DOE advocates method that could lead to Yucca approval

Friday, Feb. 4, 2000 | 10:57 a.m.

Approval of Yucca Mountain as the sole place in the country for burying deadly nuclear waste could be granted despite findings that Yucca would be unsafe, under a new approval method advocated by the Department of Energy.

With such a method, one negative factor, no matter how serious, might not be grounds for disqualifying Yucca Mountain.

Standing 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas in an uninhabited open-desert area, Yucca Mountain is a top priority of the state, which for more than a decade has been fighting the federal government's plans.

If Yucca is approved, it would need to be secure for 10,000 years. It would hold 77,000 tons of radioactive waste from the 73 nuclear reactors around the country and 7,000 tons of weapons-grade nuclear waste.

Under the proposed new approval method, instead of following the current checklist of possible disqualifying factors, such as contaminated ground water or earthquakes, DOE scientists would engineer a computer model -- containing the positive and negative factors in building the repository at Yucca Mountain.

All the factors would then be evaluated as a whole, with no one factor likely to be regarded as disqualifying.

The change, first proposed in November and awaiting a decision from Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, was explained Thursday by William Boyle, a DOE senior policy advisor, during a public hearing at the St. Tropez hotel.

Boyle said the scientists will build the computer model with a range of scenarios of what can happen over 10,000 years and then see how the mountain can perform.

Many people at Thursday's hearing spoke against the shift.

The DOE's current guidelines are a "fair ruler" to measure how robust the mountain is, veteran nuclear waste consultant Atef Elzeftany said.

"I have not seen a computer model in my entire life that is accurate," Elzeftany told DOE officials.

Robert Loux, of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, said the proposed rule does not match the intent of Congress written in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982.

"Our view is the DOE's proposal violates the spirit and the letter of the law," Loux said.

When President Ronald Reagan signed the act in 1983, Yucca's volcanic rock shouldered the burden of protecting people and the environment from radiation, Loux said. By 1990 the DOE had shifted its reliance from the mountain to man-made barriers such as containers and underground shielding, he said.

Senior state Deputy Attorney General Marta Adams said that the DOE was proposing a single guideline that excludes threats from earthquakes, volcanoes, socio-economic factors and transportation.

Hydrologist Earle Dixon said the DOE has not addressed the current radioactive ground water contamination from 41 years of nuclear experiments at the Nevada Test Site that could one day combine with Yucca's runoff.

"We don't address the existing contamination very well at all," said Dixon of the UNLV environmental studies program and a member of the DOE's Citizen Advisory Board reviewing Test Site activities. He suggested evaluating current contamination.

The DOE's shift to look at how Yucca performs as a system might work for building an automobile, but the mountain is too complex, said Dennis Bechtel, Clark County's Nuclear Waste Division director. Public health and safety concerns must be spelled out, he said.

Even the nuclear industry -- which has sued the DOE over its failure to remove highly radioactive waste from nuclear power plants and transport it to a repository -- has opposed the DOE's proposed formal rule.

"It's too inflexible," said Steven Kraft of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's lobbying arm. He suggested the DOE instead issue guidelines that do not need such a formal hearing process.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., who did not appear at the hearing, wrote a letter to Energy Secretary Richardson asking him to delay any decision on Yucca until radiation ground water standards are set by the EPA. Both the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the EPA have proposed standards, but the EPA proposal is more strict.

Perhaps it is time to evaluate another site, said Amargosa Valley farmer Ralph McCracken, who grows pistachio trees about 12 miles southwest of Yucca.

"The big question is, is it safe? Is underground storage of nuclear waste possible?" he asked.

The DOE's proposed guideline change matches those of two other regulators, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the EPA, Boyle said. And the independent Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board endorsed the DOE's proposal, chairman Jared Cohon said.

It would replace the individual checklist -- which contains scores of disqualifying factors -- which the DOE first set up to compare three potential sites in Nevada, Washington and Texas.

Congress singled out Yucca in 1987 as the only site for the DOE to study.