Yucca access limited

Tuesday, Sept. 10, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

The U.S. Department of Energy has denied state and Clark County scientists access to Yucca Mountain without an escort.

Bob Loux, director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, told the Nevada Legislature's Committee on High-Level Radioactive Waste Monday that state officials feel hampered as independent reviewers.

By law the state has authority to conduct independent investigations and examinations of the five-mile tunnel being bored into Yucca Mountain to explore it as a possible high-level nuclear waste dump.

Two state engineers have completed the DOE's safety training, yet they are allowed in the tunnel only with a DOE escort, when the DOE wants to allow access, Loux said.

"We've gone along with DOE's schedule, but it does not allow independent study," Loux said, citing the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act giving the state the role of independent reviewer.

Dennis Bechtel of the county's Comprehensive Planning Nuclear Waste Division said his engineers have had problems of their own gaining entrance to the tunnel 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

In some cases a county engineer spent more than two hours driving to the site then has been refused access into the tunnel, Bechtel said.

The legislative committee's chairman, Assemblyman Bob Price, D-Las Vegas, said the limits placed on state scientists concerned him. He asked his staff to write a letter to DOE for an explanation of the limited access.

"The primary reason for the limited access, as I understand it, is safety," Loux said.

Safety also emerged as a major concern during the three-hour hearing.

The gigantic tunnel boring machine has been shut down since Thursday until DOE crews are trained in using respirators to protect their lungs from dust.

The committee also learned that the state will receive only $30,000 to train 500 people responsible statewide for responding to a high-level nuclear waste transportation accident.

"We find that inadequate for training," Loux said.

Nebraska, a state that will become a corridor for road and rail shipments of radioactive fuel rods if Yucca Mountain is selected as a permanent dump or if the Nevada Test Site is chosen as a temporary storage site, has requested $1 million a year for such training, Loux said.

Bechtel agreed that the proposed $30,000 is "totally inadequate" for training highway patrol troopers, firefighters and medical personnel.

But at least one committee member looked to future benefits rather than liabilities from nuclear waste disposal in Nevada.

State Sen. Jack Regan, R-Las Vegas, said nuclear waste stored or buried in Nevada might someday become a fuel supply once oil and natural gas run out in the next 100 years or so.

"If the federal government took the liability and gave the state the asset, Nevada could become the Kuwait of the 22nd century," Regan said, referring to the oil capitol of the Middle East.