EPA's Nuclear Emergency Drinking Water Guidelines Take Heat
By Peak Johnson
The U.S. EPA has proposed a rule that could allow the public to temporarily drink water containing radioactive contamination in the case of a nuclear emergency and it isn’t sitting well with some.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the EPA “thinks it would be acceptable for the public to temporarily drink water containing radioactive contamination at up to thousands of times normal federal safety limits.”
ThinkProgess reported that “during a radiological emergency, radioactive material could be released into the rivers, lakes, and streams used by public water suppliers.” What the EPA is proposing is a “non-regulatory” guidance that authorities can use “to protect residents from experiencing the harmful effects from radiation in drinking water following an emergency.”
Guidelines influence radioactive limits that initiate safety measures like local water use restrictions or implementing different water supplies, reported ThinkProgress.
The EPA has been working for some time on these drinking water guidelines as part of a broader set of recommendations in case radioactive material is ever discharged into the environment, according to The Wall Street Journal.
An agency spokeswoman told The Wall Street Journal that the public’s comments on the guidelines are still being looked over and that the EPA expects to release final documents later this year.
The EPA had proposed new guidelines for restricting drinking water after a nuclear incident, partially a response to the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan.
The agency’s Draft Protective Action Guide advises officials on how to react to “a nuclear meltdown or a dirty bomb, a weapon that combines conventional explosives such as dynamite with radioactive material,” ThinkProgress reported.
Opponents of the proposal, including the New York attorney general and environmental groups, stated that the initiative represented a “drastic departure from normal protection limits and could endanger people’s health,” per The Wall Street Journal.
“The upshot really is that the [nuclear] industry really wants to be able to release more radioactivity and not be responsible for it,” Diane D’Arrigo, a project director at the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, told ThinkProgress. “This is really a big loss.”