EPA is raising Radiation Standards for drinking water by 100000% - I Called EPA's Office and Spoke to an Engineer ...Unbelievable!

The EPA is about to raise the standards for radiation in drinking water by 100,000%!  Yeah, you are reading it correctly One Hundred Thousand Percent!  By their own standards at this time that means one in 4 people will get cancer.  Also they will do it as a guidance instead of a regulation so they will not need a public discourse or notification to the public to do so.

Of course the EPA is a government agency to protect the people corporations.

I decided to call the EPA head office in the state of Tennessee and ask them if they are testing the rain water now due to the Japanese Fukushima Nuclear Plant meltdown happening and considering the fact other states around Tennessee have been reporting radiation in their rain water.

I spoke to the head engineer of EPA in Nashville today 3/30/11.  I asked him if the Tennessee EPA is going to test the rain water.  He said the EPA will keep their standards of testing which is a once a year test.

I proceeded to ask, even though the EPA does this once a year, don't they think it should be done now since the Japanese nuclear meltdown?  What if the water was just tested on March the 10th does that mean they won't test it again until next year?  He said that is correct.

I pressed the subject and gave him a scenario of an event.... I said "What if the EPA had tested a stream that is a once a year event, two weeks ago.  Then a corporation had a contamination/environmental spill into it, would you still wait to test the stream until the next year or would you go out and test it right away to see if there are contaminates in it?"  He said "We would go out and test it for contaminates".   I then asked "isn't that the same thing that  is happening now with Japan, there is radiation fallout that is happening and don't they want to know if the rain has radiation in it?"

He kept with the government line that they will keep their normal EPA standards and test once a year for radiation contaminates in the rainwater.

He was not aware of the EPA raising the radiation standards of drinking water, I read him the article and then asked him for his email address and emailed it to him.  He also said he was not aware of radiation being found in the rain water in  Pa. and Ma., I told him he could find those articles online.  I also told him about Berkeley finding a huge amount of radiation in the water there. 

From the Berkeley information:

General discussion about radiation levels in California:  - UPDATE: a Berkeley lab's results from testing rainwater on March 23rd suggests that 1 liter of rain-harvested drinking water in Berkeley, Calif., would have an iodine-131 concentration of 542.7 picocuries and consuming one liter of this water would provide a radiation dose to the thyroid of an infant of 7.54 millirems.  About 132 liters of water contaminated at these levels would provide 1 Rem dose to the infant thyroid. (Per NRC NUREG 1.109 rev. 1 Oct. '77).  At these levels, a Bay Area adult would have to breath for 425 days to receive the same iodine-131 exposure as drinking 1 liter of rain-harvested drinking water.  Also, the cesium-137 levels in rain water for March 23-24 broke a new high record peak since analyses begin on March 17 at the Berkeley lab - it's now at 16 picoCuries of Cesium-137 per liter of rain-harvested water.  Boil down a liter of this rainwater, or ash in an oven a rain-soaked 'sticky' film filter, and it would measure on an advanced gamma counter 1,344 clicks per minute (CPM) *above* normal background levels  - that doesn't even include the beta or alpha particles, including the beta energies of the Iodine-131 and Cesium-137! The high levels of iodine-131 in Berkeley rainwater that initially alarmed Idealist are detailed in the following section.

He gave me labs to call to get the rain water tested if I wanted to.

I have called those labs but they send the water away and they did not seem the least bit interested in testing the water in the first place.

I am absolutely amazed that the EPA is taking the attitude they are with possible radiation fallout in our rain.  I talked to the person for about 10 minutes from the EPA - trying to get him to understand why the EPA should be testing the rain everywhere.   He stood by the government line of "Once a year is enough and our standards"!

It is up to all the individuals of this country to test our rain and to test our water and be diligent because the U.S. government obviously could not care less and will just raise the radiation standards as they need to and as the radiation goes up.

The article about the EPA raising the standards of radiation in our drinking water:

The EPA is preparing to dramatically increase permissible radioactive releases in drinking water, food and soil after “radiological incidents,” according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

What is termed a guidance that EPA is considering - as opposed to a regulation - does not require public airing before it’s decided upon.

EPA officials contacted today in the Atlanta and D.C. offices had no response on the issue as of 6 p.m.

The radiation guides called Protective Action Guides or PAGs are protocols for responding to radiological events ranging from nuclear power-plant accidents to dirty bombs.

Drinking water, for example, would have a huge increase in allowable public exposure to radioactivity, the group says, that would include:

A nearly 1000-fold increase in strontium-90

A 3000 to 100,000-fold hike for iodine-131

An almost 25,000 rise for nickel-63 

The new radiation guidance would also allow long-term cleanup standards thousands of times more lax than anything EPA has ever before accepted, permitting doses to the public that EPA itself estimates would cause a cancer in as much as every fourth person exposed, the group says.

These relaxed standards are opposed by public health professionals inside EPA, according to documents PEER said it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

PEER is a national alliance of local state and federal resource professionals