Group testifies about dangers of Yucca Mountain plan

Wednesday, Oct. 27, 1999 | 11:43 a.m.

The U.S. Department of Energy's plan to turn Yucca Mountain into a high-level nuclear waste repository would cause more deaths than leaving the wastes at existing reactors, Physicians for Social Responsibility told DOE officials Tuesday.

"We ask the DOE to put health and safety above industry profit by stopping this premature decision to truck wastes to the Yucca Mountain repository," Kimberly Roberts, a group spokeswoman, said at a hearing on Yucca Mountain in Washington.

Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the only site under study by the Department of Energy to store up to 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste from commercial nuclear reactors and Defense Department activities.

"Yucca Mountain should be removed from consideration as a permanent repository and waste should be stored at the site of origin until a safe, permanent site and transportation proposal are confirmed," Roberts said.

For example, the DOE estimates that 15 fatal cancers would result from a terrorist attack on a truck cask en route to Yucca Mountain. There are no cancer deaths if the nuclear waste remains at the reactor sites, she said.

The DOE has scheduled 17 hearings around the country to hear public concerns over environmental impacts from a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca. The Las Vegas hearing has been set for Jan. 11.

In addition to the Physicians for Social Responsibility, Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev., and state officials testified at Tuesday's hearing.

Bryan blasted the DOE's 1,400-page environmental impact study because it does not reveal the potential impacts from buried nuclear waste escaping into the ground water and the air.

The senator also noted that the nuclear industry's greatest fear is the public finding out the road and rail routes that highly radioactive shipments will follow. Using federal highways and freeways, the shipments will roll through 43 states and past 50 million people living within a half-mile of the routes.

"The DOE is well aware that the day they specify the transportation routes, the controversy over Yucca Mountain will no longer be a Nevada issue, but will be a source of extreme and vocal outrage in hundreds of communities large and small across the nation," said Bryan, who was the only one of the four-member Nevada congressional delegation to testify at the hearing.

Robert Loux, executive director of the state Agency for Nuclear Projects, testified that the DOE's study presented scenarios that are "wholly inappropriate, even absurd."

The DOE study does not describe the Yucca Mountain project in a way that allows impact analysis, he said.

"The range of possible impacts is wide, and they all lead to releases of radionuclides from the repository that contaminate a ground water source that is currently used for drinking water and agricultural purposes," Loux said, referring to Amargosa Valley which lies 12 miles south and west of the mountain.

The state's transportation consultant noted that Nevada officials have been trying to get the DOE and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the agency that will license any repository, to reexamine the consequences of terrorism and sabotage against high-level nuclear waste shipments.

While the DOE assumes that current federal safeguards protect such shipments against terrorist attacks, Nevada officials disagreed and asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to take a second look, consultant Robert Halstead said.

The NRC accepted Nevada's request and said in September it will review the state's concerns over terrorism.