EPA Docket CenterAir and Radiation Docket
Environmental Protection Agency
EPA West, Mail Code 6102T
1200 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20460
Attn. Docket ID No. OAR-2005-0083

Re: Proposal for revised radiation release regulations for Yucca Mountain

Dear EPA,

As a concerned U.S. citizen and taxpayer, I am extremely disturbed at EPA’s proposed double standard and I demand that it be withdrawn. The proposal would protect people for the first 10,000 years to currently applied standards of protection, but would then doom future generations after that time to a 1 in 36 cancer rate (or even worse, up to a 100% cancer rate, due to EPA mathematical manipulation), and a 1 in 72 fatal cancer rate (or even worse). Such proposed cancer rates and fatal cancer rates are horrifying, and EPA must withdraw such an unacceptable proposal. This is a complete violation of principles of inter-generational equity, as well as public health and environmental protection.

EPA's proposal to allow 350 millirem per year radiation doses to people living downstream from the leaking dump -- the equivalent of 58 full chest x-rays per year -- would not only cause cancer, but also birth defects, genetic damage, and other maladies, and at alarming rates, and must be withdrawn. Current standards of 15 millirem per year from all pathways, and 4 millirem per year from drinking water, must be applied for the full regulatory period at Yucca Mountain, extending to the period of peak radiation doses (hundreds of thousands of years into the future) and beyond.

These proposed regulations allowing 350 millirem per year radiation doses are completely unacceptable and must not be allowed to set a precedent to be applied at other radioactively contaminated sites across the country because they represent a large-scale weakening of environmental and public health protection standards--the worst such standards, by far, in the Western world--in violation of international norms. This inter-generational immorality must also not be applied to other EPA jurisdictions, such as non-radioactive, toxic and hazardous chemical contaminated sites.