Miller to press energy chief to discard Yucca plan

Thursday, Dec. 3, 1998 | 11:05 a.m.

Gov. Bob Miller plans to ask Energy Secretary Bill Richardson on Friday to disqualify Yucca Mountain from becoming the nation's repository for high-level nuclear waste because the federal agency is breaking its own rules.

Richardson said he plans to visit Yucca Mountain on Friday. The secretary also promised to meet with Miller, Gov.-elect Kenny Guinn and other state officials to hear their concerns after he tours the mountain.

Miller, a Democrat, has been a staunch opponent of burying nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"It's going to be a frank and honest discussion," Miller's spokesman Gordon Absher said. The secretary requested the meeting with Miller, Guinn and available members of the congressional delegation, he said.

Guinn, a Republican, also is opposed to Yucca Mountain becoming a repository for nuclear waste. He was invited to the briefing by Richardson's office, Peter Ernaut, Guinn's chief of staff, said.

"We're there to listen," Ernaut said. "We're the new kids on the block."

The state Nuclear Waste Projects Office is preparing a packet of information on why the mountain should be disqualified as the nation's nuclear waste dump based on federal law that the DOE must follow.

The focus of the state's argument is that ground water could travel off the mountain and into irrigation water in Amargosa Valley within a 1,000-year time frame, according to Bob Loux, director of the Nuclear Waste Projects Office in Carson City.

Based on the DOE's own regulations, ground water must take longer than 1,000 years to travel off the dumpsite or the site is disqualified, Loux said.

Scientific evidence for the rapid ground-water movement came from DOE's own studies. Scientists discovered that chlorine-36, a radioactive byproduct of nuclear-weapons tests, had reached deep into the mountain from rain and snowfalls through cracks and crevices in the volcanic rock.

The other issue the governor plans to raise with Richardson involves the changing of radiation limits for ground water. The Environmental Protection Agency limits the amount of radiation in ground water at another nuclear repository near Carlsbad, N.M., to 4 millirems per liter of water. Millirems measure the effect that radiation would have in living tissue.

The EPA is proposing a 25-millirem limit at Yucca Mountain, which is expected to contain the nation's most radioactive waste. There is no national safety standard for radiation in ground water.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the agency that must license a nuclear repository, has proposed its own ground-water standard: no limit to radiation at all.

"I think if DOE has to live with the stricter ground-water standard at Yucca Mountain, they couldn't meet it," Loux said.

The state prepared a similar packet of information for former Energy Secretary James Watkins, a retired admiral who served in the Reagan and Bush administrations, Loux said.

The state's argument against a dump at Yucca Mountain has been supported by new findings by independent scientists and a call to stop the project by 220 national and international environmental and consumer groups.

A Siberian scientist who discovered 300 bubbles of gas or water deposited in crystals and minerals inside the mountain announced new findings this week. Yuri Dublyansky said his research indicates that those deposits came from hot water rising from deep within the earth.

The newest evidence Dublyansky found in samples taken from the 5-mile-long exploratory study tunnel in June shows hydrocarbons in the deposits, further proof of deep water moving upward, indicating geothermal activity sometime in the mountain's past.

The group effort to stop work at Yucca Mountain came in a petition to Richardson about a report card due to Congress at the end of this year. The groups asked Richardson to have the DOE's viability assessment scientifically reviewed and allow public hearings on it before Congress accepts it.

The energy secretary has said that the report does not contain the final word on whether Yucca Mountain becomes a repository or not. It will take the DOE until 2001 to conclude whether Yucca Mountain can be licensed.