report when it inserted several controversial provisions into its draft of the fiscal 2013 National Defense Authorization Act. The provisions would have streamlined DOE oversight, including by removing the department’s authority “to make policy, prescribe regulations and conduct oversight of health, safety and security in the nuclear security enterprise.”

Senate Democrats and House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans ultimately stripped the proposals from the fiscal 2013 bill. Lawmakers expressed particular reservations over scaling back government oversight of the nuclear-weapons complex after an 82-year-old nun and two other peace activists broke into the Y-12 National Nuclear Security Complex in Tennessee.

This year, reforms proposed by House Armed Service Committee Republicans are not as ambitious, but their version of the fiscal 2014 defense authorization bill does include some controversial provisions regarding lab oversight.

One such provision would require the independent Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board to conduct cost-benefit analyses of any recommendations it makes, upon request from the Energy secretary. Democrats have raised concerns that conducting such analyses would drain resources from the safety board and limit its ability to conduct oversight and make recommendations on how to improve safety and security across the weapons complex.

The Energy Department, which has a much larger budget and staff, would be better suited to conduct such analyses, Democrats contend.

Similarly, critics of the House Armed Services proposals believe the department also has the ability to conduct the type of cost-benefit analyses that would determine the proper level of oversight for laboratory experiments -- as recommended by the new NAS report -- without adopting the controversial statutory changes that GOP committee members have proposed, a Capitol Hill staffer told Global Security Newswire.

Congress pushed the Energy Department to do these kinds of appraisals in the version of the fiscal 2013 defense authorization bill that ultimately became law, noted the Capitol Hill aide, who asked to remain unnamed, lacking authorization to discuss the issue publicly. While the department has the ability to do these reviews, it needs to work out the details with the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, the staffer said.

According to the congressional aide, such reviews would enable the department to focus its oversight efforts more on the problems that are most likely to arise from lab experiments, rather than the worst-case scenarios. The type of oversight rollbacks proposed by House Armed Service Committee Republicans would be too extreme, the staffer asserted, given the inherent dangers associated with conducting experiments using plutonium and other sensitive materials.

While the NAS report is correct to point out the issue, the GOP committee members’ proposals are not the solution, the aide argued.

House Armed Service Committee Republicans “will go, ‘See, well, we told you so,’ but the DOE has these probabilistic tools, they’ve just got to work with DNFSB to say, ‘Look, this is the most likely event, this is the least likely event … not the 1 in 10 million kind of thing,” the staffer said.

The House Armed Service Committee did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

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To Counter Nuclear Smuggling, Officials Look to Mobile Detection Technology

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Fri, 23 Aug 2013 16:00:23 -0400

A recently completed White House-led strategic review could shift priorities for a program intended to prevent the smuggling of nuclear-weapon material across international borders, a top U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration official tells Global Security Newswire.

Anne Harrington, deputy NNSA administrator for defense nuclear nonproliferation, said in an interview that the broad assessment of the Second Line of Defense program will mean that its subsidiary Megaports program will be more selective about which international ports at which it chooses to invest in radiation-detection equipment.

Overall, there will be a greater emphasis on mobile -- rather than stationary -- detection systems, said Harrington, whose organization is a semi-autonomous part of the Energy Department.

In a wide-ranging interview, she addressed a number of issues, including why release of an environmental impact statement regarding the potential conversion of surplus weapons-grade plutonium to mixed-oxide reactor fuel has been delayed. The official also discussed whether the United States should institute an import ban on medical isotopes produced with highly enriched uranium, given concerns that Russia could undercut the market for isotopes produced with low enriched uranium.

“I can’t see any immediate reason to engage in a medical trade war with Russia over how they produce their isotopes,” Harrington said, noting Russia’s stated intention to eventually switch low enriched uranium.

Separately, the United States and Russia are working to craft implementing agreements relative to the new Cooperative Threat Reduction pact that the two nations announced in June, Harrington toldGSN. The deal replaced the so-called Nunn-Lugar agreement that had enabled U.S. efforts to secure nuclear weapons-related items in Russia since the end of the Cold War.

Harrington further discussed the potential for international nuclear-security standards following an International Atomic Energy Agency conference that took place in Vienna in July.

Edited excerpts of the recent interview follow.

GSN: Turning to the Second Lind of Defense, you said in March that the interagency review on that program had been finished and that it was now clearer what its role was going to be going forward. Can you talk a little bit now about what that role will be and how it will be similar or different to what it was previously?

Harrington: One of the things that came out of the review which I think was very interesting was a reassessment, for example, of the Megaports program and identifying a point of diminishing return in terms of which ports, which transshipment ports, really contribute the most to U.S. national security.

A transshipment port that, let’s say, primarily functions to take goods made in India and transship them to Australia maybe isn’t as valid a target for our program as a port, 30 percent of whose outbound cargo ends up in a U.S. port. That would be pretty important.

So we really refined that kind of analysis, in order to better target where our investments go. So that was, I think, a very useful step, and also revisiting some of the technologies that we were using and how we combine technologies to address trafficking in some particular geographic locations.

So [stationary] portals are very useful in certain places. Mobile vans are very useful in some places. Handhelds, backpacks -- there’s a lot of different detection capability available now and what we’ve done is adjust the mix of technology that we apply to any particular situation.

GSN: In the interest of cost-effectiveness?

Harrington: Not just cost-effectiveness, but mission effectiveness.

I was in the Middle East in July and it’s really hard to lay a road across the desert and say this is where all the traffic is going to go. You need a different, more flexible kind of capability in many countries where a stationary detector doesn’t give you.

And so modifying the mix of technologies actually makes us much more effective in terms of what we can deliver. We’ve seen this in practice in a number of places now, and so that’s going to affect future decisions on procurement and technology choices.

GSN: In light of these reassessments, do the previously stated goals of equipping 650 sites in 30 countries and 100 seaports by 2018 still stand, or have those been adjusted in light of the new assessment?

Harrington: Those have been adjusted, I’m not going to give you new figures because I might misquote them. But those have changed and, in fact, I’ve been reviewing some of the draft goals that we’re circulating right now. And, the focus is much more on the delivery of mobile capacity than stationary. And, as I’ve said, we’ve reassessed the Megaports target and we believe the new target is very defensible.

To read more of the interview, which touched on Nunn-Lugar, the Nuclear Security Conference, medical isotopes and other issues, read the full story on Global Security Newswire.

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House Could Withhold DHS Funds While Waiting for Chemical Security Report

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Thu, 16 May 2013 16:09:47 -0400

House appropriators are looking to withhold $20 million in fiscal 2014 funds from the Homeland Security Department until it delivers a spending plan and progress report for its beleaguered chemical security program.

A spending bill released on Tuesday by the Republican-controlled House Appropriations Committee allocates $77.1 million for the DHS Infrastructure Security Compliance Division, which is responsible for implementing the controversial Chemical Facility Antiterrorism Standards. This is $763,000 less than what Congress approved for this budget year and $8.7 million less than what the Obama administration has requested for fiscal 2014, committee spokeswoman Jennifer Hing noted.

