DOE to hear public on Yucca

Sunday, Sept. 26, 1999 | 9:41 a.m.

To find out the times and exact locations of the scheduled hearings, call 1-800-967-3477. Or go to the DOE's website: www.ymp.gov

Sept. 27: Amargosa Valley

Sept. 30: Pahrump

Oct. 5: Goldfield

Oct. 14: Boise, Idaho

Oct. 19: Ely

Oct. 21: Atlanta, Ga.

Oct. 26: Washington, D.C.

Nov. 4: Lone Pine, Calif.

Nov. 9: Denver

Nov. 16: Caliente

Dec. 1: Reno

Dec. 7: Austin

Dec. 9: Crescent Valley

Jan. 11: Las Vegas

Jan. 13: Salt Lake City

Jan. 19: St. Louis

Date not yet set: Carson City

The Department of Energy begins hearings this week on its environmental impact statement for a proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, and the debate could become as hot as the radioactive rods the agency plans to ship to Nevada.

By law the Department of Energy has to allow the public to weigh environmental impacts of a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in detail -- from building to operating to eventually closing it.

The federal agency plans to do that in 17 hearings in Nevada and across the country. The first one is in Amargosa Valley on Monday. The Las Vegas hearing is scheduled for Jan. 11.

The DOE will accept written public comments until Feb. 9.

The 1,400-page draft environmental impact statement produced by the DOE offers two alternatives for Yucca Mountain: build a repository or don't.

This impact statement differs significantly from most, because Congress ordered the DOE to consider only those two alternatives.

The DOE will not look at alternative ways to store or manage the waste. The only solution posed in the draft statement is deep geological burial inside Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The other alternative is to leave the wastes at reactors and DOE sites across the country indefinitely.

'This is a process'

"We are looking at potential impacts from a repository and without one," the DOE's Wendy Dixon said. Dixon is in charge of preparing the impact statement and producing a final draft.

"This is a process, not a mandate for a certain result," Dixon said, noting that a decision on whether to proceed with a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain will not be made until 2001.

Under the proposed action, the DOE would build, operate, monitor and eventually close a repository 1,000 feet beneath the surface of Yucca Mountain to dispose of irradiated fuel from 111 U.S. reactors and high-level nuclear waste left from 50 years of building weapons at DOE sites across the country.

The proposal includes shipping the 70,000 tons of waste from commercial reactors and DOE sites to Yucca Mountain. Each ton would fit into a standard refrigerator. Although the final design for the containers is not complete, after protective shielding is added, each burial cask could be the size of a tractor-trailer truck.

The nuclear waste will include 50 tons of plutonium, the most radioactive material. Plutonium has a radioactive lifespan of 24,500 years. Most of the material that would be stored in the repository would have a lifespan of hundreds of years. But the fact is, the deadly plutonium is mixed throughout the waste like raisins in a loaf of bread.

For planning purposes, the DOE estimates that waste canisters would begin arriving at the repository by 2010 and burying them would end in 2033. A bill in Congress could bring the waste to Yucca Mountain as soon as 2007.

Possibility of retrieval

The DOE does not believe the wastes will ever have to be retrieved. The draft impact statement does not even consider retrieval of the buried canisters as part of the repository scenario.

Under current law, the DOE would have to be able to retrieve any leaking containers in the first 50 years of the repository's operation. But after that, the law is vague as to what would happen.

The total cost of the repository is estimated at $28.8 billion by the DOE.

The DOE study addresses effects on water, radiation exposure risks, dangers of earthquakes and volcanos, risks along transportation routes and impact on cultural resources.

Overall, the impact statement says that Yucca Mountain will contain the highly radioactive wastes using the natural rock and manmade canisters to protect the public and environment from radiation leaks for hundreds of thousands of years. The impact statement examines the environmental consequences, and the DOE now is seeking public comment on whether those risks are acceptable.

Those comments will be incorporated into a final report to the president, who will decide whether to send it to Congress for approval. The repository plan then would go before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for licensing, a process that takes three to five years. Then a repository could be built.

The DOE is counting on environmental features of Yucca Mountain, such as its dryness and remoteness, and engineered barriers such as disposal containers and shields, to keep the buried waste from escaping.

The impact statement looks at six factors that could affect that plan.

The repository itself would be carved into Yucca's volcanic rock 570 to 1,200 feet above the water table. The ground water level varies that much inside the mountain.

One of the concerns the DOE examines in the statement is an increase of future rainfall that could raise the water table, the DOE's Dan Kane said. Kane is a nuclear engineer in charge of license application design selection.

If the climate becomes cooler and wetter, rainfall and melted snows could reach the waste packages through cracks and smaller fissures.

The DOE is considering monitoring the repository for 50-_nobreak, 100- and 300-year intervals, Kane said, depending on the problems discovered by scientific studies ongoing at the mountain.

The primary path for radiation buried in Yucca Mountain to escape and endanger people is through ground water. Water invading the repository could corrode the buried containers, allowing radiation to escape.

Extreme heat might change the chemistry of the rocks, posing a threat for faster corrosion of the waste containers.

The complex layers of rock inside Yucca Mountain will be able to contain short-lived types of radiation that are only dangerous for a few decades, Kane said. But scientists are unwilling to guarantee that the mountain can safely isolate the most dangerous and long-lasting types of radiation such as plutonium and Neptunium, he said. Neptunium will remain radioactive for millions of years.

