Technical Basis for EPAʼs Proposed Regulation on the Cleanup of Sites Contaminated with Radioactivity

Abstract

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is proposing a regulation for the protection of the public from radioactive contamination at sites that are to be cleaned up and released for public use. The rule will apply to sites under the control of Federal agencies, and will impose limits on radiation doses to individuals living or working on a site following cleanup; it will thereby provide site owners and managers with uniform, consistent cleanup criteria for planning and carrying out remediation. This paper presents an overview of EPA's approach to assessing some of the beneficial and adverse effects associated with various possible values for the annual dose limit. In particular, it discusses the method developed to determine how the choice of cleanup criterion affects (1) the time-integrated potential numbers of non-fatal and fatal radiogenic cancers averted among future populations, (2) the occurrence of radiogenic cancers among remediation workers and the public caused by the cleanup process itself, and (3) the volumes of contaminated soil that may require remediation. The analytic methods described here were used to provide input data and assumptions for the Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) that supports the proposed regulation; the RIA also considered non-radiological benefits and costs (i.e., public health, economic, and ecological) of the standards.

Sites in the United States Contaminated with Radioactivity

“…It is based largely on an early draft EPA report# on U.S. contaminated sites and subsequent EPA analyses (US. EPA 1994;Wolbarst et al 1996), and on additional and more current information from databases, technical reports, and literature prepared by DOD, DOE, EPA, NRC, and their contractors. Information was obtained also from the Departments of Agriculture (USDA), Commerce (DOC), Health and Human Services (DHHS), Interior (DOI), and Veterans Affairs (DVA), and from the General Services Administration (GSA), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).…”

“…** EPA, NRC, DOE and DOD staff have previously jointly developed afunctional categorization scheme to place any site into one of 18 categories (US. EPA 1993bWolbarst et al 1996). The scheme helps identify commonalities among sites, and was used by EPA to develop representative 'reference' sites for assessing the potential risks posed by such sites and determining the costeffectiveness of various cleanup levels for them (U.S. EPA 1994; Wolbarst et al 1996Wolbarst et al , 1998.…”

Military use of depleted uranium: assessment of prolonged population exposure

“…RESRAD 5.91 [14] code is used, all parameters default except for the ones given in Table 2. Estimates of dose to individuals and population for risk in contaminated sites have been performed by EPA employing primarily the code RESRAD (for related work see [15,16]). …”

Risk assessment and optimization (ALARA) analysis for the environmental remediation of Brookhaven National Laboratory`s hazardous waste management facility

“…These methods &o may be of value for risk assessors and decision-makers at the 5,000 estimated sites in the United States that are contaminated with radioactive materials. Some 250 of them belong to Federal agencies, primarily DOE and the Department of Defense (DOD) (Wolbarst 1996).…”