NRC stiffens attack against DOE’s nuclear waste study

Benjamin Grove

Friday, Jan. 14, 2000 | 10:24 a.m.

ROCKVILLE, Md. -- Critics of the plan to bury the nation's nuclear waste in Nevada have panned the U.S. Department of Energy's study of how waste would affect the environment since the report was released in August.

Environmentalists joined Nevada's members of Congress and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in saying the 1,600-page study was flawed in several ways. For one, the study did not thoroughly examine train and truck routes that the waste would follow to Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, critics said.

Now the Maryland-based Nuclear Regulatory Commission is making its objection more official.

The commission's Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste on Thursday drafted a letter to commission chairman Richard Meserve that recommended the Department of Energy produce a more thorough final study.

"There wasn't enough information about alternative transportation scenarios," committee chairman John Garrick said after the meeting. "And we wanted more information about what the environmental impacts would be on those alternative routes. It was a very superficial treatment."

The commission is a powerful player in the Yucca plan. The commission must approve the Department of Energy's application to bury waste at Yucca before any waste is shipped to Nevada. The DOE is scheduled to complete that application next year.

The panel also recommended in the letter that the DOE focus on Yucca studies and stop wasting time studying what would happen if the Yucca plan is scrapped and the waste remains at the power plants.

"It's nonsense," Milton Levenson, a private consultant who advises the committee, said after the meeting. "A 'no-action' scenario suggests that the waste would be left at 100 sites across the country for 10,000 years. That's never going to happen."

Critics disagree. They counter that the power plants should keep the waste on-site. They say new technologies may one day reveal how to quickly break waste down.

Congress in 1987 designated Yucca Mountain as the only site to be studied for nuclear waste burial. The utility companies that run the nation's nuclear power plants say they can't afford to continue storing waste, or say they don't have room to do it.

Congress is likely to continue debating the Yucca Mountain proposal this session, which begins Jan. 24. Nevada lawmakers still hope to kill the plan through legislation.