NRC rapped for sanitized LV report

Benjamin Grove

Thursday, Dec. 16, 1999 | 11:13 a.m.

ROCKVILLE, Md. -- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is reaching out to Nevadans who are skeptical of anything nuclear, especially a proposal to dump the nation's high-level radioactive waste in the state.

But one critic said Wednesday that the commission's effort to communicate with Nevadans is half-hearted at best.

The NRC eventually would have to approve the license and set safety regulations for a proposed nuclear tomb inside Yucca Mountain, where the Department of Energy would store 77,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste produced at power plants around the country.

Many Nevada officials and residents have been critical of the Yucca plan since it was launched in 1983.

Some of them peppered NRC officials with their concerns at an October meeting in Las Vegas. In response, members of an NRC committee are drafting a letter to their boss, NRC chairman Richard Meserve, outlining the concerns raised at the meeting.

The NRC's Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste spent several hours during a work session Wednesday editing the letter, carefully considering every word and hyphen.

But critic Amy Shollenberger said the letter does not contain all the concerns raised. The committee edited out some Nevadan concerns at a work session a month ago, she said.

"Technically, this is part of their 'strategic plan' to build public confidence," Shollenberger, an analyst for the advocacy group Public Citizen, said during the meeting. "It's all for show."

The committee chairman, John Garrick, countered, "All the major stuff is in the letter." The NRC cares about public opinion because Nevadans can still influence whether waste is eventually buried at Yucca, Garrick said.

The committee letter makes several recommendations to NRC chairman Meserve, among them to involve Nevada residents more in decision making and to make the NRC's decision-making more "transparent" to outsiders.

But winning over Nevadans won't be easy, NRC officials know.

"The point is not to win them over, but to let them know who we are, and to let them know that they have a voice in the process," NRC commissioner Greta Dicus said, during an earlier meeting Wednesday.

The NRC also finds itself on the unpopular side in a battle with the Environmental Protection Agency over what constitutes a safe level of radiation that would be emitted by waste buried in Yucca Mountain. The NRC's recommended level is 25 millirem a year. The EPA's standard is more strict: 15 millirem, with a separate 4 millirem rate for groundwater. A millirem is a basic unit of measure used to determine damage caused by radiation.

That topic surfaced briefly during NRC meetings Wednesday.

"From the standpoint of the public, it's two numbers, and the lower one has got to be better," said NRC commissioner Jeffrey Merrifield. "How do we get beyond that?"

An NRC hired consultant answered, "Obviously, it's not an easy thing to do, or it would have been done a long time ago."