Environmentalists say DOE rules disqualify Yucca for nuclear dump

Mary Manning and Mark D. Preston

Wednesday, Nov. 18, 1998 | 11:08 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Yucca Mountain should be disqualified as the depository for the nation's high-level nuclear waste, 220 environmental groups and anti-nuclear coalitions urged in a letter sent to energy secretary Bill Richardson this morning.

The Sierra Club, Public Citizen, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, U.S. Public Interest Research Group representing 39 states in the international community signed a petition telling Richardson to end the nuclear dump project, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, based on DOE's own rules.

"This is the first time the whole environmental community that works on this issue has said no to Yucca Mountain," said Auke Piersma, an energy analyst for Ralph Nader's Public Citizen.

Elected officials as diverse as Reps. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., Shelly Berkley, D-Nev., and Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, joined forces on Capitol Hill this morning to deliver the petition. Gibbons said the Yucca Mountain project violates Nevada's right as a state to protect the health and safety of its people.

"It is unfathomable to me that the federal government would even consider breaching its commitment to protect and preserve Nevada's 10th Amendment rights," Gibbons said. "This ticking time bomb is the single greatest environmental threat Nevada has ever seen."

The DOE's own data show that residue from nuclear weapons testing has leaked into the repository block 1,000 feet inside Yucca Mountain in less than 50 years, the petition says. The residue came from Pacific atomic bomb fallout that fell in rain and provided a marker to trace ground water.

The DOE is supposed to disqualify the site if ground water moves through the mountain in less than 1,000 years.

"At this point, it is clear that Yucca Mountain can be approved as a high-level radioactive waste dump only if the DOE and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission change or ignore their own stated regulations for an atomic waste repository," said Michael Mariotte, executive director of the NIRS, a national nuclear watchdog group based in Washington, D.C.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, said that this is a historic opportunity for Richardson not to make a big mistake and warned there would be protests to prevent Yucca from being a depository.

"The message to the Department of Energy and the nuclear waste industry is this, 'as long as you take dumping highly irridated nuclear waste in a big hole at Yucca Mountain you will meet opposition at every nuclear site along every transportation route and the dump site itself."'

The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act and its 1987 amendments say that the DOE needs one disqualifying condition to abandon the site. The petition noted two disqualifications as well as a number of unresolved issues.

Such rapid ground water travel means that major off-site sources of water for drinking and irrigating crops in the Amargosa Valley will be contaminated.

The Amargosa Valley south and west of Yucca Mountain has the largest dairy in Nevada. "With 92 percent of milk comprised of water, our children may eventually be drinking radionuclides for breakfast, lunch and dinner," the petition said.

Earthquakes, volcanos and human intrusion are other unanswered questions.

A 5.6 magnitude quake in June 1992 occurred at Little Skull Mountain next to Yucca Mountain. Last year, California Institute of Technology and Harvard scientists published a report that said that Yucca Mountain's crust has been moving over a seven-year period. The rapid ground motion could crush buried nuclear waste canisters and cause releases of radiation into the water and air.

The petition also requests Richardson to stop spending billions of dollars contributed to the Nuclear Waste Fund by nuclear industry ratepayers.

More than $3 billion has been spent on Yucca Mountain, and if it opens, it won't accept waste before 2010. Instead, the coalition suggested the funds be placed in escrow, until a suitable nuclear waste management program is created.

The petition against Yucca Mountain comes weeks before the DOE is expected to release its own report card on the nuclear waste project, known as a viability assessment.

Piersma, a public citizen, said they purposely sent the letter to Richardson right before the viability assessment and a few months before Congress convenes to give "members of Congress the ability to change the debate from interim storage to permanent storage."

"What we're looking for is more time to look at other options," Piersma said. "The question is do we need a solution today and the answer is no."

The nuclear waste debate has heated up recently after Congress, threatened by a presidential veto, failed to pass a temporary nuclear waste storage bill to put the most radioactive materials at the Nevada Test Site until Yucca Mountain is ready.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission had decided on its own to propose a special radiation limit of 25 millirems of radiation exposure at Yucca Mountain when the national standard is 15 millirems.

Earlier this month, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol Browner wrote to the commission and asked it to wait until the EPA issued its own rules for limiting exposure.

"Why would they be changing the rules?" asked Mary Olson, an NIRS nuclear waste specialist. "Nevadans have a right to know. Now we've got the whole world watching."

In Nevada opponents of the dump were elated for the nationwide support. "I'm thrilled that other people feel the way we do about Yucca Mountain," said Judy Treichel, executive director of the Nuclear Waste Task Force based in Las Vegas.

Berkley, who was elected earlier this month, said she has already started lobbying Democratic members to gain their support to stop nuclear waste from coming to Nevada.

"My job here is to represent the folks back home, and they have told me loud and clear that we do not want the nuclear dump at Yucca Mountain," Berkley said.

The Nuclear Energy Institute, meanwhile, paid for a full-page color advertisement in the Washington Post Tuesday saying how safe, clean and reliable nuclear energy is. The institute is the major fund-raising and lobbying arm of the nuclear utility industry.

Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Pete Dominici, R-N.M., said in Congressional Quarterly that he was considering "comprehensive legislation that would provide a balanced treatment for all low-emission sources of energy." Interim nuclear waste storage "might be part of that legislation," he added.

Dominici said the temporary storage bills last session were stand-alone legislation that allowed opponents of nuclear energy to "muster enough support to prevent a veto-proof majority." The Senate's passage of last year's bill fell two votes shy of the 67 needed to override a Clinton veto.