Management of Commercially Generated Radioactive Waste - U.S. ...

3.16
population within a 50-mile radius reference environment of a waste facility ( 2 million),
and the world population ( 6 billion in the year 20 0 0 ).(a) In selected instances dose to
the population of the eastern half of the United States is also presented.
Unless otherwise noted, doses are to the whole body; doses to other organs of interest
are presented in DOE/ET-0029. Dose in this Statement is usually expressed as a 70-yr accu-
mulated whole-body dose, although where informative, first-year doses are also given. In
some instances, multigeneration doses are provided.
Health effects are calculated for regional or worldwide populations based on the dose
received by these populations from the aggregation of the facilities involved. The doses
calculated to result from individual facilities, except for nondesign basis repository acci-
dents, are usually too small to warrant discussion of health effects.
In this Statement, 50 to 500 fatal cancers and 50 to 300 serious genetic defects are
assumed to result in an exposed population for each million man-rem of radiation exposure
received (for a total of 100 to 800 health effects per million man-rem). The possibility
of zero risk is not excluded by the available data, i.e., there is a possibility that no
cancers may be caused by low doses of radiation. For further discussion of the derivation
of these risk factors, the reader should consult Appendix E.
Also presented is an alternative approach to analysis of exposure in which the esti-
mated radiation doses from waste management activities are compared with more accurately
known radiation doses from other sources such as naturally occurring radiation and radio-
active materials.
Radiation dose calculations (Appendix D) use models to develop total doses by summing
radiation doses from various radionuclides entering (or externally exposing) the human body.
Each step in the dose calculation has uncertainty associated with it. A common radiation
protection practice has been to assign values to parameters used in dose calculation that,
if uncertain, will tend to overstate rather than understate the resulting dose.
3.2.6 Socioeconomic Impacts
The approach used in the analysis of socioeconomic impacts emphasizes changes in local
employment and population caused by the construction and operation of a waste repository in
selected geologic media. The repositories examined in this analysis generate socioeconomic
impacts in several ways: through the employment requirements of construction and operation,
through the demand generated for locally supplied materials and services, through secondary
economic growth generated by the project, and through the public revenues resulting from
project operation. In this generic Statement, the employment requirements are stressed
because they more directly affect impacts (such as demands for housing, education, and
health services) than do other requirements. Because tax structures and prospective reve-
nues vary widely across potential sites no meaningful and representative estimates of reve-
(a) The only radionuclides that contribute significantly to worldwide radiation doses for
the type of release mechanisms visualized here are 3H 14C, and 85 Kr. For this
reason, worldwide dose calculations are based on 3 H, 14C, and 8 5 Kr only.