Committee to Bridge the Gap
Nuclear Information and Resource Service
for
immediate
release
31 January 2006
DEPT. of HOMELAND SECURITY
ISSUES GROSSLY LAX DIRTY BOMB CLEANUP GUIDANCE
"A Nuclear Katrina in the Making"
The Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) today issued new guidelines for responding to a radiological
"dirty" bomb that would permit doses to the public equivalent to tens
of thousands of chest X-rays without requiring intervention and cleanup. The
federal government estimates radiation doses that large would produce cancer or
leukemia in a quarter of those exposed. (This is on top of the number of
cancers that would occur in the absence of the extra radiation exposure.)
Watchdog groups accused DHS -- already under attack
for its ineffective response to Hurricane Katrina -- of continuing its
inadequate response to disasters. "Katrina revealed DHS doing
nothing while thousands of people were left stranded and at risk," said
Daniel Hirsch, President of the Los Angeles-based Committee to Bridge the Gap,
which monitors governmental radiation policy. "Now
DHS is proposing a nuclear Katrina -- a formal policy of allowing the public to
be exposed to massive radiation doses from a dirty bomb while the government
does nothing to protect them."
The DHS guidance was published today in the Federal
Register. Although public comment will be permitted, the guidance is
immediately effective. Leaked versions of the draft guidance previously
provoked a storm of controversy, with approximately a hundred organizations
attacking it as dangerously lax, but the final version is essentially
unchanged.
The
guidance permits radioactive contamination from a terrorist dirty bomb to
remain in place, with no long-term cleanup measures required, at doses up to
10,000 millirems per year indefinitely. This is
about a thousand times higher dose and risk than EPA Superfund guidance
currently allows for cleanup of the nation's most contaminated sites.
“Some pro-nuclear government officials publicly claim that a radiological weapon
couldn’t cause any harm except fear,” said Diane D'Arrigo
of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a
Proponents of the relaxed dirty bomb cleanup standards have misleadingly tried to compare the permitted doses to natural background. However, the guidance would in fact allow doses thirty times higher than background. Furthermore, background radiation isn’t harmless. Official government radiation risk estimates indicate that about one of every thirty people in this country—or approximately 10 million of the nearly 300 million American population -- will develop cancer from exposure to background radiation. “Permitting huge additional doses to be added to what people already get from background is unacceptable from a public health standpoint,” said Hirsch.
Copies of an analysis of the guidance are available upon request.
See
http://www.nirs.org/radiation
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