Nevada lawmakers say DOE changing Yucca rules in middle of the game

Scott Sonner

Wednesday, Dec. 1, 1999 | 11:26 a.m.

RENO, Nev. - State officials and local activists railed against a proposed nuclear waste site in Nevada today as Sen. Harry Reid accused the Energy Department of trying to change the siting rules in the middle of the game.

Reid, D-Nev., said a DOE proposal published in the Federal Register on Tuesday would lower the standards by which the high-level radioactive storage facility could be located at Yucca Mountain northwest of Las Vegas.

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

Reid, assistant Democratic leader of the Senate, attacked the proposed rule change in a letter to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.

He said the proposal would abandon previous guidelines disqualifying the site if it were shown that surface water penetrated the site over 1,000 years.

The senator told Richardson it has been proven that surface water has penetrated the repository depths in less than 40 years at Yucca Mountain.

"The Department of Energy is quietly attempting to lower the bar for bringing nuclear waste to Nevada," said Reid, who also is the ranking Democrat on the Senate appropriations subcommittee that funds the DOE.

The Energy Department had no immediate response to Reid's letter, a spokeswoman at headquarters in Washington said today.

Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., said it was "another attempt by the Department of Energy to make a square peg fit in a round hole.

"Yucca Mountain is not every going to meet the design requirements that were set out for a nuclear repository," Gibbons said in a telephone interview from Las Vegas.

"The DOE and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are trying to change the rules and change the design so that Yucca Mountain fits. It's an attempt to bypass the safety requirements set out in law," he said.

Meanwhile, local activists and state officials who planned to testify at a DOE public hearing on the dump site in Reno today directed their strongest criticism at the potential dangers of a spill in a wreck of a train hauling waste to Nevada.

John Hadder of Citizen Alert said as much as 70,000 metric tons of highly radioactive waste could be sent to Nevada in as many as 96,000 truck shipments and 20,000 rail shipments over a period of 24 to 39 years.

Hadder and Robert Loux, executive director of the State of Nevada Office of the Governor's Agency for Nuclear Projects, said the DOE's draft environmental impact downplays the potential for transportation problems.

"What is disturbing is that the DOE's evaluation of the poential impacts is seriously deficient," Loux told the Reno-Gazette Journal.

A 1 percent spill from a shipment of a half metric ton could contaminate 42 square miles, Loux said.

It would cost anywhere from $4.5 billion to $20 billion to clean up such a spill, he said.

The public comment period on the DOE's environmental review closes Feb. 9. The department expects a final version of the EIS to be ready by November 2000.