In addition, the bill would withhold $20 million in DHS funds until the department submits “an expenditure plan for the Chemical Facility Antiterrorism Standards program that includes the number of facilities covered by the program, inspectors on-board, inspections pending, and inspections projected to be completed by Sept. 30, 2014,” according to the legislation.

Lawmakers have scrutinized the CFATS program in recent years, particularly since an internal memo reporting numerous problems with the initiative was leaked to the press in late 2011. The program – which is meant to help protect high-risk chemical plants and other facilities from sabotage – was suffering from a litany of management issues and department personnel were slow to complete reviews of site security plans, according to the memo.

Last month’s fertilizer plant explosion that leveled homes and killed at least 14 people in West, Texas added to Capitol Hill concern about the program’s effectiveness. The CFATS program was not regulating the facility, even though it held enough dangerous chemicals to trigger coverage.

For fiscal 2013 the House Appropriations Committee had sought a 40 percent funding cut for the program. This year’s figure represents a 10 percent cut below what the administration is seeking for the infrastructure security division that runs the program – not counting the additional $20 million in department funds that would be withheld until the department submits the information lawmakers are requesting. Hing said the money would specifically be held back from the division's parent body, the National Protection and Programs Directorate.

Earlier this month, the department released some updated statistics for the program, but they do not appear to include all of the information House Republicans are seeking. A DHS fact sheet says the program has approved 85 security plans following on-site inspections and has provided preliminary authorization for another 380 plans.

As of last September, the program had only completed two on-site inspections and authorized 73 plans.

According to the May 2013 fact sheet, a total of 4,351 facilities are currently covered by the program.

The Democrat-controlled Senate Appropriations Committee has yet to release its homeland security spending bill.

(Image via BEEE/Shutterstock.com)

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EPA Nominee Declines Comment on Controversial Nuclear Incident Guide

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:39:31 -0400

The Obama administration’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency declined on Thursday to answer questions about a controversial new guide that suggests public health standards could be relaxed dramatically in the event of a nuclear attack or accident.

Asked to comment on concerns that the guide references drinking water guidelines nearly 30,000 times less stringent than EPA rules, Gina McCarthy remained silent following her Senate confirmation hearing. An aide said “no comment” and pushed a reporter out of the way.

Called a protective action guide for radiological incidents, the new document references International Atomic Energy Agency guidelines suggesting intervention is not needed until drinking water is contaminated with radioactive iodine 131 at a concentration of 81,000 picocuries per liter. This is 27,000 times less stringent than the EPA rule of three picocuries per liter.

The document has created an uproar among watchdog groups and is now also attracting attention on Capitol Hill, according to a congressional aide with knowledge of the issue. The staffer asked to remain anonymous due to not being authorized do discuss the matter publicly, but told Global Security Newswire that lawmakers are looking at the issue for the purpose of commenting in more detail at a later date.

Previously, an EPA spokeswoman noted that the guide would be subject to a 90-day public comment period once it is formally published in the Federal Register. The document, which was posted on the EPA website Friday evening, is already labeled for “interim use.”

Some activists have blamed McCarthy for various controversies surrounding the development of the new guide, which was under her purview as the agency’s assistant administrator for air and radiation. They have argued the document is not fundamentally different from a prior version drafted by the Bush administration that was blocked by the Obama camp during its first days in office and say the issue merits some attention during McCarthy’s confirmation process.

McCarthy’s confirmation hearing on Thursday consisted largely of partisan disputes between Republicans concerned about the prospect of tougher air and climate control regulations and Democrats who argued such measures need consideration. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.,, an ardent McCarthy supporter, said she hoped a vote on the nomination would happen within a matter of weeks but that she had yet to secure a commitment from fellow senators. Previously, Senator Roy Blunt, R-Mo., threatened to hold up McCarthy’s confirmation, according to press reports.

In addition to the concerns about drinking water guidelines, watchdog groups have complained the new EPA guide suggests the agency might not employ long-held Superfund cleanup standards following an attack with a radiological “dirty bomb” or nuclear weapon, or an incident at a nuclear power plant. A recent report chartered by the Homeland Security Department suggests remediation guidelines under which as many as one in 20 people would be expected to develop cancer from long-term radiation exposure.

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EPA Relaxes Public Health Guidelines For Radiological Attacks, Accidents

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 15:36:25 -0400

After years of internal deliberation and controversy, the Obama administration has issued a document suggesting that when dealing with the aftermath of an accident or attack involving radioactive materials, public health guidelines can be made thousands of times less stringent than what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency would normally allow.

The EPA document, called a protective action guide for radiological incidents, was quietly posted on a page on the agency’s website Friday evening. The low-profile release followed an uproar of concern from watchdog groups in recent weeks over news that the White House had privately agreed to back relaxed radiological cleanup standards in certain circumstances and had cleared the path for the new EPA guide.

Agency officials had tried to issue the protective action guide during the final days of the Bush administration in January 2009, but the incoming Obama camp ultimately blocked its publication in part due to concerns that it included guidelines suggesting people could drink water contaminated at levels thousands of times above what the agency would typically permit.

The new version of the guide released Friday does not include such dramatically relaxed guidelines its text, but directs the reader to similar recommendations made by other federal agencies and international organizations in various documents. It suggests that they might be worth considering in circumstances where complying with its own enforceable drinking water regulations is deemed impractical.

Such circumstances could include the months – and possibly years – following a “dirty bomb” attack, a nuclear weapons explosion or an accident at a nuclear power plant, according to the guide, a nonbinding document intended to prepare federal, state and local officials for responding to such events.

For example, the new EPA guide refers to International Atomic Energy Agency guidelines that suggest intervention is not necessary until drinking water is contaminated with radioactive iodine 131 at a concentration of 81,000 picocuries per liter. This is 27,000 times less stringent than the EPA rule of 3 picocuries per liter.

“This is public health policy only Dr. Strangelove could embrace,” Jeff Ruch, executive director for the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said in a statement Monday, referring to Peter Sellers’ character in the Stanley Kubrick film of the same name.

Along with other activists, Ruch laid the blame for the document’s perceived shortcomings on Gina McCarthy, the EPA air and radiation chief who is scheduled for a Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday regarding her nomination to become the agency’s next administrator. “If this typifies the environmental leadership we can expect from Ms. McCarthy, then EPA is in for a long, dirty slog,” Ruch said.

In a statement to Global Security Newswire, EPA spokeswoman Julia Valentine said the new document does not propose specific drinking water guidelines, but rather seeks comment on what guidelines are appropriate. “The agency would like to hear from state and local partners on this issue and is seeking input from states and local authorities as it considers the appropriateness of, and possible values of, a drinking water PAG,” she said.

However, while the new guide will be subject to a 90-day public comment period once it formally is published in the Federal Register, it has been labeled for “interim use,” meaning it is effective immediately.

Daniel Hirsch, a nuclear policy lecturer at the University of California-Santa Cruz who led a coalition of some 60 watchdog groups against the Bush-era incarnation of the EPA guide, argued the Obama guide is worse than the Bush document in not only ultimately referencing many of the same controversial recommendations, but by forcing the reader to dig through a myriad of other documents to find them.

