Alternate cooling process proposed for nuke waste

Friday, June 1, 2001 | 10:37 a.m.

AMARGOSA VALLEY -- An alternate design of Yucca Mountain believed to do a better job of cooling the nuclear waste that would be buried there received a cool reception at a public hearing Thursday night.

The design was proposed earlier this month by the Department of Energy and reviewed publicly Thursday at the Longstreet Inn and Casino in this rural town 12 miles southwest of Yucca Mountain.

Officials with the DOE explained that the alternate was simply a plan to give them flexibility once construction begins if Congress, the president and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approve Yucca as a burial site for the deadly waste. The mountain is 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The alternate design would place the waste on top of the mountain in pools of water for its first 50 years, instead of immediately burying it underneath the mountain.

Immediate burial has been the plan since Yucca was chosen in 1987 as the sole site to be studied as a repository for the high-level nuclear waste produced by commercial reactors and defense activities.

Protesting the loudest Thursday night was Steve Frishman, a state consultant with the Agency for Nuclear Projects. Nevada has vehemently opposed Yucca Mountain since the idea was broached and the agency is its arm for expressing opposition.

The alternative plan would place roughly 5,500 tons of radioactive wastes in a pool of water built inside a robot controlled building on top of the mountain. No analysis has yet been done to determine whether this building could stand up to a major disaster such as an earthquake or flood.

Frishman, speaking before a DOE panel and about 50 people attending the first of three hearings on the alternative design, read a quote from Bob Loux, the executive director of the Agency for Nuclear Projects.

"There will be a rapid and possibly catastrophic heating of the damaged spent fuel in the pool," Loux wrote, referring to what would happen in the event of an earthquake or flood.

The DOE officials proposed the immediate cooling plan as a way to prevent interior heating of the mountain. Nuclear waste, which needs to be buried for a minimum of 10,000 years before it is no longer lethal, maintains temperature above the boiling point. The mountain is being built to contain 77,000 tons of waste.

Scientists fear the combined heat could change the chemistry of the rock and the naturally occurring water, which could lead to corrosion of the canisters containing the waste.

No one attending the hearing spoke in favor of the Yucca Mountain repository, which the DOE plans to open in 2010 at the earliest.

The DOE's supplement to its draft environmental impact study also describes a another cooling plan. This would be a dry, surface-level 200-acre spent-fuel storage area at the north end of the mountain that would contain about 45,000 tons of waste for up to 50 years.

Jennifer Viereck, a resident of Tecopa, Calif., just 12 miles from the mountain's border, said the DOE's latest repository design is too vague.

"We are not sure if this (the design) is premature or if the process here (Thursday's public hearing) may be illegal." She thought the meeting might be illegal because she said people attending were not given enough information to comprehend the new plan's consequences.

Kalynda Tilges of Las Vegas, who is nuclear issues coordinator for Citizen Alert, said that she worries about how fast water contaminated with radiation will flow out of the repository and expose people.

Urging the DOE to rewrite the 1,600 pages of its draft environmental impact statement, Tilges said the public has not had enough time to digest the volumes of studies under way at the mountain. And those studies are not complete.

"This country has selected a site and now we are making the rules to fit," Tilges said. "I find that wrong."