Where I Stand — Brian Greenspun: Piling up Yucca science

Friday, Dec. 4, 1998 | 11:50 a.m.

ANY PLAN to store the nation's high-level nuclear waste a few miles from Las Vegas for the next 10,000 years could be all wet.

That's good news for Nevada and bad news for the GOP leaders in Congress and their puppet masters in the nuclear power community. As most Nevadans know, it is one of the top priorities of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and his friend from Idaho, Sen. Larry Craig, to make sure Nevada is chosen as soon as possible as the temporary site for storing the radioactive garbage the rest of the country doesn't want.

They say they are pushing so hard to force this nightmare upon the good citizens of the Silver State because the nation has a problem and only Nevada, with its small population and minimal political clout inside the Beltway, can serve as the solution. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, doesn't it?

Actually, Congress has been doing its best for the past 20 years to find the ways and means to shove this nuclear ugliness down our throats, regardless of the wishes of Nevadans for a safe and healthy place to raise their children and grandchildren. And, in fairness, it was a Democratic senator back in the early 1980s who first conceived of the plan to throw science and good sense out the window in exchange for a place to bury the nation's nuke problem in our backyard.

Life changes and so does the direction of political largesse. This time it is going to the Republican Party and coupled with some good, old fashioned NIMBY thinking (not in my back yard) is finding a good deal of support amongst the people on the right side of the aisle. So far, the only thing keeping the most toxic substance known to man out of Las Vegas on its way to Yucca Mountain is President Clinton's promised veto and Sens. Harry Reid and Dick Bryan's ability to muster veto-sustaining support.

What we need to kill this thing, though, once and for all is some disqualifying evidence that Yucca Mountain is the wrong place to do what the Department of Energy and its industry sponsors want. It has been a bit of a moving target, though, because each time the state thinks it has the disqualifying evidence, the DOE and Congress try to change the rules. It is also a bit frustrating.

This time, however, a Siberian scientist who makes his life's work studying water movement may give us what we need. His findings so far are compelling enough that Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson is making a special trip here today to see and hear for himself what our fussing is all about.

Yuri Dublyansky works for the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. It is his findings that hot water moved up and into Yucca Mountain in the recent geological past (that's sometime in the past million years or so) that may put a damper on the nuke industry's move to bury us with its radioactive waste problem. Dublyansky and others believe that any movement through Yucca Mountain of water will most likely corrode any canisters in which the high-level waste is stored which, in turn, could cause significant environmental damage. You can read that as a disaster in the making and not be far off.

It is hard to imagine, although I won't put it past the trying, that the DOE would make the effort to change the rules to allow leaking water as an exception to the requirement of 10,000 years of stability for any permanent repository. The folks at DOE have tried almost as much in the past and, to date, think they are getting away with it.

So far, those who are urging more study of this latest report suggest that any assessment conclusions be put off for at least another two years so scientists can determine the nature and extent of Dublyansky's findings. That will be difficult for DOE to swallow because, in short, the money men in the nuke power industry didn't pay all those large campaign contributions for nothing. And, to our good fortune, nothing is what they keep getting because good science stays in the way of bad politics.

It is likely to believe that science one day will be charged with finding a 21st century solution to the nuclear waste problem instead of underground burial, which is rooted firmly in the 19th century. There is no reason to believe that such an answer will not be found. Until then, though, Nevadans will have to remain ever vigilant lest the Congress and the DOE slide that stuff under our nose and into our back yards before we know what hit us.

Our defense lies in a presidential veto, a congressional delegation united against any improper incursions into our right as a state to be free from nuclear nightmares, and some water crystals probably formed in the last million years.

Things are looking up in the Silver State. I can remember a time when we didn't even have a prayer!