Environmentalists back Nevada’s fight against nuke waste

Monday, June 11, 2001 | 10:11 a.m.

Environmental activists from across the country told Nevada officials Friday in Las Vegas that they support the state's fight against a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.

They added that the project may have been successfully delayed, but is long from dead.

Nevada's congressional delegation has stopped temporary nuclear waste storage and stalled permanent burial of 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, for more than 14 years, national grassroots representatives said.

In 1987 Yucca Mountain was designated in federal law as the only site to be studied as a high-level nuclear waste repository. A repository was originally supposed to open by 1998, but now will not open before 2010.

Since the Democrats gained control of the Senate last week, leaders have said legislation to further the Yucca Mountain Project will not be considered this year.

The environmentalists also told the Nevada Commission on Nuclear Projects, meeting at Las Vegas City Hall, that new federal Environmental Protection Agency guidelines for how much radioactivity can escape from a proposed repository are encouraging, but not final.

The EPA standard would allow an average farmer 11 miles from the repository to be exposed to 15 millirems a year of radiation from Yucca Mountain, with a maximum of 4 millirems coming through the ground water. An average chest X-ray is 5 millirems.

That was lower than the limits suggested by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which would license the repository. The NRC advocated exposure of 25 millirems a year, with no separate ground water limit. NRC officials have said they will adopt the EPA standard when it becomes final next month.

"I was very pleased with the EPA regulations," said former governor and two-term U.S. Sen. Richard Bryan, a vehement opponent of a Yucca Mountain repository, who was attending his first meeting as a commission member.

However, a clause tacked onto the law that can remove one or the other standard could be dangerous, he warned.

The language, called a severability clause, was put into the EPA standards during a Bush administration review of the radiation exposure limits, agency officials said.

"Severability means they can pick and choose what remains in the standard," Bryan, 63, said. "The severability clause cuts both ways."

Bob Loux, executive director of the state's Agency for Nuclear Projects, agreed with Bryan.

The nuclear industry filed two lawsuits within hours of EPA releasing the standards on Wednesday, Loux said. "That might give them another shot at going back to Congress and getting the standards set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission," he said.

Grassroots activists said they can help stop the government from dumping nuclear waste in Nevada by raising national opposition to the plan.

"Yucca Mountain is flawed, that is the message to get out across the country," Scott Denman, executive director of the Safe Energy Communication Council, said. The council is a national energy policy group formed in 1980 to counteract "propaganda" from the Nuclear Energy Council, the former lobbying arm of the nuclear industry.

"You are not alone," Denman told Nevadans. "You share the same values of most Americans. A nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain is not inevitable."

Representatives from Massachusetts, Georgia, Utah and Washington, D.C., activist groups echoed that sentiment.

Congressional action on Yucca Mountain could be as far away as 2003, after the next elections, Don Hancock, director of the Southwest Research and Information Center of Albuquerque, N.M., said.

No matter how much the public opposes a Yucca repository, it will take an act of Congress to stop it, Hancock said.

"Yucca Mountain is still in the law," Hancock said. "Until it is removed by Congress from the law, it could return as a solution after the congressional elections in 2002 or after the presidential election in 2004."

Glenn Carroll of Atlanta, who has fought nuclear utilities from expanding in the South for years, said it is time for a national dialogue on storing radioactive wastes, mainly spent fuel pellets, on site until a sound scientific solution is offered to handle the nuclear materials.

"But first, let's stop putting $1 million a day into the rat hole at Yucca Mountain," Carroll said.

Some Department of Energy laboratories have started research into methods to transform spent nuclear fuel into something less radioactive and with less bulk.

UNLV received $3 million this year to initiate studies on advanced accelerators, a method that would allow transforming the high-level nuclear waste near the 103 existing reactors around the nation. The accelerators would not eliminate a need for a repository, but it would have to store materials for about 300 years, instead of 10,000 years.