Guinn, Del Papa urge DOE to delay Yucca action

Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2001 | 8:47 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- Gov. Kenny Guinn and Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa are asking Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham to delay recommending Yucca Mountain as the nation's nuclear waste repository.

The timing of their request is critical because Abraham plans to make a recommendation about the Yucca site to President Bush in the coming weeks. And that recommendation will be based on new federal site suitability guidelines that take effect Friday, which Nevada officials plan to immediately challenge in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The new DOE rules allow the government to rely more on metal waste storage containers to isolate waste from the environment, as opposed to the geologic advantages of underground tunnels at Yucca Mountain.

Nevada officials say the DOE is changing the rules because studies at the Yucca site have raised doubts about whether the site itself could contain radioactive waste for thousands of years.

Guidelines for selecting a site, Guinn and Del Papa said, "are neither legally nor scientifically sound," and the two want a chance to challenge the guidelines in court before Abraham makes his recommendation.

The governor and attorney general, in a letter to Abraham Monday, said the guidelines are "scientifically specious and blatantly violative of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act." The guidelines, they said, would permit "literally any site in the world" to be designated as a nuclear repository.

In their letter, Guinn and Del Papa included a report from Victor Gilinsky, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who was hired by the state to review the rules.

Original Department of Energy guidelines required that engineered barriers -- such as high-tech alloy waste casks covered by "drip shields" -- would never be used to compensate for poor site geology, Gilinsky said. He said the "natural barriers were to be the primary basis for repository site selection and approval."

And the containers in which the nuclear waste would be stored have yet to be proven structurally sound, Gilinsky said.

"There could be an error in analysis or in the research. There could be an undiscovered manufacturing flaw that affects all the containers," he said.

As a result, he said, it is possible that radiation could leak from the casks.

Gilinsky said the department has spent $8 billion developing Yucca so far, and construction and operation of the facility will cost another $50 billion. He expects that to be a low estimate.

"It is a gigantic amount to risk on a review process that still has many technical and regulatory hurdles to cross."

He said the "selection of a nuclear waste repository should be based primarily on its natural, geologic characteristics, and not those of an engineered waste container which could be placed almost anywhere as appropriately as it could be in Nevada."

Del Papa said it would be unwise for the energy secretary to proceed in the approval process, "particularly in light of technical defects in the site identified by the National Academy of Science, the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board and others."

Guinn and Del Papa agreed with findings in a draft of a General Accounting Office audit, which concluded the DOE is not ready to recommend the site to President Bush.

Bush has said the selection will be based on scientific evidence and would not be influenced by politics.