“What I find particularly tragic is, because it is so corrupt, it now is a useless document,” Hirsch told GSN. “If you have an emergency, you want to go to a protective action guide, look up tables, and know what you’re supposed to do.”

In Hirsch’s view, McCarthy, along with acting EPA Administrator Bob Perciasepe, “moved the most horrible stuff into references” so that “they could somehow claim that it is not identical to the Bush-era PAG.”

The new 86-page guide’s reliance on other documents is “a recipe for absolute mayhem in the midst of an emergency,” Hirsch said. “And that’s because of politics.”

Another controversial aspect of the Bush-era draft of the EPA guide was its embrace of a loosely defined approach to cleanup called optimization, under which decisions about how to permanently restore an area affected by a nuclear incident would not have to be based on the public health guidelines on which the agency usually relies.

According to a draft report recently commissioned by the Homeland Security Department, cleanup decisions under the optimization approach would be based on a target radiation dose range of between 100 and 2,000 millirems of radiation per year, meaning as many as about one in 20 people would be expected to develop cancer from long-term exposure. Historically, the Environmental Protection Agency has not allowed long-term cancer risks greater than one in 10,000 in a worst-case scenario, pursuant to guidelines its Superfund program established in the 1980s.

While the new EPA guide does not use the word “optimization,” it similarly suggests that compliance with the agency’s conventional guidelines might not be practical following the types of incidents the guide is meant to address.

“It should be noted that the extent and scope of contamination as a result of [a nuclear power plant, radiological “dirty bomb” or nuclear weapons incident] may be at a much larger scale than a site or facility decommissioned or remedial cleanup normally experienced under established regulatory frameworks,” says a draft of a Federal Register notice that will formally announce the document’s release. “Lesser radiological incidents may be well addressed under existing response and environmental cleanup programs.”

Watchdog organizations have argued, however, that the range of incidents which the new EPA guide and the DHS report suggest responders need not follow conventional health guidelines is too broad. Many scenarios involving a dirty bomb – a weapon that would use conventional explosive to disperse radioactive material -- are expected to contaminate areas smaller than many Superfund sites. Suggesting in a federal policy document that such cleanups need not follow conventional EPA rules could set a dangerous precedent for a wide range of situations, they have said. Some EPA and state government officials have raised similar concerns.

“Mixing in a [nuclear weapon] with a [dirty bomb] and a nuclear power accident and other kinds of accidents -- it’s just intellectually dishonest,” Hirsch said. “They should say our standard is to try to protect in the risk range we always have historically and there may be some absolutely exigent circumstances such as nuclear weapons explosion where that might be difficult but this is our goal and our planning basis.”

Suggestions in the new EPA guide that some radioactive waste might have to be dumped in conventional landfills due to a lack of sufficient space at specially designed sites has also sparked concern among activists.

Diane D’Arrigo, of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, read these suggestions as “an admission that a nuclear power accident could cause major devastation and create enormous amounts of nuclear waste that would exceed all radioactive disposal capacity in the country so would need to go to regular landfills or be burned to disperse into our air and lungs.” She said the new guide was a “step toward making this an ‘acceptable’ practice,” in more routine situations.

Valentine, the EPA spokeswoman, said however that the new guide “will not affect the agency’s Superfund authorities, existing cleanup regulations or current health and safety standards,” despite the statements in the document suggesting those authorities, regulations and standards may not be applicable to a broad range of scenarios. She said the agency “is not weakening cleanup standards,” but rather, “building a bridge between managing the effects of a catastrophe and meeting existing environmental standards.”

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Watchdog Groups Blast White House-Backed Nuclear Cleanup Study

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 15:29:33 -0400

Following scathing criticism from watchdog organizations, officials preparing a controversial report on nuclear incident cleanup reportedly backed by the White House have opted to extend public comment on the document by nearly two weeks.

Commissioned by the Homeland Security Department, the draft report suggests remediation guidelines in which up to roughly one in 20 people would be expected to develop cancer from long-term radiation exposure. The deadline for the public to comment on the draft report was to expire April 4, but its authors have opted to push the date back to April 15.

Under guidelines established by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program in the 1980s, cleanup of toxic sites in the United States are usually designed so that, in a worst-case scenario, no more than one in 10,000 people would be expected to develop cancer due to extended exposure to contaminants. The new report, organized by the private National Council of Radiation Protection and primarily drafted by federal officials, suggests such standards are not practical following a massive disaster such as the 2011 Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown in Japan, along with considerably smaller dirty bomb attacks.

Activists throughout the country argue the report’s argument is misplaced.

“NCRP’s response to lessons learned is simply to redefine ‘clean’ by lowering the cleanup standard [and] is frankly criminal,” Mary Lampert, director of the Massachusetts-based Pilgrim Watch said in comments submitted on Thursday. “Just as ‘wrong’ does not become ‘right’ by rewriting the Commandments to ‘Though shall’ from ‘Thou shall not;’ dirty does not become clean; nor harmful become harmless by a stroke of the pen to change the definitions.”

Lampert said the “only humane and sane approach would be for NCRP to recommend measures to reduce the risk of nuclear disasters in light of the potentially real and potentially devastating economic and human consequences; and then to recommend policies and a framework to deal with short and long-term off-site consequences.”

She noted the federal government has yet to decide which of its agencies would be in charge of cleanup after a nuclear power plant incident and who would be responsible for paying for the work. She and other activists have also complained that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been slow to require certain mitigation measures, such as installing radiation filters on venting systems at Fukushima-style reactors.

Activists also complained that personnel from the EPA Superfund office were not included among the federal officials who drafted the report and that the authors also did not consult with public interest groups.

“The panel’s process has operated under the general public’s radar screen,” according to Lampert’s comments. “Had it not been for reporting by Global Security Newswire, [Pilgrim Watch] would not have been aware of the draft and the date set to submit comment.”

At least 17 other public interest groups have also expressed concern about the 587-page draft report during the last week, and had requested that the comment deadline be extended 60 days.

Writing on behalf of 16 of the organizations, Diane D’Arrigo, of the Maryland-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service, raised fears that the report “is clearly intended to serve as an influential recommendation that will affect the regulations that protect the public from ionizing radiation,” and requested more time to “fully review and provide input.” Daniel Hirsch, of the California-based Committee to Bridge the Gap, said activists are pushing for the issue to be a focus of Gina McCarthy’s Senate confirmation hearing to become the next EPA administrator.

The controversy surrounding the draft report comes as the Environmental Protection Agency is poised to release a new guidance document that is also widely expected to suggest that Superfund standards need not be applied to all nuclear incidents. The White House cleared the EPA guide for release last week.

In a statement to GSN, EPA spokeswoman Julia Valentine said the new guide will “reflect the best available radiation science” and “will not affect the agency’s Superfund authorities, existing cleanup regulations or current health and safety standards.”

Agency officials have made similar statements regarding prior drafts of the guide in recent years – including remarks that defended a Bush-era draft of the same guide suggesting people could drink water contaminated at levels thousands of times what the agency would normally allow. Those statements have done little to placate critics both in and outside the government who have raised concerns about the precedent such a federal document would establish and who have noted that recent studies by the National Academies of Science suggest radiation is even more dangerous than once thought.

