DOE to rule on Yucca in fall

Monday, July 2, 2001 | 11:16 a.m.

Scientific studies are incomplete and several lawsuits are pending, but the Energy Department is committed to making a recommendation this fall on whether Yucca Mountain is suitable as a high-level nuclear waste repository.

Officials said they expect Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham to deliver a recommendation to President Bush between October and December on whether Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is suitable as a repository site.

Three pending lawsuits are not expected to delay a recommendation on Yucca, the only site under study as the nation's dump for commercial reactor fuel and military waste, DOE spokesman Joe Davis said.

Nor will the lack of information for a final design of a repository to contain 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste, DOE senior policy analyst Abraham Van Luik said.

The DOE will decide on how closely to pack waste into 12,000 containers inside the mountain after the site recommendation, but before DOE asks for a building permit, Van Luik said. The DOE is approaching the project with a flexible design, he said.

"This fall the decision is whether it passes or fails," Van Luik said.

The DOE originally planned to open a repository in 1998 at Yucca Mountain. The agency has spent almost $7 billion studying the site over the past 20 years.

Scientists serving on the independent Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and an international scientific review panel are pushing the DOE for more information concerning contaminated ground water movement, seismic activity and volcanic eruptions.

The DOE's latest deadline may slip again, the scientists and analysts have said.

"If they proceed without enough information to satisfy the NRC, they may be at risk for another delay," Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects Executive Director Bob Loux said, echoing comments of the others. "The DOE is being hit from all sides by everybody who is reviewing its Yucca Mountain work."

This is not the first time progress has been delayed.

The site recommendation was expected in December, but a DOE inspector general's investigation into possible bias by DOE officials put the project on hold. In April investigators said there was no evidence that the department was biased toward the site, but they warned department officials to avoid even an appearance of favoring the mountain.

Congress also has trimmed up to $100 million from the department's budget each year since 1995. The cuts caused project managers to delay completing onsite studies and analyses that could be used in the licensing process, DOE officials said.

Another potential delay came after the Environmental Protection Agency issued new radiation exposure limits last month.

The nuclear industry sued the EPA on the same day the standards were released, and last week the state of Nevada and a coalition of environmental organizations also sued the agency.

The DOE has to recalculate all of the computer models for its proposed environmental impacts based on the EPA standards, which limit total radiation exposure to 15 millirems a year for an average person 12 miles outside the repository boundary, with 4 millirems of that allowed in ground water. An average chest X-ray is about 5 millirems.

The nuclear industry wanted a 25-millirem exposure limit with no ground water standard, and the NRC agreed with the industry. Those are the figures used in the DOE's current computer models.

"With the types of changes in the final EPA standard versus the proposed one, we see no obstacle to doing the requisite recalculations in time for a later fall submittal to the secretary," Van Luik said.

Earlier this year the DOE asked the NRC for review in June of its plan on how a repository would perform. DOE asked for a delay in the review until July, then postponed it until August.

The NRC has to license the construction and operation of a high-level nuclear waste repository. Before the commission begins formal hearings, NRC staffers are meeting with DOE scientists to review research collected over the past 20 years.

But that review is not expected to affect the site recommendation.

The DOE does not have to answer any questions from the NRC at this point, because the agency has not requested a license to build a repository, David Brooks, NRC section chief, said.

The early review gives the DOE an opportunity to fill gaps of missing scientific information the NRC might find, Brooks said.

NRC scientists already have asked for the DOE to calculate the consequences of a volcanic eruption through the repository during the first 1,000 years, when radiation doses would be high. The NRC has ordered DOE to calculate radiation doses in air, water and people -- even residents sealed inside their homes -- in case of such a catastrophic event.

Van Luik said the DOE expects NRC to request more information.

So far, the DOE does not have answers to questions concerning the speed and direction of ground water running through the mountain. If contaminated ground water escapes Yucca Mountain sooner than 10,000 years, the DOE would have to prove that people and the environment will still be safe within that period.

Geohydrologist Martin Mifflin, a former NRC scientist, said the DOE has no idea about how ground water flows from the repository to the nearby farming community of Amargosa Valley. Faults and fractures could allow water to flow quickly from the repository to the valley, 12 miles away, he said.

State consultants believe that water flowing through Yucca's fractures could corrode waste packages in less than 200 years, allowing radiation into the environment.