Information needs for siting new, and evaluating current, nuclear facilities: ecology, fate and transport, and human health

Abstract

The USA is entering an era of energy diversity, and increasing nuclear capacity and concerns focus on accidents, security, waste, and pollution. Physical buffers that separate outsiders from nuclear facilities often support important natural ecosystems but may contain contaminants. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licenses nuclear reactors; the applicant provides environmental assessments that serve as the basis for Environmental Impact Statements developed by NRC. We provide a template for the types of information needed for safe siting of nuclear facilities with buffers in three categories: ecological, fate and transport, and human health information that can be used for risk evaluations. Each item on the lists is an indicator for evaluation, and individual indicators can be selected for specific region. Ecological information needs include biodiversity (species, populations, communities) and structure and functioning of ecosystems, habitats, and landscapes, in addition to common, abundant, and unique species and endangered and rare ones. The key variables of fate and transport are sources of release for radionuclides and other chemicals, nature of releases (atmospheric vapors, subsurface liquids), features, and properties of environmental media (wind speed, direction and atmospheric stability, hydraulic gradient, hydraulic conductivity, groundwater chemistry). Human health aspects include receptor populations (demography, density, dispersion, and distance), potential pathways (drinking water sources, gardening, fishing), and exposure opportunities (lifestyle activities). For each of the three types of information needs, we expect that only a few of the indicators will be applicable to a particular site and that stakeholders should agree on a site-specific suite.

Ecological Information Needs for Environmental Justice

“…It must be emphasized that EJ communities must participate, and where possible, collaborate with scientists and managers to derive the information needs for their own communities. (8,13,15,19) That is, the informational needs must derive from the communities themselves, and be constantly updated and modified with collaboration with EJ communities. Some communities, particularly in areas with recent immigrants, require periodic identification of new cultural, religious, and nutritional patterns.…”

“…While information alone is not enough to address a broad range of questions dealing with EJ, it forms the basis for a range of evaluations that include exposure assessment, risk assessment, ( 9‐18 ) risk management, ( 19‐21 ) natural resource damage assessment and reparations, ( 22‐24 ) cultural/religious exposures, eco‐cultural dependency web analysis, ( 25, 26 ) and eco‐cultural attribute analysis. ( 6,8,15,27‐29 ) There is now a substantial literature on environmental justice and equity, ( 30‐36 ) and this article adds to this paradigm.…”

Environmental Assessment for Sustainability and Resiliency for Ecological and Human Health

“…Sustaining biodiversity is widely recognized as desirable, yet preservation of diverse cultures and communities is an important societal value as well. We have previously proposed that indicators can be selected to provide information about ecological health, human health, and the health of diverse cultures (societal/cultural health) [18,35,36]. For example, preserving fish stocks to maintain healthy populations and to ensure continued fisheries is an important societal goal, but preserving fish populations because they also have an important cultural and societal value independent of fisheries is not always considered in indicator selection, particularly for Tribal Nations [37,38].…”

An Ecological Multidisciplinary Approach to Protecting Society, Human Health, and the Environment at Nuclear Facilities

“…In this article, building on our previous work (Burger et al, 2002(Burger et al, , 2010Burger, Gochfield, Powers, Kosson et al 2007), we take an ecological approach to examining the information needs for continued use of existing nuclear facilities, the siting of new nuclear facilities, establishment of baselines, security and emergency planning, and for remediation, decontamination, and decommissioning of facilities. Our assumption is that a holistic approach should be used to examine the informational needs of regulators, resource managers, public policy makers, Tribal Nations, scientists, and the public to assure the protection of human health and the environment around nuclear facilities.…”

“…This article provides templates for site characterization for five areas: (1) geophysical, sources, fate and transport, (2) biological systems; (3) human health; (4) stakeholder and environmental justice; and (5) societal, economic, and political. This article builds on previous literature (de Groot et al, 2002;Efroymson et al, 2008), and an earlier attempt to develop templates that included only fate and transport, ecology, and human health considerations (Burger et al, 2010), and broadens the approach and templates to encompass a wider range of informational needs for key issues surrounding nuclear facilities: baselines, siting, relicensing, remediation and decontamination, trend analysis, security, and emergency planning. Previous lists Carletta et al, 2004;Greenberg et al, 2004) were more restrictive, did not list the key indicators for societal systems, and were not as inclusive as the templates presented in this article.…”