Debating Nuclear Risk at Landfills

For at least a decade, California has allowed mildly radioactive waste from old nuclear sites to go to recycling plants and city dumps not licensed to handle radioactive material of any type.

Yet neither landfill owners nor their employees, nearby residents nor elected officials, were ever notified of the state’s policy, details of which are only now becoming public after a lawsuit and questions from concerned state lawmakers.

Anti-nuclear activists, environmental groups and others are demanding to know more about where the state has allowed the waste -- mostly soil, concrete and metal with residual traces of radiation -- to be disposed of.

But the California Department of Health Services contends that it did not keep detailed records on slightly radioactive trash because officials never considered it contaminated enough to pose a health hazard.

“There is a lot of public fear and concern about anything radioactive; it’s a polarizing issue,” said the deputy director of the Health Services Department, Kevin Reilly. But the slightly radioactive trash, he said, “does not pose a significant health risk. And it is not just California’s opinion; it is a near-universal opinion within the scientific community.

“When you get down to low levels, you don’t have any scientific evidence to suggest they are a threat, especially when you take into account the ability of the human body to repair itself,” he added.

Experts disagree on whether exposure to the material -- mostly debris from old buildings where radioactive experiments took place -- is a serious health risk. Under current state standards, it can be the equivalent of 2 1/2 chest X-rays a year.

But standards were much looser in previous years, and state officials concede that waste from some older nuclear sites might have been as much as 20 times as radioactive as the maximum the state would consider safe today.

The danger is greatest for those who live or work near the waste and are more likely than others to be exposed to it repeatedly.

And even though they insist that the waste is harmless, state attorneys refuse to release records on its likely sources -- the more than 1,400 former nuclear sites that the state has released from oversight in the last 15 years -- because of post-Sept. 11 concerns that terrorists might be trying to collect radioactive materials for a “dirty bomb.”

State legislators and environmental groups alarmed by the dumping had hoped to examine the inventory of sites to determine the danger for themselves.

They criticized the state’s decision to keep the information private, saying it raises troubling questions about the nature of the radioactive junk that might have been shipped from the sites. The state claimed to have decommissioned the sites only after they were cleaned up to safe levels.

“It’s so safe we can sprinkle it on your children’s cereal, but we can’t tell you about it because Osama bin Laden might want to use it to make a bomb to blow up Los Angeles? There’s a bit of a disconnect there,” said Daniel Hirsch of the anti-nuclear Committee to Bridge the Gap. He noted that the old sites were supposedly cleaned up to safe levels before the state unconditionally released them from oversight.

Meanwhile, Gov. Gray Davis’ administration is moving forward with new guidelines to allow at least some dumping and recycling to continue. The new plans are needed because a judge ruled earlier this year that the first formal regulations California adopted to permit the practice last year, well after it was already underway, violated the state’s own laws.

The ruling concluded that California had not followed proper procedures -- by failing to consider stricter alternatives -- before enacting the new regulations.

The unregulated disposal practices went on as California sought unsuccessfully to establish a dump to receive low-level nuclear waste in Ward Valley in the Mojave Desert.

In the absence of the Ward Valley facility, the state did not prohibit the routine disposal of mildly radioactive waste. As a result, state officials acknowledge, mildly radioactive trash has ended up in municipal landfills and might even have been recycled.

For private companies and government agencies with stockpiles of radioactive junk, there was a substantial financial incentive to take advantage of the state’s policy and send at least some radioactive waste to local landfills.

It is far more expensive to ship radioactive trash to one of the nation’s few licensed nuclear repositories. High-level waste, such as spent fuel rods from nuclear power plants, is required by federal law to go to licensed nuclear waste landfills.

Earlier in his political career, Davis cited safety reasons for opposing the Ward Valley dump, which was to be a repository for most of California’s radioactive waste. So, environmentalists were perplexed this fall when, as governor, he vetoed legislation that would have banned dumping in ordinary landfills.

Davis’ veto reflected the concerns of nuclear energy and biotechnology firms, which would have had to spend millions more to dispose of radioactive waste at licensed nuclear dumps if the measure had become law.

State officials concede that some of the mildly radioactive trash probably would have gone to Ward Valley if that dump had been allowed to open. But they insist that most of what they are allowing to go to landfills or recyclers is so slightly contaminated that they never would have ordered it to go to a licensed nuclear facility.

Many nuclear scientists agree with state officials that the levels of radioactivity in the trash are insignificant compared with the radiation Americans are exposed to every day in other ways. They call the issue a classic example of the public’s lack of knowledge of radiation’s true health risks.

Exposure to radiation is commonly measured in units called millirems; average Americans are exposed to 360 millirems of radioactivity in a lifetime. The state’s current policy, they note, allows for release of radioactive trash only at levels of 25 millirems or lower. Exposure to 25 millirems is the equivalent of 2 1/2 chest X-rays a year.

