The controversial plan to store nuclear waste underground in a facility in Nevada's Yucca Mountain reached another milestone today, as the Environmental Protection Agency issued limits for how much radiation people in the surrounding area could be exposed to--all the way from when the facility is scheduled to open, in 2020, until 1 million years in the future. The EPA announced yesterday that to protect the hypothetical people living in Nevada 1 million years from now, the Yucca Mountain facility
must be designed to ensure that people living near it then are exposed to no more than 100 millirems of radiation annually — equivalent to about a half-dozen X-rays. And over the next 10,000 years, radiation exposure to the waste dump's neighbors may be no more than 15 millirems a year, which is about what people get from an ordinary X-ray [AP].
The project has run into opposition every step ...