While most draft versions of the guide have included disclaimers saying the document should not affect standards at existing Superfund sites, they have not ruled out the possibility that the conventional cleanup approach would not be used for remediation after a radiological “dirty bomb” attack, nuclear power plant accident or similar event. In addition, the draft NCRP report currently open for comment suggests using a loosely defined approach called “optimization” instead, and says the White House backs this suggestion.

Lampert argued in her comments on the draft report that that the National Academies of Science, rather than the NCRP organization, should lead study of the issue. The NCRP panel appears biased, Lampert contended, based on who was not included on it and on statements made in the unfinalized document.

As an example of the report’s alleged bias, Lampert argued it mischaracterizes the consequences of the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear reactor meltdown in Pennsylvania. The draft report states the incident “did not result in any radiological injury or offsite contamination” but Lampert noted that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission estimated that 10 million curies of radiation were released during the incident while industry experts estimated between 17 million and 1 billion curies. Subsequent studies showed radiation-linked disease in the surrounding communities, Lampert claimed.

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White House Advances Controversial Nuclear Incident Response Guide

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 16:01:19 -0400

The White House has cleared the way for a controversial guide on responding to nuclear incidents that is expected to relax long-held cleanup standards, prompting watchdog groups to call for Senate scrutiny of the matter during hearings on Gina McCarthy's nomination to become the next Environmental Protection Agency administrator.

The White House Management and Budget Office completed its review of the Environmental Protection Agency’s protective action guidance for radiological incidents on Friday, according to the OMB website. While the document is not yet public, it is widely expected to suggest cleanups do not have to comply with public health guidelines established during the 1980s by the EPA Superfund program.

One of the Obama administration’s first actions upon taking office in January 2009 was to halt publication of a Bush-era draft of the document.

The earlier version suggested people could drink water contaminated with radiation levels thousands of times above what the Environmental Protection Agency would normally allow following an incident such as a radiological “dirty bomb” attack or a nuclear power plant accident. It also embraced a loosely defined approach to cleanup called “optimization,” under which stakeholders would be permitted to develop unique remediation standards for a given incident rather than follow Superfund rules.

The Obama White House now backs optimization, according to a recently completed draft report sponsored by the Homeland Security Department. This has alarmed nuclear watchdogs, particularly since the report suggests optimization would permit annual radiation doses that could cause as many as one in about 20 people to develop cancer over a 30-year period. In a worst-case scenario, EPA rules do not typically allow a cancer risk greater than one in 10,000 during this time frame.

Given the findings of the DHS report, nuclear watchdogs say they expect the EPA guide will suggest that following its own Superfund rules is not necessary in all cases. A version of the EPA guide floated internally during President Obama’s first term included such language, and activists say the findings of the DHS report show the White House approves such statements.

Activists would have preferred that the EPA guide continue to languish in a state of perpetual review, but now that it has been cleared by the White House they are pushing the Senate to scrutinize the issue when it considers Gina McCarthy’s nomination to become the agency’s next administrator. McCarthy, who as assistant administrator for air and radiation was responsible for overseeing revisions of the guide, is due to appear before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on April 11.

“The responsibility is shared between the EPA officials who did not stand up for strong environmental protection and the White House which has been eager to show its tilt toward industry when it comes to environmental protection,” said Daniel Hirsch, president of Committee to Bridge the Gap, which led some 60 public interest groups against the Bush-era version of the guide in 2008.

A spokeswoman for Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) did not respond to a request for comment. White House and EPA officials also did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

Activists, meanwhile, are calling for the private National Council on Radiation Protection, which organized the drafting of the report on optimization on behalf of the Homeland Security Department, to extend its public comment period for the document. The present deadline is Thursday, but activists are asking that it be pushed back 60 days after learning of it from reports in Global Security Newswire.

“It has just come to our attention that this extensive and potentially highly influential NCRP document is available for public review and comment,” 16 watchdog groups, including Physicians for Social Responsibility, Friends of the Earth and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, said in a Monday letter. “It is clearly intended to serve as an influential recommendation that will affect the regulations that protect the public from ionizing radiation. To our knowledge, the public and public interest groups have not been included in the development of this document despite many of us actively interacting for decades in the issues it covers.”

Activists have previously raised concerns about the makeup of the panel that drafted the report. While the document discusses the Superfund cleanup approach extensively, no experts from the EPA office that works on the program directly were included on the panel. Instead, representatives of the agency’s radiation and emergency management offices – which have routinely argued against the Superfund approach – were selected to participate as consultants or advisers.

The draft report argues that the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan demonstrated that abandoning normal EPA standards is necessary in some cases. The DHS report says the disaster contaminated an area the size of Connecticut and, it claims, showed that cleaning up as thoroughly as the U.S. government usually requires would not be possible.

Activists have challenged this argument, noting that many dirty bomb scenarios the DHS report and the pending EPA guide address would affect areas substantially smaller than those traditional Environmental Protection Agency standards have been applied to in the past. The normal EPA benchmarks have been used at hundreds of sites, including nuclear weapons facilities owned by the Energy Department, mining grounds stretching across hundreds of square miles and the urban areas affected by the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

A major concern of not only activists, but also some EPA and state government officials, is the precedent a federal document allowing for relaxed remediation standards in a wide range of radiological scenarios could set for routine cleanups. Private companies and government officials are already arguing against using the Superfund approach at several radiological sites, including the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in California and an area of in central Florida where EPA officials fear some 40,000 people living on former phosphate mines may be exposed to dangerous levels of radiation.

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White House Supports Rollback of Cleanup Standards for Nuclear Incidents

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 13:55:10 -0400

WASHINGTON – The White House has endorsed a plan to relax long-held standards for cleaning up radioactive material released by a nuclear power plant disaster or act of terrorism, a group of federal officials say in a new draft report.

As expected, the recently completed draft report on radiation remediation parts ways with standard U.S. practice and suggests guidelines under which as many as one in 23 people would be expected to develop cancer from long-term radiation exposure. The claim that the White House has agreed to abandon standard protocol in some instances is new.

One of the Obama administration’s first actions after taking office in January 2009 was to halt publication of a planned Environmental Protection Agency guide that contained similar rollbacks. A revised version of that document is now pending review at the White House Management and Budget Office.

The apparent shift in the administration’s position on the issue is alarming, said Daniel Hirsch, who as president of the nuclear watchdog group Committee to Bridge the Gap led a coalition of some 60 organizations against the stalled EPA guide.

“You begin to wonder whether the Obama administration is morphing itself in some aspects into the Bush administration,” said Hirsch, a nuclear policy lecturer at the University of California-Santa Cruz.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment, but a federal source told Global Security Newswire that the claim of its endorsement of relaxed cleanup guidelines is consistent with a deal the administration has made with various federal agencies on that issue. The source spoke on condition of anonymity due to not being authorized to discuss the matter.