By comparison, working in a granite-encrusted building such as the state Capitol, for example, can produce similar exposure to low levels of radiation, because the stone contains traces of uranium and thorium.

Likewise, a routine cross-country flight exposes passengers to small levels of radiation from cosmic rays, as does living in a high-altitude city such as Denver. Even sleeping next to another person can increase exposure, because humans emit tiny levels of radiation after eating foods such as bananas which contain potassium, they note.

“The issue is very much overblown,” said Alan Pasternak of the California Radioactive Materials Management Forum, an industry group. “Concerns about very small levels of radioactivity going to landfills need some government guidance. But if you want to limit all radioactivity, you had better start with cemeteries, because the dead have detectable levels of radiation.”

Anti-nuclear activists, some of them scientists who have worked in the nuclear industry, disagree. They say all radioactive waste should go to licensed nuclear dumps. Though 2 1/2 X-rays may not sound like much, they say some federal studies have determined that repeated exposure to 25 millirems can lead to death from cancer in one out of every 1,000 people.

They contend that it is difficult, if not impossible, for the state to accurately determine the level of radioactivity of the contaminated junk in question, given its current oversight policies, and they fear that radioactive material that is hotter than the permitted level is going into local dumps.

Furthermore, they point out that what scientists considered safe exposures to radiation two decades ago are no longer considered safe, and that the radioactive material, even if it is considered harmless today, could be deemed harmful in the future.

Fifteen years ago, for example, California unconditionally released old nuclear sites from regulation at radiation levels as high as 500 millirems -- 20 times as high as what it currently considers safe.

“That’s the important point, because the history of radiation regulation is that these permissible levels have been getting lower and lower,” said Hirsch of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, who also was director of the Adlai Stevenson Program on Nuclear Policy at UC Santa Cruz.

California, state officials argue, has simply been following safety standards set by the federal government and is not alone among states in allowing slightly radioactive trash to go to landfills not licensed to handle nuclear waste. Most of the state-licensed sites in question, they note, were small research labs that generated little if any truly hazardous radioactive waste.

However, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal panel the state cites as its model for regulation, has been struggling with the issue of mildly radioactive material for years.

A plan it unveiled to deregulate waste that was deemed “below regulatory concern” was struck down by Congress a decade ago amid public fears of recycled radioactive forks and hip replacements. Moreover, another arm of the federal government, the Environmental Protection Agency, recommends more restrictive policies than the NRC.

Revelations that California has allowed the dumping of radioactive waste at local landfills surfaced two years ago.

That was when officials confirmed in writing to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and state Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) that shipments of slightly radioactive material from the former Santa Susana Field Laboratory, a rocket-testing ground between the Simi and San Fernando valleys, had been sent to the Sunshine Canyon Landfill in Los Angeles County.

Santa Susana, the site of numerous rocket experiments after Word War II, had a partial meltdown of uranium fuel rods in 1959. According to officials, waste from Santa Susana also was sent to the Bradley Landfill in Sun Valley and to a metal recycler on Terminal Island.

Government health officials and representatives from Boeing’s Rocketdyne division, the site’s owner, tried to assure the public that the trash was safe. But local residents wonder why no one was notified.

“I don’t believe them,” said Kim Thompson, a member of Los Angeles’ Environmental Affairs Commission who lives near Sunshine Canyon. “Some people say everything has some level of radioactivity in it, but I have to believe that what came from Rocketdyne is worse.”

State officials have so far refused to release a full accounting of how much of the radioactive waste has been dumped around the state and where it came from. They told legislators earlier this year that such a list would take four years to compile. More recently, officials have indicated that detailed dumping data do not exist.

The financial stakes behind the dumping issue are huge.

A study by the National Academy of Sciences found that, in the next three decades, decommissioning of old nuclear sites around the country will generate 740,000 metric tons of slightly radioactive metal and as much as 12 million tons of concrete.

If that material is sent to licensed nuclear dumps, the study concluded, the cost could reach $11.7 billion. If it is placed in ordinary landfills, it could cost as little as $300 million -- or maybe nothing if the price could be offset by revenue from recycling.

California’s only two working nuclear power plants -- Diablo Canyon in Central California and San Onofre near San Clemente -- are to be decommissioned in the next three decades.

Davis followed his veto of the legislation by state Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles) with a partial moratorium on dumping that prevents disposal of radioactive waste at most landfills.

However, it does not prevent recycling or dumping of slightly radioactive dirt at farms or anywhere else. Also, it still allows dumping at more than 20 sites, including the Chiquita Canyon Landfill in Los Angeles County and the Simi Valley Landfill in Ventura County.

Romero, still upset over the veto, is preparing legislation for next year to restrict disposal of all radioactive waste. Frustrated by the state’s actions, she and other lawmakers are also debating whether to move the state office responsible for the dumping policy out of the Department of Health Services.

“I am most disappointed with this department,” she said.