NRC accused of loosening Yucca rules

Wednesday, Nov. 3, 1999 | 10:36 a.m.

Critics of a plan to regulate a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain attacked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Tuesday for a rule that appears to help the U.S. Department of Energy build the proposed dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Nevada officials, local government representatives and citizens said at a workshop in Las Vegas on the NRC's rule that the commission is loosening the limits on radiation in ground water and in air and possibly threatening people living in the shadow of the mountain.

The NRC proposes that a total of 25 millirems of radiation -- the amount received in 3 1/2 chest X-rays -- can escape the mountain and expose a person about 12 miles away each year. The NRC will include ground water contamination within that overall allowance, but will not set a specific limit for water.

In contrast the Environmental Protection Agency offered a 15-millirem limit -- equivalent to about 2 1/2 chest X-rays -- that includes that a maximum of 4 millirems can escape through the ground water per year.

Yucca Mountain is the only site being considered as a dump for 77,000 tons of spent fuel from the nation's nuclear power plants and defense-related radioactive waste. If it passes scientific muster it could open by 2010.

One key standard it must meet is how much radiation can escape the repository per year. Who sets that standard is the subject of hot debate and political maneuvering, because proponents have said a repository at Yucca Mountain could not meet the EPA standard.

The NRC would license the repository if Congress and the president approve it.

"This mountain seems to be setting its own rules," Judy Treichel, director of the citizen information group Nuclear Waste Task Force, said Tuesday.

"What would cause the regulators to go to Congress and say, 'This is a dog, this is a show-stopper?' " she asked. "We don't have that from the proposed rule."

Treichel suggested the NRC make a long, strong checklist of technical hoops that the DOE would have to jump through to receive a license for building and operating a repository at Yucca. "And make it understandable for the public," she said.

The commission by law has to ensure that radiation from 77,000 tons of highly radioactive wastes will not escape a repository inside Yucca by ordering the DOE to prove natural rock and manmade barriers will work, Keith McConnell, the NRC's section chief, said. "No one is expected to die," he said.

But Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said last week that is not what radiation experts say in a report, the fifth in a series done since the U.S. entered the nuclear age in 1945. Each version of the report has lowered the limit of radiation considered safe.

For every Amargosa Valley adult farmer who dies of cancer after drinking contaminated ground water less than 20 miles from Yucca, three children could die of cancers, because they are more vulnerable, the report estimated.

McConnell said after the workshop that the commission is planning to take another look at radiation exposure to the most sensitive populations, such as infants and children. "Obviously, we are not communicating what is in the proposed rule," he said.

The DOE's approach to burying the wastes using multiple barriers is known as "defense in depth" and requires that if some of the 100,000 nuclear storage containers fail, surrounding rock and the dry desert environment will prevent radiation from leaving the repository. No one can predict how much radiation would escape or when those failures might occur.

The mountain is riddled with 36 known earthquake faults, has rapid ground water flows and cannot contain the proposed nuclear waste load, Steve Frishman, technical policy coordinator for the state Agency for Nuclear Projects, said.

"I don't care how many engineered barriers there are, what is the performance of the site all about?" Frishman asked. The NRC officials had no answer.

To Western Shoshone spiritual leader Corbin Harney, the radiation poses a threat to Indian tribes that have been surviving for centuries in the harsh Great Basin. "Today you are buffaloed," Harney told the NRC. "You do not know what to do with the wastes."