Yucca plan gains political support

Friday, June 22, 2001 | 11:24 a.m.

The prospect of Yucca Mountain becoming a repository for the nation's waste gained political support Thursday amid the doubts of independent scientists who questioned the depth of the Department of Energy's study.

Senate Energy Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., said he would support a nuclear repository at Yucca Mountain if the DOE determines the site to be safe. Bingaman's comments run counter to those made by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-South Dakota, who said last month the proposal would die under a Democratically controlled Senate.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham could recommend approval of the site, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, to President Bush by the end of the year, DOE officials said during Thursday's meeting in Las Vegas.

Scientists, during a meeting of Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board members Thursday, called the DOE's data "highly simplified, highly idealized" and "strikingly ambiguous."

The comments were made as the board -- a group of independent scientists charged with overseeing the DOE's research -- awaits more than 1,300 pages of the DOE study containing new evidence regarding the viability of Yucca as a repository for nuclear waste.

The DOE reports presented Wednesday and Thursday show that people within 12 to 20 miles of the site would be exposed to small amounts of radiation from the about 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste buried inside Yucca Mountain. The report also states that radiation could move through the saturated zone and into the ground water in fewer than 1,000 years.

Government scientists said they are relying on titanium drip shields to prevent moving water from corroding buried containers inside the mountain.

Nevertheless, some review board members criticized the DOE for the limited information on radiation and its effect on the population, as well as the inherent problems of using computer models to predict the state of the project 100,000 years from now.

The DOE predicts that no radiation will escape the repository during its first 10,000 years of operation.

Scant laboratory results do not help the DOE's case, board member Paul Craig, an emeritus engineering professor at the University of California, said. The data are "strikingly ambiguous," he said.

"What does it mean? Is the repository incredibly robust or is something drastically wrong?" Craig asked.

DOE officials insisted that the new information builds confidence in regard to the viability of the site.

"There are people in the Yucca Mountain Project that want to bring it back here, to zero," Senior Policy Adviser William Boyle said, pointing to radiation exposure curves during a slide show. "Perhaps they don't realize they will have to pay the price of getting to zero."

Craig said he was frustrated.

"It doesn't yet do the job in my estimation," Craig said of the array of DOE computer models.

Corrosion expert Alberto Sagues, also a board member, said experiments that implemented a metal alloy -- C-22 -- were "highly simplified, highly idealized" by the DOE scientists.

Something as simple as changing the material used to hold the metal, even during a laboratory experiment, could dramatically change the outcome, he said.

"I have a lot of concern about the results," Sagues said.

As did Kalynda Tilges, nuclear coordinator for Citizen Alert, a Nevada watchdog group.

"I'm a wife, a mother and a grandmother," Tilges said. "But, according to the DOE, I am also a dose receptor."

Tilges also questioned whether the DOE has considered radiation in ground water, the result of more than 1,000 nuclear weapons experiments at the Nevada Test Site, in addition to contamination from stored waste at Yucca Mountain.

The Denver Post contributed to this report.