Critics: DOE has changed Yucca rules

Wednesday, Dec. 1, 1999 | 11:10 a.m.

The Department of Energy offered new rules on the approval of a proposed high-level nuclear waste repository site at Yucca Mountain Tuesday -- rules that were greeted with howls by national and local critics who accused the DOE of changing the guidelines to ensure that the repository will be built.

The DOE wants to change siting guidelines issued in 1996 that spelled out certain findings that would stop a Yucca Mountain repository, such as ground water moving too fast, an earthquake or volcanic activity at the mountain.

Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the sole site under study by the DOE for the world's first high-level nuclear waste repository. The mountain has not yet passed scientific muster and will not be ready to accept 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste until 2010 at the earliest.

The DOE proposes to use complex computer models with whatever scientific information it has in hand to prove a repository will work, but no single fact should disqualify Yucca Mountain, the new rules say. The proposal was published in the Federal Register on Tuesday.

The DOE's proposal would eliminate individual problems such as rapid ground water flow from stopping the DOE from building the repository, Nevada's technical coordinator Steve Frishman said.

"What they're trying to do is change the law by regulation," Frishman said. "It's a simple attempt to avoid the law."

Both Sens. Harry Reid and Richard Bryan, D-Nev., denounced the DOE guideline.

In a letter sent to President Clinton today, Bryan said, "As it has become increasingly clear that the Yucca Mountain site cannot meet the existing siting guidelines, the DOE has attempted to ... evaluate the suitability of Yucca Mountain based on a single, and far less stringent, total system performance assessment."

"Such a change," the letter stated, "would destroy and remaining public confidence in the site characterization process and place the health and safety of over 1 million Nevadans in serious jeopardy."

"It's more of the same old game-playing," Bryan's chief of staff, Jan Neal, said this morning. "The site doesn't meet the criteria so instead of disqualifying the site they change the criteria."

Reid said he had "crave concern" with the DOE's proposal. He noted that atomic weapons fallout from Pacific Island nuclear tests reached the repository's level 1,000 feet deep inside Yucca in less than 40 years.

"That characteristic surely violated the earlier criterion that such water migration must take more than 1,000 years," Reid said.

"Generally, the changes cited in your proposed rulemaking do very little to dispel the perception that earlier guidelines are being abandoned because they would disqualify Yucca Mountain from any further consideration as a permanent disposal site," Reid wrote in a letter to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.

"This is a transparent effort to change the rules of the game in the third quarter," Reid said. "It's a rule change that could threaten the health and safety of the people of Nevada."

Reid and Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev., were successful this year in forcing Senate Republicans to abandon efforts to store nuclear waste temporarily at the Nevada Test Site, a former proving ground for nuclear weapons experiments.

Public Citizen's Mass Energy Project senior policy analyst Amy Shollenberger called the DOE proposal "another blatant attempt to ensure that Yucca Mountain is approved as a geologic repository for radioactive waste, even though all of the evidence suggests that it will endanger the public, the environment and future generations."

Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group launched by Ralph Nader, has been a leading critic of the DOE's attempt to weaken safeguards at the site. Shollenberger said if DOE is successful and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which must license the site, can eliminate a ground water radiation limit, the region's aquifer could be destroyed.