In its report, the DOE calls the risks of contamination through ground water negligible. Officials believe the combination of rock and canisters will sufficiently protect people and the environment.

Earthquakes and volcanos

The DOE also is studying what happens to ground water under Yucca Mountain when an earthquake occurs, Tim Sullivan, the DOE's team leader for site recommendation, said.

When a 5.6 magnitude earthquake occurred at Little Skull Mountain, 12 miles southeast of Yucca Mountain, on June 29, 1992, water in test wells drilled at the repository site rose 6.5 feet, Sullivan said.

In a major quake -- a magnitude 6 or greater -- the experts estimate the ground water would jump 70 feet to 105 feet, Sullivan said.

There are 36 known earthquake faults running through and around Yucca Mountain, as well as a lava cone field that exploded and oozed black magma from deep within the earth about 12 million years ago.

Yucca Mountain itself is not a volcano. But it formed from the oozing magma and belches of ash from ancient lava cones 12 to 20 miles away.

Federal scientists believe the threat from an earthquake or volcano is remote.

Another worry focuses on an overheated repository that could raise the rock's temperature above water's boiling point of 212 degrees Fahrenheit, Kane said.

Studies are under way at the mountain to figure out how extreme heat and radiation from the waste canisters might change the rock or the water contained in the mountain over time. Officials won't know until those studies are completed how great a danger overheated ground water might be.

But already DOE scientists are contemplating a solution: Tunnels would be cooled by a series of fans to remove the hot air from the areas where the containers are buried.

The impact statement also must consider radiation exposure risks to people and the environment from the proposed repository.

The statement considers environmental impacts on thousands of people living within a 50-mile radius of Yucca Mountain from 2000 on. The residents under consideration live in three counties: Nye and Clark in Nevada and Inyo County, Calif.

Besides radiation, workers, shippers and the public will be exposed to dust in the air, toxic chemicals and noise from building and closing a repository. Vehicle exhaust and minerals in the mountain's dust pose a health concern from air pollution.

The public will probably be exposed to the equivalent of one chest X-ray's worth of radiation a year, the study says. Workers are at the greatest risk, according to the impact statement, with the possibility of being exposed to five to 10 chest X-rays' worth of radiation.

The DOE does not say whether it thinks those are acceptable levels, but they are within proposed radiation exposure standards published by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. However, they would exceed standards published by the Environmental Protection Agency.

It has not yet been decided whether the NRC or the EPA will set the guidelines that will apply to Yucca Mountain.

Transportation

Although transportation routes for shipping thousands of tons of highly radioactive waste have not been chosen yet, the impact statement looks at established interstate highways and state routes that offer access to Yucca Mountain. There are no railroad lines to the mountain.

National nuclear waste routes run through 43 states and pass an estimated 53 million people who live within a mile of the transportation corridor. The impact statement estimates the radiation doses to these people at about one chest X-ray's worth of radiation per year.

The DOE does not offer an opinion on whether those are acceptable levels of exposure, leaving that to the NRC or EPA, whichever sets the radiation standards for Yucca Mountain.

One issue the impact statement does not address is the threat of a terrorist attack on shipments en route to Yucca Mountain -- a threat that the state of Nevada has raised as a critical factor.

A DOE report done in the 1980s said a radioactive release from a terrorist explosion that damaged a single shipping container could contaminate an area to the extent that 48 acres would have to be dug up and removed. In a rural area, such a cleanup would cost $46 billion, the study estimated. In an urban setting, the cost would skyrocket to more than $56 billion.

Earlier this month the Nuclear Regulatory Commission agreed to review its rules on terrorists attacking nuclear waste shipments after the state of Nevada raised new concerns about smaller, less detectable explosive devices. State officials also noted an increase of domestic terrorism since the bombing of New York City's World Trade Center in 1993 and the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Cultural resources

Cultural resources are often a forgotten part of an environmental impact statement, but the study in this section looks at how a repository would affect American Indian sites. Yucca Mountain has historical connections with the earliest human inhabitants of Southern Nevada.

It also has been a sacred mountain to Indian tribes dating back thousands of years.

The Western Shoshone and Southern Paiutes worked on their own report to the DOE, writing about effects from shipping and burying highly radioactive wastes, called "angry rocks" by the Indians, inside Yucca Mountain.

The Indians said the proposed transportation routes to the mountain violate their tribal members even after death by interrupting a soul's journey from Earth to heaven.

The DOE, while it does not address those concerns in its impact statement, has promised to meet with the tribes to address their concerns.

The environmental impact statement does not look at any effect a repository would have on the local economy, but that is also on the minds of Southern Nevadans.

A study commissioned in 1994 by the state of Nevada, which opposes waste burial at Yucca Mountain, estimated it would cost $53.8 billion for the operation, state Agency for Nuclear Projects Director Robert Loux said.

In addition to that cost, Clark County Nuclear Waste Division Director Dennis Bechtel said, the impact statement does very little analysis of local costs, such as what the stigma attached to nuclear waste would do to the tourist-based economy. Sociology researchers have studied human fears and nuclear waste raises anxiety higher than a nuclear power reactor.

He doesn't believe the DOE study takes into account all the potential problems.

"We may be stretching it by calling it an EIS (environmental impact statement)," that would fully investigate all the consequences, Bechtel said.

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