A ‘New Normal’

Pursuant to guidelines established by the EPA Superfund program during the 1980s, cleanups are usually designed so that no more than one in 10,000 people would be expected to develop cancer in a worst-case scenario involving long-term exposure to radioactive contaminants. A Homeland Security Department document published in 2008 suggested that a loosely-defined concept called “optimization” should replace the EPA guidelines for decontamination after a terrorist attack.

The White House now supports this “optimization” approach, for both terrorist attacks and nuclear power plant accidents, the draft report says. Its authors are accepting comments on the document through April 4.

Homeland Security officials initially sought to define optimization by including relaxed radiation dose guidelines similar to what the new draft report is now recommending in their 2008 guide. They dropped this idea after encountering strong opposition from EPA and state government officials, along with nuclear and public health watchdog groups. Though it was apparent the Superfund approach was deemed too strict, the document ultimately included no numerical benchmarks, leaving it unclear what would be expected of those assigned to mop up after a nuclear or radiological attack.

In order to address this deficiency, the department in 2010 hired the private National Council on Radiation Protection to organize a panel consisting largely of federal officials to prepare a report that would pick up where their own document left off. Nearly complete, that document now supports essentially the same recommendation that DHS officials were unable to get approved through the conventional public policy process: that a radiation dose to the human body of between 100 and 2,000 millirems per year be the target officials should aim for when deciding on cleanup actions.

In layman’s terms, an annual dose of 2,000 millirems over a 30-year period would likely result in one in 23 people developing cancer, based on estimates from the private International Council on Radiation Protection, from which the new NCRP report draws much of its recommendations. Approximately one in 466 people would be expected to develop cancer from an annual dose of 100 millirems over the same time period – about 20 times more than what the government has typically accepted in a worst-case scenario.

The NCRP report says the relaxation of cleanup standards is necessitated by events such as the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown in Japan. It says that disaster contaminated an area the size of Connecticut and, the report claims, demonstrated that remediation as thorough as what the U.S. government usually requires would not be possible. Instead, it suggests aiming for the lower end of the 100 to 2,000 millirem per year range when possible and says that further dose reductions should continue after reaching the lower benchmark.

“Thus, the design of the reference levels is meant only to aid in the optimization process but must not be construed as de facto cleanup criteria by any means,” the report says. “The specific situation and values of the levels will be established upon full consultation and agreement with stakeholders.”

At the same time, however, the report says the more stringent EPA guidelines – which have been used to clean hundreds of sites, including those affected by nuclear weapons operations and the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington -- are not appropriate.

Rather than using conventional health standards for determining if an area is safe to be permanently returned to its previous use, the NCRP report advices embracing a “new normal” in the years following an incident involving radioactive materials.

According to the draft report, “one must realize that there are other important factors besides human health that should be considered in the decision-making process.” It says “public financial burdens, restoring key infrastructures, and resuming normal commercial activities, as well as balancing the roles and interests of affected stakeholders” are also important factors.

The report acknowledges that the EPA Superfund process already accounts for factors such as cost, state government approval and community acceptance when making cleanup decisions. However, it calls the health risk factors that the agency employs “overly conservative.”

The less stringent optimization approach is superior because it “is designed to address far broader and more complex issues involving remediation of a widely contaminated area, with its predominant objective to achieve a timely restoration and recovery of the affected communities from a highly perturbed state, such as in a heavily populated metropolitan area where terrorist attacks are deemed likely to occur,” the report says.

Existing regulations on disposal of radioactive waste will also not be suitable for such circumstances, the report says. The need to dispose of large quantities of waste will necessitate disposal not only at special sites designed for radioactivity, but also at landfills operating under looser regulations, including ordinary municipal dumps, according to the report. Similar rollbacks of radioactive waste disposal requirements were floated during the Bush years, but ultimately stalled amid controversy and concerns about potential groundwater contamination.

Question of Size

The draft report suggests the more relaxed guidelines would be applicable for incidents including involving nuclear power plants; the detonation of a radiological “dirty bomb” that would use conventional explosives to disperse radioactive material over a relatively small area; and improvised nuclear devices, which might be capable of a level of destruction closer to that of a conventional atomic bomb.

The document acknowledges that the impact of some dirty bombs might be limited – in some cases affecting an area no larger than a single building or city block. In those situations, conventional cleanup standards could be “useful benchmarks,” it says. Authors cited a 2002 study by the Federation of American Scientists showing great variation in the size of potential dirty bomb sites but do not acknowledge that one of the larger hypothetically affected areas – covering about 386 square miles – is still nearly four times smaller than some Superfund sites, however.

Hirsch argued that the report’s approach to remediation is backward. If anything, the default assumption should be that conventional EPA health standards are always used for long-term cleanup projects, with a possible exception for extraordinary cases where using the stricter standards might be impossible, or create more harm than good, he said. Deciding in advance that the usual standards will not be applicable to most dirty bomb situations, along with all improvised nuclear device and power plant incidents, he said, would open the door to undue public health risks.

It is hypothetically possible that some nuclear incidents could be so devastating that cleanup to conventional standards would not be possible and that forbidding the public from ever returning to the affected area because of elevated radiation levels might not be practical, Hirsch conceded. However, this would be the case in only a minority of situations and does not justify relaxing standards in advance of such an event, he said.

“It’s not entirely intellectually stupid to assert that we [could] contaminate such a large area that we can’t realistically abandon it forever,” Hirsch said. “But what they do is take an argument that in a very small subset of cases has some merit and they spread it to a universe in which it doesn’t.”

S.Y. Chen, a senior engineer at the Argonne National Laboratory who served as chairman of the panel that drafted the report, declined to comment. The panel includes officials working under the Energy Department, Homeland Security Department and various state agencies, most of which had expressed support for the controversial optimization approach in the past.

Preparation vs. Expectation

The issue of cleanup guidelines is one of several the federal government is grappling with in response to incidents such as Fukushima and the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Activists have raised concerns that, at the same time federal officials are suggesting a nuclear incident would likely be so bad that it would require the relaxation of remediation standards, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has opted against certain measures meant to reduce the likelihood of such an event or limit the amount of radiation released should one occur.

In response to the disaster in Japan, the commission has required additional backup power for some U.S. nuclear power plant components and earlier this year ordered that Fukushima-style reactors improve vents intended to relieve pressure inside a reactor’s containment vessel and prevent rupture. On Tuesday, though, the commission opted to delay by four years making a final decision as to whether to require that the vents be equipped with radiation filters that would limit the amount of dangerous particles released into the environment.

Activists have also lobbied for years to require the expedited transfer of spent fuel rods to dry cask storage in the interest of limiting the chance of spent fuel pool fires, but the commission has yet to issue such a requirement. It has also refused to require that reactors be protected from airplane attacks and has been criticized by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office for not doing enough to secure radioactive materials at U.S. hospitals that could be used to make a dirty bomb.

“If [a nuclear incident] is going to be so bad that you can’t clean up to [conventional standards] but have to have a ‘new normal,’ then you need to do everything you can to prevent that from happening,” Hirsch said. “I would think if you read this [report] you would say shut down every nuclear plant in the country and lock up and dispose of all radioactive materials that could be stolen” and used to build a dirty bomb.

