Scientists will study how to reverse Yucca plan if need be

Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2000 | 11:15 a.m.

An independent scientific panel is reviewing a process that would allow federal officials to pull the plug on a proposed high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain at any time they feel the project is not safe.

The U.S. Department of Energy, which is charged with disposing of 77,000 tons of commercial and defense radioactive waste, has asked the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences to detail how the decision-making process on Yucca Mountain could be taken step by step, allowing the agency to reverse itself at any point.

"The DOE is asking us to look at this issue fresh," Kevin Crowley, a National Research Council staff member, said. "There are no irreversible decisions using this approach."

Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the only site under study to become the world's first high-level nuclear waste repository. If it is found scientifically sound and is licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it could open by 2010.

Congress in 1987 established Yucca Mountain as the sole site to be considered, but the process the DOE now is researching could stop a nuclear waste repository, even if it is approved politically, at any time.

"At any step in the process, we can reverse it," said Ivan Itkin, director of the DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management.

Next year the repository goes back into the political arena. The president is expected to recommend in July whether to build the repository, and then Congress would vote whether to fund it.

Itkin told the Sun Friday that approaching a nuclear repository step by step at Yucca is sound.

Such a process makes the decision "step-wise and reversible," Itkin wrote to National Research Council Chairman Bruce Alberts in an Oct. 19 letter.

However, Robert Loux, director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, warned that the National Academy of Sciences may not be truly independent.

"They are hired as contractors," said Loux, who had not heard of Itkin's proposal this morning. "The DOE routinely hires them."

Itkin said that with the proposed process, if any major flaw were discovered by scientists -- from the current task of designing the dump to sealing it in the second half of the century -- the process could be stopped.

"This method addresses the ability to reverse the important decisions as we move ultimately to permanent disposal," Itkin said.

Rather than building a nuclear waste repository under the approach the DOE is using, Itkin said taking a staged, or step-by-step, approach to the project would add a "flexible" measure to the process.

Such an approach does not support temporary storage of nuclear waste in Nevada, Itkin said, a step Congress has been trying to take since the early 1990s. President Clinton repeatedly has vetoed any temporary waste storage in Nevada.

"This activity in no way promotes temporary nuclear waste storage," Itkin said.

Crowley said the independent scientific panel is planning to schedule a workshop after the first of the year.

Once everyone involved in nuclear waste management has weighed in, the council would write a report to the DOE on the best way to proceed, Crowley said.

He added that Congress may or may not decide to go ahead with Yucca Mountain next July.

"It could be that the project is too expensive," he said. "There could be a lot of things that could change it."

The National Research Council will look at U.S. nuclear waste policy but report on the issue in such a way that it could help foreign countries with their own decisions, Crowley said.

"This issue is global. It doesn't just apply to Yucca Mountain," he said.