Re: MRFA

[RuthWeiner@AOL.COM]

In a message dated 4/6/02 7:18:23 PM Mountain Standard Time, tedrock@cpcug.org writes:



> My question is: do you (or anyone else reading this msg) know where I can find a reference from a regulator that says "Don't multiply trivial doses by large populations to "predict" deaths"?  


I don't know of a regulatory reference that says this.  In fact, multiplying trivial doses by large populations is EXACTLY what DOE requires us to do and presumably NRC requires it also.  Part of NUREG/CR-6672 is the calculation of collective doses using RADTRAN, and the result is indeed  a trivial average dose multiplied by a large population.  If NRC is telling you this, I wish they would put it in writing and let the rest of us know.


What the Yucca Mountain EIS (and every DOE EIS, as far as I know) includes, are calculations of collective dose along various routes (which is essentially the average dose multiplied by the population in a half-mile band on either side of the highway), multiplication of that collective dose by 0.0005, and the result reported as "latent cancer fatalities."  By the way, the EIS on the Private Fuel Storage Facility, which was done under NRC auspices, does this as well.  


A number of DOE EISs in fact report ONLY the "latent cancer fatalities" (LCF) in the body of the EIS, and relegate collective and average individual doses to an Appendix (the Sandia Sitewide EIS is an example of this).  At least in the Yucca Mountain EIS we were able to report doses along with LCF.  



Ruth Weiner, Ph. D.

ruthweiner@aol.com