SNT and EPA's Maximum Individual Risk

Breaking News: The Gordian Knot Group has published a little book called The Two Lies that Killed Nuclear Power. It is now available on Amazon and possibly elsewhere. Nothing new for the choir members. Just a 100 page distillation of the core regulatory problem preventing nuclear from realizing its promethean promise, and how to fix it. But a hard copy version of the argument may be useful in certain situations.

Unfortunately, the book had to be a large trim size, full color. I set the price, 24 bucks, as low as Kindle would let me.

Figure 1. Dose Rate Profile for High End (top 10%) Okuma Population. First two years only.

The EPA uses something called the Maximum Individual Risk or MIR. This effectively is the lifetime risk from an activity that the EPA deems "generally considered acceptable". The EPA’s MIR for getting cancer is 100 in a million or 0.00010.

Figure 1 shows the SNT cancer incidence for the high end (top 10%) group in Okuma, the hardest hit town, at Fukushima. According to GKG estimates, these people started out with a ambient dose rate of 310 microGy/hour outside their homes. Figure 1 assumes these people do not evacuate, and make at most modest changes in their behavior, resulting in a location factor of 0.2.¹

The SNT cancer incidence for this high end Okuma group after 50 days is 0.000011, a little over 10 in a million chance; after 2 years it is about 0.000040, 40 in a million; and after 40 years it is 0.000044, 44 in a million. Clearly the incidence will not get above 0.00005 or 50 in a million, no matter how long the person lives in this part of town. That's half of the EPA acceptable MIR. Under SNT, EPA would not evacuate even the hardest hit people at Fukushima.

If you repeat this calculation for Chernobyl, you will find that under SNT only the 50,000 people closest to the plant should even think about evacuating.\cite{flop3}[Sec 6.6] And if the moms do evacuate, they and their kids can return in a matter of weeks.

Under SNT, the EPA clean up dose rate limit would go from 0.15 mSv per YEAR to 0.11 mSv per DAY. None of the UMTRA sites nor Hanford would require any radiation clean-up.

Under SNT and UCERT, the radiation exposure and lost earnings compensation at Fukushima would total very roughly 25 million dollars.

Under SNT and UCERT, the radiation exposure and lost earnings compensation at Chernobyl would be less than 5 billion dollars, an amount that is commercially insurable at less than 0.2 cents per kWh.\cite{wna-liab}

The only reason for repeating these facts is to make the point that, while SNT is intentionally very conservative, that pessimism will not prevent nearly should-cost nuclear power. SNT is good enough.

1. The location factor is the ratio of the dose rate outside the home, the dose rate the resident would receive if he stood outside his house 24/7, to the dose rate actually incurred. The latter can be much lower, mainly due to time indoors. A study of the residents of Date-shi, a town just outside the Fukushima evacuation zone who were fitted with dosimeters, founded that their location factor was 0.15+/-0.03.\cite{miyazaki-2017}