A major concern of not only activists, but also some EPA and state government officials, is the precedent a federal document endorsing relaxed cleanup standards for a wide range of radiological incidents could have for more routine cleanups, including that of former nuclear weapons sites and other facilities owned by the Energy Department and private companies. Industry and government officials are already arguing against the use of the Superfund approach at several sites, including the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in California and an area in central Florida where EPA officials fear some 40,000 people living on former phosphate mines may be exposed to dangerous radiation levels.

For these reasons, activists have raised concerns about the makeup of the NCRP panel that the Homeland Security Department hired to draft the new report. While the document discusses the Superfund approach extensively, no experts from the EPA cleanup office that works on the program directly were included on the panel. Instead, representatives of the agency’s radiation and emergency management offices – which have routinely argued against the Superfund approach -- were selected to participate as consultants and advisors. GSN has submitted numerous requestsunder the Freedom of Information Act inquiring about the nature of these officials’ involvement, but all have been denied by EPA and NCRP officials.

Remarks one EPA emergency management official made recently might shed some light on how some staff in that office view Superfund’s applicability to nuclear disasters, however.

Speaking at a March 12 symposium hosted by the Defense Strategies Institute, Paul Kudarauskas, of the EPA Consequence Management Advisory Team, said events like Fukushima would cause a “fundamental shift” to cleanup.

U.S. residents are used to having “cleanup to perfection,” but will have to abandon their “not in my backyard” mentality in such cases, Kudarauskas said. “People are going to have to put their big boy pants on and suck it up.”

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NRC: New Nuclear Plant Safety Measures Not Premature But Final Decision Pending

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 16:09:44 -0400

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has rejected the notion that it is not ready to decide whether aging atomic power plants need to make upgrades intended to limit radiation releases during a major crisis, but its ultimate action on the matter is not yet clear.

In the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant meltdowns in Japan, the commission has identified a host of potential ways to improve the security and safety of U.S. reactors. It has divided those potential measures into tiers, identifying some as requiring action sooner and others further down the road.

Some Democrats and watchdog groups have suggested that the agency has not moved quickly enough to act on potential improvements. In a Friday letter, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) noted that today it two year anniversary of the onset of the Japanese crisis and that NRC staff issued a report on post-Fukushima recommendations in July 2011. Boxer asked commission Chairwoman Allison Macfarlane for provide a status update in advance of a hearing next month.

Republicans lawmakers have suggested, however, that the commission should not address its post-Fukushima response in a piecemeal fashion. Nor should it issue any major new requirements before conducting a thorough comparison of the Japanese and U.S. regulatory systems and devising a comprehensive plan for how to fill any potential gaps that could exacerbate a terrorist attack or natural disaster affecting a nuclear reactor.

During a recent hearing, Representative Edward Whitfield (R-Ky.) suggested that various safety and security issues that have arisen since the Fukushima incident “seem so interdependent." He questioned why the commission appeared to be making efforts to address them “independently and separate” from one another.

Specifically, Whitfield and other House Republicans have suggested that the commission should not require aging nuclear plants to install filtered vents until it completes the regulatory comparison and post-Fukushima reactor safety plan. Agency staff, along with many Democrats and watchdog groups, say filtered vents would limit radiation releases in the event of a terrorist attack or natural disaster. Should a facility lose power, vents relieve pressure building inside a heating reactor core while filters would reduce the amount of radiation that passes through the vents.

In response to Whitfield’s concerns, all five presidentially appointed commissioners said they were taking a comprehensive look at how requiring filtered vents and other possible post-Fukushima actions could impact one another, but suggested it would not be prudent to delay certain actions deemed to be the most pressing.

Republican Commissioner Kristine Svinicki suggested that if the agency did not dispose of some issues, it would create a state of perpetual uncertainty for the industry.

“We’re trying to strike a balance,” Svinicki said during the Feb. 28 hearing. “We’re attempting to integrate as well as we can.”

Commissioner William Ostendorff, also a Republican, said at the meeting that there “has been significant consideration of interlapping” between all issues the commission has addressed recently, suggesting that it was not making individual regulatory decisions in a vacuum.

In a recent letter to House Republicans, the commission also noted that it has already “conducted a regulatory comparison of the station blackout regulations that existed in Japan at the time of the” Fukushima incident and that it “continues to evaluate the various technical and regulatory factors in Japan that contributed to the accident.”

The commission in the letter also defended its staff’s estimates on the cost to install filtered vents.

While NRC staff projected about $16 million per plant, industry officials put the figure closer to $45 million. They argue that NRC evaluators are only accounting for the cost of filter components purchased from outside vendors and are not including the expense of additional modifications operators might have to make on-site to make the filters viable.

The commission’s letter, though, says the expense estimates “were intended to cover not only the equipment costs, but also the site specific engineering and plant modification costs.” It adds that the “estimate used in the NRC’s staff’s assessment was based upon discussions with vendors, regulators, and plant operators who have had experience with the installation of filtering systems at foreign nuclear power plants.”

Republicans have asserted that the agency should only pursue post-Fukushima regulatory actions if the anticipated safety and security gains outweigh the costs of compliance. In their letter, the commissioners responded by noting that they considered but took no action on several post-Fukushima requirements.

“Examples of items considered but not acted upon or implemented include the immediate shutdown of operating plants, the installation of various systems, structures, and components (beyond ongoing actions), the staging of robots to provide access to contaminated areas, adding multiple and diverse instruments to measure parameters such as spent fuel pool level and requiring all plants to install dedicated bunkers with independent power supplies and coolant systems,” the commissioners said in the Feb. 15 letter.

It remains unclear, however, whether the commissioners will decide to go forward with a filtered vent requirement. Spokesman Scott Burnell told Global Security Newswire that the agency continues to deliberate on its course of action.

In their letter to House Republicans, the commissioners suggested that some already-established NRC requirements could help mitigate radioactive releases from a terrorist attack or Fukushima-style event.

“The addition of backup equipment to supplement current safety systems and development of mitigating strategies, such as those implemented in the U.S. following Sept. 11, 2001, to address such external hazards and plant conditions might have supported the efforts of plant operators to mitigate the event at Fukushima Daiichi,” the commissioners said. “These measures would provide additional protection for the existing barriers; including the reactor fuel, coolant systems, and containments.”

At least one NRC panel member, Svinicki, has previously expressed opposition to a filtered vent requirement. She argued last year that existing protective measures should prevent them from being necessary.

In January, the commission rejected a watchdog group’s legal bid to have it require filtered vents without deciding whether to issue a similar mandate on its own terms.

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Energy Officials Are Divided Over Nuclear Agency's Future

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 13:31:09 -0500

Deputy Energy Secretary Daniel Poneman told lawmakers on Thursday that he and other top DOE officials reject a suggestion from the department’s top security official that it might be prudent to dissolve the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration in the wake of last year’s highly publicized break-in at the Y-12 nuclear weapons facility.

As reported by Global Security Newswire, Health, Safety and Security Office chief Glenn Podonsky last week said he believed the nuclear arms complex operated better when it was directly under the Energy Department’s defense program, prior to NNSA formation in 2000.

Members of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee questioned Poneman about news reports of Podonsky’s remarks during a hearing on nuclear security.

