EIS of the final nuclear waste repository in Sweden - ECRR, Video Statement by Professor Chris Busby

Publication date
2010-02-04

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_8881z6qXk and http://www.bsrrw.org/?page_id=15

See also: Busby, Chris.  2010-02-05.  Preliminary formal Response to the SKB Environmental Impact Statement of December 2009 relating to the proposed radioactive waste repository at Forsmark, Sweden. European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR).

The video, of the Baltic Sea regional office of the ECRR, draws attention to the fact that the SKB employs the obsolete and erroneous radiation risk model of the International Commission on Radiological Protection ICRP. Prof Chris Busby argues that this risk model, which predicted no harm from the Chernobyl accident and no problems associated with living near nuclear sites has now been overtaken by experimental and epidemiological evidence.

Astonishingly, the SKB:s EIS barely mentions radiation risk, see MKB_preliminar.pdf (32 MB, at www.skb.se).

There is one section (3.4, page 37) where the document refers to the ICRP model: however no modelling of dose or exposure is to be found anywhere in any of the documents examined. Even where the radiation exposures are discussed, the EIS makes very erroneous statements and gives misleading information. For example, on p 37 we are told that after 100,000 years all that will remain is natural uranium minerals. This is not true: there will be massively enhanced levels of both U-238 and also the more radioactive U-235 and U-234. Since uranium has a half life of billions of years, there will be virtually no change in its quantity over the 100,000 years of the graph on p 38.

The European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) model provides means of modifying current dose/risk estimates to compensate for some of the shortcomings of the ICRP. (www.euradcom.org)

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