Yucca water fight headed to high court

Wednesday, June 16, 1999 | 11:13 a.m.

The fight over the right to use ground water at Yucca Mountain for a proposed high-level nuclear waste repository is likely to end up in the U.S. Supreme Court, an official of the state attorney general's office said.

Deputy Attorney General Marta Adams said Tuesday that it is against state law to contaminate any ground water, and the federal government should be denied water rights for the Yucca Mountain project.

Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the only site being studied for a national repository for highly radioactive nuclear waste. If the site passes scientific muster, waste could begin arriving by 2010.

If the state denies the water rights at Yucca Mountain, it would not delay repository construction, but it could halt the building of roads to the site.

The Department of Energy, which is charged with studying and then building the repository if it is approved, has temporary rights to use ground water at Yucca Mountain until 2002. It has applied for permanent use of 430 acre-feet of ground water at the site.

Radioactive contamination should be addressed when the state hears the application for permanent use in November, Adams said during a preliminary hearing at the Las Vegas Valley Water District.

The state is the only entity willing to protect the health and safety of Nevada's people, Adams said.

The DOE has asked State Engineer Michael Turnipseed not to consider contamination issues in the hearing.

"Those issues raised by the state will turn this into a mini-licensing hearing, an argument into whether a repository should be constructed," DOE attorney Brent Kolvet said. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will decide after scientific studies are completed in 2002 whether a repository at Yucca Mountain will be licensed to operate.

Turnipseed has agreed to keep the issue of contamination out of the November hearing, noting that by state law the engineer cannot rule on constitutional or contamination issues. The Nevada Division of Environmental Protection is responsible for preventing ground water contamination, Turnipseed said.

Whichever decision Turnipseed makes on the water rights, it is likely to be challenged in court, Adams said, noting that Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa is committed to taking such a fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The DOE's own safety strategy and other documents say the ground water will dilute nuclear waste, thus lowering radiation exposure to people at the repository's boundary, Adams said.

The DOE has written into its repository plans that it will "dilute and disperse" radioactivity in the ground water after it leaves buried nuclear waste containers inside Yucca Mountain, she said. The ground water drains into the Amargosa Valley, west of the mountain.

"We are not talking about studies or standards here. Contamination is flat-out prohibited by state law," she said.

"They are not planning to isolate the waste. They plan to inject it into the environment."

But the DOE denied it plans to contaminate the environment.

DOE attorney Kolvet said contamination was not at issue in deciding whether the agency can use the water to build such things as roads at Yucca Mountain. The DOE has not completed studies at the mountain and does not have permission to build a repository for highly radioactive waste there, he said. The site is not contaminated at this time.

Radiation standards for Yucca Mountain have not been set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The state, the environmental watchdog group Citizen Alert, the Southern Nye County Conservation District and the Amargosa Water Committee have filed protests against the applications.