Mayor lends name to anti-Yucca letter

Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2000 | 11:34 a.m.

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman today joined more than 100 environmental groups in demanding that Nevada's Yucca Mountain be disqualified as the site for the nation's first high-level nuclear waste repository.

Goodman was to appear at 11 a.m. today at City Hall plaza with Citizen Alert, Nevada Desert Experience and other environmental groups. Linked to the Las Vegas gathering was a press conference in Washington this morning by Nevada lawmakers and national and international organizations opposing the Yucca site.

"Today we are here to raise another red flag about another potential nuclear disaster," Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said this morning.

In a group letter to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, environmentalists asked that he disqualify Yucca on scientific grounds.

The letter was written after a copyrighted article in the Las Vegas Sun on Dec. 1 reported that an Energy Department document prepared by a Yucca Mountain contractor appeared to favor the site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. By law, the DOE is required to remain neutral during the site-selection process.

In that story, Ivan Itkin, the DOE's nuclear waste director, acknowledged that he is ready to recommend Yucca Mountain as a safe site to bury 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste.

Yucca Mountain is the only site being studied as the nation's radioactive waste repository.

Groups from 35 states signed the letter. Their main objection involved water found 1,000 feet underneath Yucca Mountain that tests showed was 50 years old or younger. This proves, the groups said, that the mountain is unfit to contain wastes for 10,000 years. Ground water could corrode the buried casks containing the wastes, meaning that radioactivity could escape to the outside environment within decades.

Ground water 1,000 feet below Yucca Mountain sampled three years ago by Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists was found to contain chlorine-36, a radioactive isotope that rode the winds from atomic bomb tests in the Pacific Ocean during the 1950s. Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists are conducting more tests to confirm the findings.

Because the bomb tests were only 50 years ago, and because the water was found 1,000 feet below the surface, the environmental groups say they are convinced, even without further studies, that water moves too fast through the mountain's fractures and faults to serve as a nuclear waste repository.

Goodman was the first public official to sign the group letter. Citizen Alert of Nevada, the Sierra Club, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Indian tribes and a group from Japan also signed it.

"We have urged you, Secretary Richardson, to disqualify the site for safety reasons," the letter said. "DOE has proven itself disingenuous."

DOE's guidelines for a repository forbid water moving into the site in less than 1,000 years.

Water could corrode the containers holding the wastes, releasing radioactivity into the environment, said Michael Mariotte, director of Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a Washington-based clearinghouse for information on the nuclear industry.

"American citizens realize that it doesn't make sense to transport nuclear waste across the country to a site that is fatally flawed," Mariotte said today at the Washington press conference.

The group letter also noted that DOE's review of environmental effects ignores the transportation of hundreds of thousands of shipments of highly radioactive wastes through 43 states, as well as the 36 recognized earthquake faults at Yucca Mountain, possible volcanic eruptions and the possibility of water flooding the repository.

The Dec. 1 story reported the contents of a 60-page draft report that DOE is supposed to give Congress by the end of this year or early next year. A two-page memo attached to the report, written by a DOE contractor, said: "The overview (the draft report) provides information that potential supporters can use in expressing support for a site recommendation.

"Suitability of the site is less of a concern to Congress than the broader issue of whether the nuclear waste problem can be solved at an affordable price in both financial and political terms," the memo says.

Reid called the memo another "scandalous episode" in the Yucca site study process and said the memo was evidence of a "secret marriage" between DOE and its contractors.

"What the secret memo said in effect was, 'All those people who oppose Yucca Mountain: here's how you handle them,' " Reid said.

Signers of the group letter say "No compromise is acceptable."

"An unsuitable site should not be used for high-level nuclear waste disposal," the letter says. "If Yucca Mountain cannot meet stringent safety standards, it must be disqualified."

In another Yucca Mountain development, the Clark County Commission voted today to approve a public information campaign for Southern Nevada residents. The campaign will emphasize the dangers of a nuclear waste repository to the Las Vegas Valley's economy and its future as a growing community.