Yucca Mountain study delivered to Congress

Friday, Dec. 18, 1998 | 11:13 a.m.

The Energy Department delivered no surprises in a report Congress received today on federal studies at Yucca Mountain, a potential national dumpsite for nuclear waste, despite recent scientific questions raised about the site's safety.

The report said the department will continue to study the mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, although scientists reviewing the work for the DOE raised critical issues.

Their scientific concerns include how long the waste containers will last, how fast contaminated water will travel through the site from the surface and long-term radiation exposure.

Nevada officials dismissed the assessment as a public relations document.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said the report, called a viability assessment, indicates no reason to stop investigating Yucca Mountain to find out whether it is safe to bury 77,000 tons of nuclear waste for eternity.

The report provides the president, Congress and the public with information on the progress of analysis at the Yucca Mountain site as well as identifying critical issues that need additional study.

Whether the mountain goes before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for licensing will be decided in 2001. Even if the project is licensed, a repository would be ready in 2010 at the earliest.

"I must stress the difference between the issuing of this viability assessment, which I am doing today, and a decision I or my successor will make in 2001 on whether to recommend the Yucca Mountain site to the president for development as a repository," Richardson said, emphasizing the need for further study.

"As I have stated consistently, these decisions will be based on science and the merits and not politics," Richardson said.

"While there is technical work still to be done and questions to be answered, I believe the work thus far has been done well," he said. Richardson has visited Yucca Mountain twice in less than two months.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.; Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev.; Democratic Gov. Bob Miller; Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev.; Rep.-elect Shelley Berkley, D-Nev.; and Republican Gov.-elect Kenny Guinn vowed to continue their bipartisan unity in the fight against the dump.

"This document is masked as a policy paper, but it is really nothing more than a public-relations piece," Reid said. "I have no doubt that the pro-nuclear utilities will try to use it in their battle to promote interim storage this year."

The "real news" is the recent scientific findings of rapid movement of ground water through the mountain, Reid said.

"After 20 years and $6 billion spent by the Department of Energy on the Yucca Mountain Project, this document does nothing to dispel the essential disqualifying factors, which Nevada pointed out to the DOE 10 years ago," Miller said. The governor noted that there was no public review before the document was released.

"Let us not forget that massive contamination, up to 20 times above current radiation standards for other geologic dumps, may occur at Yucca Mountain," Gibbons said.

"This study obviously has been generated by the pro-dump forces who have a long history of changing the rules and burying important scientific evidence," Berkley said.

"We cannot allow this politically-motivated document to sway any opinion on any level," Guinn said. "It is my intention to maintain the same vehement opposition on this issue in my administration."

"This is a contrived internal document created solely by the DOE nuclear staff to justify the billions of dollars they are wasting," Bryan said.

"The report itself makes it clear it is not a decision-making document, has no bearing on the decision of suitability of Yucca Mountain and points to considerable uncertainties about the project."

The report offers a road map for further studies of the mountain before 2001.

As part of those future studies, Richardson said he is committed to working with Nevada officials and the Congress to restore funding so that Nevada can conduct its own scientific oversight of Yucca Mountain.

The Department of Energy began its studies 15 years ago and has spent $3 billion at the mountain, which is expected to contain radioactive waste created from the generation of electricity and the building of nuclear weapons.

Within five volumes and thousands of pages of support documents, the report raises the issue of possible nuclear contamination carried relatively quickly into the ground water under the mountain and then beyond the boundaries of the waste repository. Farmers and ranchers grow crops and raise cattle in the path of that radioactive flow.

In addition, DOE scientists discovered water containing radiation from atomic-bomb fallout at the repository level. The chlorine-36 found at the burial site indicates fast transport of rain water from the surface.

Since the mountain's volcanic rock cannot contain the radioactive contamination by itself, the report states that the manner in which waste would be packaged and how the storage tunnels would be laid out is crucial.

Even then, supporting studies predict that the worst radioactive releases will be in 300,000 years, so long into the future that man-made features, such as corrosion-resistant canisters, will not be reliable. The report says that people living within 12 miles of the repository could be exposed to radiation.

Independent reviewers brought in by the DOE said that making predictions to assure the health and safety of people and the environment that far into the future will be extremely difficult.

Part of that assurance rests with the Environmental Protection Agency, which is setting a radiation exposure standard for Yucca Mountain. The uncertainty of containing radiation in the mountain soars if EPA decides the repository must perform well hundreds of thousands of years from now.

The DOE report calls for the EPA to double the acceptable radiation exposure at Yucca Mountain.

Environmental groups and independent scientists have recently raised the issue of hot, deep water rising within the mountain and invading the buried nuclear casks. Former DOE geologist Jerry Szymanski first raised the issue in 1989 when he was a Yucca Mountain Project leader. He fears the geothermal activity could create a nuclear explosion.

Meanwhile, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the lobbying arm of nuclear utilities, vowed a renewed campaign in Congress to put temporary nuclear waste storage at the Nevada Test Site. "The viability assessment is now out," a statement said. "It's positive." The NEI urged Congress to act on temporary storage.

To download the viability assessment or its reports, the Internet site is:

www.ymp.gov

Mark Preston of States News Service contributed to this story.