Senators to look at other options for burying waste

Thursday, June 17, 1999 | 11:22 a.m.

Key senators have agreed to re-examine the policy of the United States to bury high-level nuclear waste permanently, most likely 1,000 feet beneath Yucca Mountain.

Sens. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and Harry Reid, D-Nev., led the way to insert language in a bill passed by a Senate committee Wednesday that would require a look at alternatives to burying the nation's nuclear waste 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas by 2010.

The agreement came in new legislation proposed by Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, who pushed to abandon temporary waste storage at the Nevada Test Site after five years of congressional efforts to pass any measure failed.

Reid said Republican-backed efforts to force the nuclear waste into the state had suffered several major blows.

"They are no longer confident that burying this waste underground and then pretending to forget about it is the right thing to do in this case," Reid said.

One of the alternatives Domenici has been exploring is transmutation, which eliminates much of the radiation from the spent uranium and plutonium. The other is reprocessing, which would make the radioactive waste usable again as fuel for nuclear power plants. Reprocessing technology was abandoned in the 1970s because of the cost and fears that the material could be stolen by terrorists.

Although Domenici supports nuclear power, he has said the nation is doing a poor job of managing its nuclear wastes.

The senator last year directed $4 million to research of new transmutation technology developed within the past two years at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M., Domenici's home state. The research may deliver a way to make highly radioactive wastes far less dangerous.

No lab is doing formal research on reprocessing yet.

A Department of Energy official said last week that transmutation could take decades to prove its technology. Domenici says the Los Alamos lab may have working technology within 20 years.

In addition, DOE Yucca Mountain Project Director Russ Dyer said, even if the technology is proven as "a magic wand that can reduce the volume," it would still leave piles of radioactive byproducts that would need to be kept out of the environment for hundreds of years.

Under current plans, a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain would be designed to contain buried waste for 10,000 years.

Murkowski's bill also shifted responsibility to set radiation limits for a repository at Yucca Mountain to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission instead of the Environmental Protection Division.

"I still have concerns," Reid said, "about allowing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, instead of the EPA, to determine safety standards for Nevadans."

Current law requires the EPA to set radiation exposure limits, expected to be about 15 millirems per year from a repository. That amount to a person is less than a single chest X-ray.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission proposed an exposure limit of 25 millirem per year, but officials have said the commission would adopt the lower standard if EPA does.