No CSO Sewage Alerts in NJ Again This Summer

Beach-goers won't be able to find out whether or not any of the Combined Sewer Overflows in NJ have bypassed raw sewage from their 217 outfalls until 2016.

The 25 new CSO permits that were signed off in January have pushed back mandatory Public Notification.

The Effective Date of Permit (EDP) for the 25 permits is July 1, 2015. Warning signs on outfalls won't be required for 6 months, until January 2016. Web pages (or hotlines) wont be required until July of 2016.

New York's Sewage Right-To-Know law was enacted May 1, 2013. Governor Christie pocket vetoed a similar NJ bill (S-831) in January of 2014.

Public Notification is part of the EPA's Nine Minimum Controls for CSOs. These have to be implemented first. The Long Term Control Plans have 5 years. This assumes there are no extensions. Not a good bet. CSOs date back to the mid-nineteenth century, when they were a good idea.

Part of the trash from CSOs that lands on beaches in Monmouth and Ocean counties - when the wind and currents are blowing our way - are whitish-gray clumps called “grease balls” or "sewage cakes". They are the Fats, Oil, and Grease (FOG) that have hardened into "soap" that is scoured off CSO pipes when it rains. They have tested higher than 160,000 bacteria colonies. Currently, beaches close when there are more than 104 colonies of enterococcus bacteria.

It's not just about bacteria. Fats are made of organic carbon that easily adsorbs chemicals. In 2008, the New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary Program reported that the average concentrations of PCBs, pesticides, dioxins/furans, cadmium, and mercury were higher in the CSO and stormwater discharges than in treated sewage effluents. The USGS found that CSOs can also be an important source of hormones and other wastewater micropollutants. Similar work Europe found that CSOs contained numerous priority pollutants.

Some CSOs bypass sewage into the Hudson-Raritan Estuary when it rains as little as one-tenth of an inch.

Meanwhile, If You Are So Inclined

You can sign up for email alerts about NY CSOs here, or you can just look at the most current reports in this spreadsheet. The list goes back to the beginning of the program in May of 2013.

There is also a little known, convoluted, quirky, effective gauntlet you can run through if you really, really want to find out if there has been a CSO sewage bypass in NJ: NJDEP's online database, Data Miner. Here's how you would use it.

NRD Settlements Need More Rules, Less Deals

Environmental standards should protect our critical natural resources. They should be enforced in a timely, consistent and equitable manner for all violators. The public has a right to know. Government should maximize fiscal accountability and transparency, and allow maximum citizen participation in the political process.

Right?

According to the Natural Resource Damages (NRD) report prepared for the NJDEP in 2006, Exxon's Bayway and Bayonne refineries polluted soils, sediments, and surface and groundwater in about 1,700 acres of wetlands, meadows, and streams in the Hudson-Raritan Estuary for over 100 years. Petroleum products and waste, consisting of hundreds of different organic contaminants and heavy metals, were spilled, discharged, or discarded - as dredge material for filling salt marshes, in leaking landfills, leakings barges, pipeline ruptures, tank failures, overflows, and explosions.

The courts ruled that Exxon was liable for damaging the region's natural resources. The report recommended that the state seek compensation. More than 500 acres around Bayway and 25 acres around Bayonne were to be restored at a cost of $2.5 billion. Additionally, Exxon would have had to restore more than 30,000 acres of wetlands, meadow and forest elsewhere in NJ, at a cost of $6.4 billion - for a total cost of $8.9 billion.

The State has inscrutably decided to settle with Exxon for $225 million. This amount alone guarantees that meaningful restoration is moot. But it never had a chance anyway. Since last year, penalties from Natural Resource Damages over $50 million can be diverted into the general fund rather than be used for their intended purpose.

Like a few months ago - when three quarters of a $190 million settlement to restore natural resource damages in the Passaic River was diverted to the general fund.

It is not just the local communities who have lost something. The Hudson-Raritan Estuary drains into the ocean past Sandy Hook. Monmouth County's Bayshore and ocean resources are downstream of the “pervasive and ubiquitous” contamination from these sites. The County is in the path of the runoff from Exxon's “tar flats” and landfill “popups” during routine rainfall, let alone during a flood. Keeping this kind of arbitrary decision-making as the status quo is not in the County's economic and environmental interests.

To protect the public health and the environment, two very loose ends need to be nailed down by the NJ Department of Environmental Protection and our legislature.

It's been five years since the Administration's own transition team warned that rules needed to be adopted for the NRD process “to provide transparency, certainty and consistency in the assessment of those damages.” The NJDEP needs to finally adopt regulations that provide standards for quantifying NRD damages. The NJDEP Baseline Ecological Evaluation, which has been adopted, only documents the damages; it doesn't assign a quantifiable cost. The State is weakened in settlement negotiations without having specific numeric standards to fall back on. It is settling for fractional penalties that ensure there will be no meaningful restoration – or that taxes will have to subsidize the private sector's mistakes - and deepen our state deficit. Having standards is but one way of eliminating the disturbing disconnect that is evidently happening now during penalty negotiations.

It's also clear that legislation is needed to require that NRD penalties are dedicated for what they were intended: funding the restoration of damaged natural resources.