“This is a pretty amazing charge from somebody that you praise and trust and who might not have line authority but has been there a long time [and] knows a lot of stuff,” Tennessee Rep. Jim Cooper, the panel’s top Democrat, told Poneman. “You all rely on his viewpoint a lot and he’s wondering whether NNSA should even have jurisdiction” over security of the nuclear weapons complex.

Poneman said DOE leaders do not share Podonsky’s view.

“We clearly believe that the structure of having NNSA as the semiautonomous part of the department is the right structure,” Poneman said. “We are fully on board with that and there’s no question about that.”

Cooper suggested Poneman “forget politics for a second” and consider Podonsky’s viewpoint “because right now the department doesn’t have a lot of credibility on the security issue.” He described Podonsky as “a guy who’s been a loyal public servant for 29 years and is trying to express a viewpoint that . . . might not be officially supported by the top brass but” that comes from “a respected individual.”

Subcommittee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., challenged Podonsky’s view, however, by noting that “a string of recurring security problems” had been reported in the weapons complex prior to the NNSA creation. He suggested that the department should consider firing Podonsky and other federal officials due to security issues that have persisted in recent years. Those problems were highlighted when an 82-year-old nun and two other peace activists in July infiltrated a high-protection sector of Y-12 that holds weapon-grade uranium.

“We want to know specifically that you’re willing to terminate people that aren’t doing their job,” Rogers told Poneman. “It sounds to me like this chief security officer might be one of the folks that ought to be on your list to look at.”

Panel members expressed particular interest in the department’s ability to fire employees due to security breaches. Representative Michael Turner (R-Ohio), chastised Poneman for characterizing his question on whether federal officials could be fired in such a circumstance as a “technical legal question” that he was reluctant to answer.

“If you don’t have clarity on this then I think that this committee needs to put something in our next piece of legislation that absolutely makes it clear that if due to the performance of individuals the security system fails it would be an offense resulting in termination,” Turner said.

Rogers told GSN that the NNSA administrator, the associate administrator for defense nuclear security and the head of the HSS office at the Energy Department at the time of the Y-12 incident all “ought to be fired.” However, Thomas D’Agostino has since retired as NNSA chief and Doug Fremont was reassigned from his position of associate administrator for the defense nuclear security as a result of incident. That leaves Podonsky, the HSS chief, as the only one of those three who still holds the position that they did at the time of the incident.

Rogers acknowledged that committee Republicans are “still trying to figure out who in the food chain had the ultimate responsibility” for the Y-12 incident. He said one problem was that the site's security contractor at the time “was notifying lower level management” of defense deficiencies but that the information “wasn’t going up the food chain.”

He said security contractors should perhaps be required to notify all levels of management of such problems.

Armed Services Committee Republicans, however, backed legislation last year that would have significantly limited the ability of Podonsky and other Energy Department officials to influence safety and security policy across the weapons complex. In one change, the legislation would have removed the Energy Department’s authority “to make policy, prescribe regulations and conduct oversight of health, safety and security in the nuclear security enterprise” and would have shifted those authorities to NNSA officials.

Democrats, labor unions and some powerful GOP lawmakers rallied against the legislation, saying the Y-12 break-in showed that, if anything, more DOE oversight was needed.

While Cooper appeared to defend Podonsky, he suggested that perhaps Poneman should lose his job over the Y-12 incident.

“Why do you deserve the chance to keep working at the problem?” Cooper asked the deputy Energy secretary.

For his part, Poneman cited a series of actions the government has taken since the break-in.

“The top three security officials at the headquarters responsible for Y-12 at that time were removed from their positions and the two top federal officials at the site were removed from their positions,” Poneman said. “The contractor that actually had the boots on ground … was terminated full out” and “the top two officials at the management and operations facility … were also retired and taken out of the picture.”

He added: “Everybody in that chain of command from the individual responders to the senior officials responsible for security specifically at that site were removed.”

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EPA withholds information on dirty bomb report

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 16:33:27 -0500

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is declining to release information on a controversial federal report that could lead people living near the site of a radiological “dirty bomb” attack to face greater cancer risks than what the agency would normally allow.

The information – which includes presentations two EPA staffers made to the panel of experts that is drafting the new report – could reveal whether the officials are speaking out against their own agency’s long-held health standards, observers say. The report is expected to suggest guidelines under which as many as one in 23 people would be expected to develop cancer from long-term radiation exposure, a sharp contrast to the EPA standard of one in 10,000 in a worst-case scenario.

The panel drafting the document was organized by the private National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements with public funds provided by the Homeland Security Department. Nonetheless, the Environmental Protection Agency has rejected multiple Freedom of Information Act requests for access to the presentations.

Observers suggest withholding the information violates the spirit of an executive order President Obama signed regarding government transparency early in his first term. The order instructed executive agencies to err on the side of openness, even in cases where they could make legal arguments against disclosure.

Mark Caramanica, attorney and freedom of information director for the Reporter’s Committee, a group dedicated to free press and open government, said it was particularly noteworthy that the NCRP panel is comprised largely of federal officials and that its forthcoming report is meant to expand upon a 2008 DHS guide for cleaning up after a dirty bomb incident.

“These are people that are doing the same types of analysis and policy work that they would be doing in their regular jobs, only now it’s in the guise of this independent contracting outfit,” Caramanica said. “So it seems to me they’re essentially still performing their government functions and the government shouldn’t be outsourcing it and then claiming that FOIA doesn’t apply.”

Expected sometime this year, the report is to pick up where the DHS document – often called a “protective action guide” – left off. The DHS guide introduced a loosely defined cleanup approached called “optimization,” which the document says involves weighing factors such as human health and public welfare against cost and economic impact. However, unlike the EPA Superfund approach that has been used at hundreds of contaminated sites during the last 30 years, optimization includes no specific cleanup targets, making it unclear how it would work in a real-world scenario.

Homeland Security in 2010 began providing funds so that the NCRP panel could draft a report that would provide more detail on how optimization would work. Last year, the panel’s chairman told Global Security Newswire that the report is likely to suggest that a radiation dose to the human body of between 100 and 2,000 millirems per year is the target officials should keep in mind when deciding how to clean up after a “dirty bomb,” a crude weapon that would use conventional explosives to disperse radioactive contamination.

Roughly one in 23 people would be expected to develop cancer after receiving a 2,000 millirem dose of radiation annually for 30 years, based on estimates from the International Commission on Radiological Protection, a nongovernmental organization whose work is expected to help form the basis for the report’s recommendations. Approximately one in 466 people would likely develop cancer from an annual dose of 100 millirems over the same time period, according to calculations GSN performed using ICRP projections.

Remediation of toxic U.S. properties is normally designed so one out of 10,000 people exposed to a site for 30 years would be expected to develop cancer in a worst-case scenario, based on guidelines established in the 1980s by the Superfund program. One in 1 million people would likely develop cancer in the best possible situation.

