Legal criteria for establishing de minimis levels for exposure to radiation from low-level radioactive waste and uranium mill tailings

This paper illustrates how the different statutes for regulating the disposal of low-level radioactive waste and uranium mill tailings lead to different criteria to establish de minimis levels for these two types of radioactive wastes. The program is in the following steps. First, cases interpreting statutes for regulating various risks are examined to derive a general methodology for extracting from any statute the legislative criteria for setting a de minimis level of risk. Second, this methodology is applied to the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as amended, and the Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act of 1978, as amended, to derive from those two Acts the legislative criteria for setting de minimis levels for exposure to radiation from low-level radioactive waste and uranium mill tailings. Finally, these criteria are compared to show how differences in the language of the statutes regulating these two classes of waste lead to differences in the criteria for establishing de minimis levels of exposure to radiation from those wastes