Nevada officials sound off on Yucca

Benjamin Grove

Friday, Jan. 21, 2000 | 11:16 a.m.

ROCKVILLE, Md., -- A group of Nevada officials today gave the Nuclear Regulatory Commission an earful of objections to a plan to bury nuclear waste in the state.

The five-member, Maryland-based commission ultimately will approve or deny the proposal to bury more than 77,000 tons of the nuclear waste from around the nation inside Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"There is no group that wants this facility to be safe more than this group of communities from Nevada," said Les Bradshaw, manager of the Department of Natural Resources and Federal Facilities for Nye County.

At issue today was an environmental study the Department of Energy conducted to assess how the nuclear waste storage might affect the state's land, people and water.

The department is conducting studies at Yucca and will file the government's application to store the waste there. Utility companies that own the nation's nuclear power plants -- most of them are east of the Mississippi -- say they cannot store their own waste forever.

Officials from the state of Nevada, Clark, Nye, Lincoln, Churchill and Lander counties sounded the concerns they have repeated since the environmental study was released in August.

"Our overall impression of the document is that it is fundamentally and legally flawed from a number of perspectives," said Robert Loux, director of the nuclear waste project office for the state of Nevada.

"You can't open a page in this document and find something that isn't of a flawed nature."

Loux handed the commission a brief outline of 16 concerns. He described several. He said the study did not include enough details on the layout of the storage area deep below the mountain's surface, or come close to adequately describing the transportation routes that trucks and trains hauling the waste would follow.

Loux also said the plans relied too much on metal storage containers to keep the waste from leaking to the outside world.

The law specifies that the waste should be isolated by underground burial.

"This is no longer a geologic disposal, it just happens to be under the surface," Loux said. "You virtually could take these waste packages -- according to the DOE they last thousands of years -- and place them virtually anywhere."

The group hammered the transportation issue.

"At a minimum, there should be a description of what the transportation routes would be," said Dennis Bechtel, planning manager for Clark County's nuclear waste division.

Two national Native American leaders said Nevada tribes have not been represented enough in Yucca planning. They said the tribes have no money or expertise to independently evaluate how the nuclear waste would affect their sacred lands.

"I don't think Congress has done a good job in looking after these tribes and giving those tribes technical teams to respond to this (study)," said Robert Holden, director of the National Congress of American Indians' nuclear waste project.

"They are sitting on the sidelines with no resources. These are the people who have been living in these lands for thousands of years and will continue to live there."

Nevada tribes consider part of the Yucca area's landscape sacred as a part of their "stories of creation and afterlife," said Richard Arnold, a representative of the Native American Tribal Organizations Group.

"We need to go on trails to get to that afterlife," Arnold said. "Our trails go through that area."