One of the two EPA officials involved with the forthcoming report is Jonathan Edwards, director of the EPA radiation protection division. On Nov. 3, 2010, Edwards made a presentation to the NCRP panel on EPA emergency response procedures and the Superfund cleanup process during a meeting in Bethesda, Md. This prompted concern from nuclear watchdog groups, since Edwards is not involved with that program but instead heads a division that had proposed adopting optimization – rather than more stringent Superfund protocol – in the agency’s own guidance for cleaning up after radiation incidents.

The 2008 attempt to adopt optimization in EPA guidelines drew opposition from some agency staff and state government officials and prompted a coalition of more than 60 groups to sign onto a letter condemning the plan. The Obama administration froze action on the effort upon taking office in 2009, and a revised version of the EPA guide is now pending review at the White House Management and Budget Office.

Last year, GSN submitted a FOIA request for a copy of Edwards’ presentation. The request also sought a copy of a presentation that John Cardarelli, of the EPA emergency management office, made to the NCRP panel on June 12, 2012, also in Bethesda.

Cardarelli gave a presentation on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis in Japan. His presentation also created concern among watchdog groups, since he had previously been involved in development of a website that suggested the Japanese could use optimization, rather than Superfund, to clean up after the power plant meltdown. Cardarelli has been one of numerous officials from outside Japan who have offered Tokyo advice on how to clean up after the disaster; activists fear his statements could set a precedent affecting domestic U.S. policy.

Edwards deputy Alan Perrin denied the FOIA request in a Sept. 14 letter, asserting the EPA employees were not acting in their official capacity when they made their presentations to the federally funded panel.

“While EPA employees may participate in NCRP programs, as technical consultants and advisers in the case of this panel, they contribute their services voluntarily in support of council objectives; they do not participate as EPA representatives,” Perrin wrote.

Kevin Miller, assistant general counsel in the EPA General Law Office, upheld GSN’s appeal of the agency’s decision on Oct. 23.

The newswire then submitted another FOIA request, seeking records that would indicate whether Edwards and Cardarelli had been granted unpaid leave to give their presentations during regular business hours. Perrin denied this request in a Dec. 4 letter, saying that releasing such information “would be an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

Late last month, NCRP President John Boice also declined to release the presentations. Global Security Newswire has since submitted a new FOIA request, this time seeking any EPA records or e-mails pertaining to the two officials’ involvement with the NCRP panel.

Daniel Hirsch, who as president of the watchdog group Committee to Bridge the Gap led the 2008 opposition to including optimization in EPA guidelines, said the refusal to release the presentations is alarming.

“It sounds outrageous – you essentially have an effort to undermine radiation protection standards in which EPA personnel are participating and then EPA is violating the Freedom of Information Act to keep that conduct form being disclosed,” Hirsch said. “It just sounds like government out of control.”

Hirsch and other critics fear the forthcoming report could set a precedent for a wide range of environmental remediation projects, ranging from cleanup of a dirty bomb site to work at former nuclear weapons facilities and industrial sites throughout the United States.

Caramanica, the attorney with the Reporter’s Committee, suggested it was also significant that DHS officials had initially sought to include a radiation dose range similar to the one the NCRP report is expected to recommend in its 2008 guide but that they were ultimately unable to do so due to opposition from other federal and state agencies.

“They initially did this in-house and came up with all these policy considerations and guidelines and went forward with producing it and it didn’t go anywhere,” Caramanica noted. “Now they decide to consult with an outside contractor, staff it with a bunch of federal employees, go through the same exact process and now tell you that none of the records are accessible under FOIA.”

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Bills would impose tougher chemical security rules

Douglas P. Guarino, Global Security Newswire — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 17:00:00 -0500

Senator Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., has introduced a pair of bills that would impose tougher security requirements on chemical and water facilities that use hazardous substances.

One of the two measures that Lautenberg introduced on Wednesday would impose additional requirements on industry through the Homeland Security Department’s 6-year-old Chemical Facility Antiterrorism Standards. The other would authorize the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate security at water facilities that use dangerous chemicals – an area that is exempt from Homeland Security’s CFATS program.

The two bills appear aimed at addressing the concerns of some Democrats – along with labor and environmental groups – that the CFATS program in its current form does not sufficiently shield industrial facilities from terrorist attacks that could release lethal materials into the surrounding area. In a press release, Lautenberg cited a report environmental groups released on Tuesday suggesting that 12,440 facilities throughout the country could harm people if damaged during a terrorist attack. The report cites EPA data on wastewater treatment plants, refineries and other facilities that use hazardous chemicals.

“We need to pass my legislation to require facilities to thoroughly review risk and help us move toward more secure plants and safer communities,” said Lautenberg, a senior Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. “Hundreds of plants have already switched to safer and more secure chemicals and processes, and this common-sense legislation would build on these achievements and increase safety nationwide.”

Lautenberg’s legislation would require managers of facilities using dangerous chemicals to evaluate whether they could reduce the consequences of an attack by switching to safer chemicals or processes. If reducing risk in this manner is determined feasible, any plant designated as “high risk” by the government would be required to make such a switch.

Industry organizations have long said requiring such a move to so-called “inherently safer technologies” would be too onerous. The requirements of the existing CFATS program are enough to ensure security measures are both sufficient and efficient, they say.

Labor and environmental groups, along with some Democrats, argue that the existing CFATS law lacks teeth by failing to authorize Homeland Security to require any specific security measures. The mandate that facilities develop site security plans to be evaluated by the government is not enough, they argue.

In addition, the CFATS program has been under fire from both sides of the aisle for the slow pace at which it has approved site security plans since its inception in 2007, along with a litany of management problems that were revealed in an internal memo leaked to the press early last year.

In September, the new leaders of the DHS program testified that they had completed 70 of 95 “action items” the memo identified as necessary to fix the management problems. More recently, a major industry group this month rolled out a plan it says will help the government increase the pace at which it can approve site security plans.

In consultation with DHS officials, the American Chemistry Council unveiled a boilerplatetemplate that its member facilities could use to devise so-called alternate security programs under the CFATS regime. Creating alternative security programs is more efficient then submitting a conventional site security plan, which ACC officials describe as “a cumbersome document containing a series of yes/no questions regarding measures to minimize the risk of a terrorist attack or other security threat.” They argue that an alternative security plan is more clear than the question and answer format.

The Society of Chemical Manufacturers and Affiliates, another industry group, is also developing an alternative security program template for its members, vice president of government affairs Bill Allmond told Global Security Newswire on Thursday.

Rick Hind, legislative director for Greenpeace, argued that the joint efforts to create alternative security programs was “just another sign” that Homeland Security is anxious to “appease the industry in the hope of greater cooperation because there is very little they can really make them do.” Hind, along with other environmental and labor activists, has been lobbying the Environmental Protection Agency to create chemical security requirements under the Clean Air Act that go beyond DHS authority.

Congressional Republicans are strongly opposed to EPA involvement in the matter, and have vowed to prevent the agency from creating such requirements. Republican-backed efforts to pass chemical security legislation in recent years have favored keeping the relevant authorities within the Homeland Security Department.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee is in the “planning stages” on potential legislation that would continue CFATS authority at the Homeland Security Department, Charlotte Baker, spokeswoman for the panel’s Republican leadership, told GSN. The current authorization for the program expires in March.

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