“Acceptable” Cancer Risks for Radon, Fracking Waste, Nuclear Power, and Radiological Disasters

January was Radon Action Month.

The EPA Action Level for radon gas in indoor air is 4 picocuries per liter (pCi/L). The EPA would prefer that you start reducing your exposure at 2 pCi/L.

That's because people living in homes with 4 pCi/L could be receiving 300 to 800 millirem (mrem) a year. In 2009, the NJDEP reported (pps. 19-20) that the lifetime risk for lung cancer at this level is about 24 in 1000, which is equal to 24,000 in one million. They define lifetime exposure as 30 years.

The average level of radon in homes in NJ, 2.4 pCi/L, has a lifetime risk of cancer of 14 in 1000 (14,000 in a million). Even the average level of radon in outdoor air, about 0.4 pCi/L, has a lifetime lung cancer risk of about 2 in 1000 (2000 in a million), according to the NJDEP.

Compare that with the “acceptable” risk for a chemical carcinogen. The Maximum Contaminant Level for benzene in drinking water is 5 parts per billion. That's a risk of about 5 in a million, if you drink 2 liters a day for 70 years.

The NJDEP has a map of the NJ coastal plain that shows where higher radon levels are due to naturally-occurring uranium deposits usually found in glauconitic soils.

One in a Million

Here are some other risks for getting cancer after being exposed to radiation, based on the National Academy of Sciences’ Report on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR VII) from 2006. The National Research Council posted a summary of the BEIR VII report that concluded that there is about a one-in-a-million risk of cancer for each dose of 1 mrem.

This does not include the dose from radon and other background radiation, which is about half the average exposure of 620 mrem a year in the US. It is an average risk - it does not take into account the higher risk of cancer in the younger years. Slide 18 shows the cancer risks at different ages after being exposed to 10,000 mrem (10 mGy), based on BEIR VII.

Fracking Waste and Nuclear Power Plants

North Dakota is proposing to raise the allowable level of radiation in fracking and other waste disposed at their landfills. It would would increase the standard from 5 picocuries per gram to 50 pCi/g. The state Department of Health commissioned the Argonne National Laboratory to determine how much a change in the regulation would increase the exposure for workers and the public. The ANL estimated that 50 pCi/g would increase the dose to no more than 100 mrem a year.  

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires nuclear power plants limit the public's exposure to radiation to 100 mrem a year.

The average risk of cancer determined in BEIR VII is about a 1 in a million risk for each millirem. For 100 mrem, the risk would be 100 in a million. The risk for being exposed to 100 mrem a year would be 3000 in a million for 30 years, and 7000 in a million for 70 years.

Protective Action Guidelines for Disasters: Nuclear Power Plants, Dirty Bombs, Nuclear Terrorism

In 2013, the EPA published its PAG Manual Protective Action Guides And Planning Guidance For Radiological Incidents. The “acceptable” levels in the PAGs for disaster response, evacuation, and remediation range from 100 to 2000 mrem a year.

The advocacy group Nuclear Resource and Information Service, using BEIR VII data - and factoring the higher risk of cancer in the younger years - concluded:

“EPA's estimate of a 70-year lifetime exposure at 2 rem per year [2000 mrem] is that 1 in every 6 people exposed would get a cancer [166,667 in a million] … Even at the 0.1 [100 mrem] lower end of possible cleanup levels, the risk would be 1 cancer for every 123 people exposed [8,130 in a million]. EPA historically has required cleanup sufficient to prevent exposure to contaminants outside a risk range of one in a million to one in ten thousand; these new recommendations would permit risks orders of magnitude higher.”

The highest PAG level, 2000 mrem (20 millisievert), is being used to allow residents to return to their homes contaminated by Fukushima Daiichi. It is also what the NRC proposed in 2014 as the highest annual dose for workers at nuclear facilities, down from the current standard of 5000 mrem a year.

This Blog Did Not

This blog did not address the controversy over predicting cancer rates from exposure to low level radiation:

“The risk of increased cancer incidence is well established for doses above 10 rem [10,000 mrem]. For low doses, it has not been possible to scientifically determine if an increased risk exists, but many scientists believe that small doses of radiation do lead to increased cancer risk, and that the degree of risk is directly proportional to the size of the dose. Risk estimates from low doses are obtained by extrapolation from high dose observations.”

It did not consider the trade-offs in those grim numbers in the 2013 PAGs for disaster response, evacuation, and remediation. According to the EPA (on page 76):

“Exposure limits in a range of one in a population of ten thousand (10^-4) to one in a population of one million (10^-6) excess lifetime cancer incidence outcomes are generally considered protective, though this may not be achievable after a large radiological incident. In making decisions about cleanup goals and strategies for a particular event, decision makers must balance the desired level of exposure reduction with the extent of the measures that would be necessary to achieve it, in order to maximize overall human welfare.”

Or as James Conca, puts it, “You personally might decide to become a refugee over rad levels equivalent to living in Idaho, but do you have the right to make someone else do that?”

This is discussed in in Part 1 and Part 2 of a previous blog.

The lack of preparedness for a radiological disaster outside the 10-mile Emergency Planning Zones around Nuclear Power Plants is discussed in this blog.