Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Bloggers Roundtable Part II Cut II
MS. BOYD: The NRC appears to be downplaying the health effects of
the Fukushima disaster. Who is collecting the data? How is the data
being shared with the U.S. public? Why doesn't the NRC require the
installation of radiation monitors that are monitored by independent
agencies with publicly accessed data?
CHAIRMAN JACZKO: Well the radiation monitoring for the general
public is really an authority and responsibility of the Environmental
Protection Agency. So we focus primarily on ensuring that our
licensees have the ability to monitor on-site and then ultimately, if
necessary, the ability to monitor offsite in order to make
assessments and analyses for determinations of emergency evacuations
or emergency action levels.
But that responsibility ultimately for kind of the general public
radiation monitoring for nuclear plant actions rests with the EPA.
And I am not intimately familiar with their programs but they do it's
something that I think it is called RadNet is a network of radiation
monitors. I don't know if they are fixed or they are portable and
they would deploy them in the event of an incident. So they do have
the capability and they were recording data in the United States
during the incident, as well as our licensees themselves were
reporting and I believe they were reporting to the EPA to get a sense
of what doses we were measuring. But certainly all the doses that
have been measured since Fukushima in the United States or in
territories are well below levels that would pose any hazards from a
health and safety standpoint.