Yucca payload grows 50 percent

Thursday, June 10, 1999 | 3:03 a.m.

A proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain may have to hold 50 percent more highly radioactive material than originally planned, the local head of the Department of Energy's Yucca Mountain Project told state officials Wednesday.

The DOE's Yucca Mountain project manager, Russ Dyer, told the state Commission on Nuclear Projects Wednesday in Las Vegas that not only wastes from commercial nuclear power plants, but also from former nuclear bomb manufacturing sites such as Hanford, Wash., and Savannah River, S.C., could send up to 105,000 tons of radioactive wastes to the repository instead of the estimated 70,000 tons.

Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the only site being studied for a national high-level nuclear waste repository. If it passes scientific muster, the soonest waste would arrive at the mountain would be 2010.

The DOE will not know for certain how much room it needs to bury U.S. high-level nuclear waste until after 2020. But the estimate Dyer mentioned Wednesday comes closer to figures compiled by the Nuclear Energy Institute, which represents the nuclear power industry. It estimates 100,000 tons of nuclear waste will need to be buried in the next 40 years, including 12,500 tons of defense waste.

State officials reacted with alarm at Dyer's news.

"The mountain is too small for the wastes," Jerry Szymanski, a former DOE geologist who now consults for Nevada's Yucca Mountain oversight office, said after the meeting. The proposed repository would become extremely hot with more radioactive wastes, he said.

As radioactive wastes sit inside the mountain for thousands of years, the heat could change the rock and water running through its cracks, causing nuclear containers to break open and release radiation, he said.

Szymanski urged the DOE to abandon the site in the 1980s after finding what he believed was evidence that hot, deep water rises inside Yucca Mountain periodically. Scientists at the DOE's Los Alamos National Laboratory also theorized that a steam explosion could disrupt the repository 1,000 feet below the mountain's surface. Other scientists have said such disasters are unlikely.

A two-year study is under way at UNLV to take a closer at the evidence and better determine the likelihood of hot water from the earth endangering the waste. But no studies have estimated what would happen with larger waste loads.

Ronald Milner, deputy director of the DOE's nuclear waste program in Washington, D.C., said Wednesday the extra capacity at Yucca Mountain is only a proposal considered as part of many environmental impacts. Any repository, whether it is at Yucca Mountain or not, is limited by law to 70,000 tons, he said.

If the extra space for nuclear waste burial is needed, Milner said, the DOE could ask Congress to raise the limit. "However, the DOE will design a repository -- if Yucca Mountain is the repository -- for 70,000 tons according to law," he said.

Dyer's comments came Wednesday as he was giving the state commission a preview of the DOE's draft environmental impact statement on Yucca Mountain, which is due on July 30. Then the public will have 90 days to comment on the statement before the report becomes final next year and goes to Congress.

Dyer explained that when the 1982 law that set the study of Yucca Mountain into motion was passed, only the existing 110 commercial reactors were considered.

After nuclear testing and the Cold War ended in 1992, the DOE began to clean up former nuclear bomb-making sites at Hanford, which processed uranium and plutonium; Rocky Flats near Denver, which produced plutonium, and Savannah River, S.C., which processed uranium. The DOE is abandoning plans to turn Savannah River's 34 million gallons of liquid nuclear weapons waste into glass blocks after 16 years and almost $500 million.

State commission members expressed concern and disgust with the DOE's short review period of three months for the coming 1,600-page draft environmental impact statement and the lack of public hearings in Carson City, the state capital, as well as Fallon and Ely, which are major rail and truck routes. The state has asked for a six-month review.

Commission Chairman Brian McKay said that the timing was "unreasonable."

None of Nevada's congressional members had heard of any plans to expand repository capacity, but they reacted with outrage. In a bipartisan effort, the members have opposed temporary or permanent nuclear waste disposal in Nevada.

Senate Democrat Richard Bryan said the news was "a surprising development," but typical of DOE's pattern on the nuclear waste project. "It's a typical DOE operation, changing the rules in the middle of the game," he said.

If it adds capacity for extra nuclear wastes, the DOE would not only have to get the law changed. It would also have to change its data for how hot the repository could become from radiation, Bryan said.

"It's my view that Yucca Mountain is never going to qualify as a repository. It's not going to happen," Bryan said.

"It's no surprise to me that the plan all along was to pick Nevada as the dumping ground for this country's nuclear waste," Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said. "Once we have the nuclear dump at 70,000 tons in our backyard, the rest is easy."

Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., called any idea for expanding the mountain's capacity as "ludicrous," citing the need for more scientific evidence. "This is the deadliest substance known to man and it is reckless to suggest that Nevada's Yucca Mountain site should accommodate any of it," he said.

The federal government canceled plans for a second high-level nuclear waste repository when Congress chose Yucca Mountain as the sole study site in 1987.

The need for extra capacity came as no surprise to the Nuclear Energy Institute.

"The (nuclear) industry generally has said the repository, wherever it ultimately is, should not have a capacity cap arbitrarily fixed pending determination of whether a second repository, in fact, would be needed," spokesman Steven Kerekes said.