DOE hopes to ease rules for dumping waste at Yucca

Wednesday, May 17, 2000 | 10:02 a.m.

The Department of Energy hopes for a green light by fall to change guidelines for putting a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. The new guidelines would make it easier for the DOE to get the proposed repository approved.

Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the only site being studied for the nation's dump for highly radioactive waste.

Previous guidelines, written in 1984 when several sites were being considered, weighed several factors separately. Those factors included the amount of time radiation travels through ground water, cost to build a repository, seismic activity and likelihood of volcanic activity, any one of which could have forced DOE to abandon a site.

DOE now wants to measure all of those factors together, so that no one factor can sink the project. The new guidelines also allow the DOE to rely on man-made barriers, such as canisters, as well as the mountain's rock to stop the radiation.

The agency filed a draft of the revised guidelines in the Federal Register in November, and earlier this month sent a final version to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The DOE hopes to have Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval of its new guidelines to include in a site report on Yucca Mountain it plans to release in November. That report will bring officials and the public up to date on its efforts to study Yucca for burying 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste from commercial reactors and nuclear weapons development.

A repository still must have its final environmental impact statement approved by the Environmental Protection Agency, NRC and other agencies. Then the DOE must show a repository is scientifically sound before Congress and the president are asked to approve the repository. The NRC then must license the site before construction can begin.

When the DOE first proposed the guideline changes on Nov. 30, it said that scientists have a better understanding of Yucca and rather than deal with a complex approach in which several potential repository sites would be compared, it prefers to review the site as a single system.

Nevada officials protested the DOE's proposed change, because they believed the repository would fail on the basis of ground water movement. The DOE received 100 comments during its 90-day comment period that closed Feb. 28. The final report refers to those comments in general but did not make changes because of them.