Firm renews proposal to bury waste in salt caverns

Tuesday, March 6, 2001 | 11:33 a.m.

An oil and gas exploration company has revived an idea to bury deadly radioactive wastes in salt caverns 10,000 feet under land or sea, a plan the federal government had put to rest.

A Strategic Environmental Technologies executive announced last week that the company was reviving a 2-year-old alternative to a Yucca Mountain repository, one that would keep nuclear shipments off America's roads and rails.

Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the only site under study by the government to dispose of the nation's 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste.

The Yucca site would require shipments of waste to travel through 43 states by truck or train.

Strategic Environmental Technologies has developed a boring machine that can go 10,000 to 12,000 feet straight down into the earth -- below ground water levels -- SET's president and 90 percent owner Robert Gardes of Lafayette, La., said. Once the boring has reached that level, up to 100 tunnels can be drilled horizontally to hold the waste, he said.

In comparison, nuclear waste canisters would be buried roughly 1,000 feet below ground, which is 1,000 above the ground water level at Yucca Mountain.

"Why salt?" Gardes asked. "It insulates heat and it's plastic, so it would mold around the nuclear wastes if multiple barriers failed. Salt does not have fractures or cracks."

Suitable salt beds for such disposal exist beneath the Gulf of Mexico, west Texas and New Mexico, Gardes said.

Instead of shipping the nuclear waste across the country by truck or by train, a ship escorted by two military destroyers would bring the waste to the below-sea sites or to ports near the land-based sites, Gardes said.

"After all, most of the nuclear power plants are on the East Coast," he noted.

If nuclear waste is buried in salt under the ocean, such as the Gulf of Mexico, they would be irretrievable, Gardes said. On the other hand, bury them in salt caverns under western Texas or in New Mexico, and the nuclear wastes could be retrieved, he said.

The DOE's approach to Yucca Mountain comes from old mining techniques, not deep bore-hole technology, he said. "The technology we are talking about wasn't available when the DOE began studying Yucca Mountain."

Deep bore-hole techniques advance all the time, Andrew Hanson, an assistant professor who specializes in petroleum geology at UNLV, said. The deepest bore hole in North America was drilled to a depth of 25,000 feet in Wyoming last year, he said.

While salt could contain nuclear wastes, miners would have to make room for it deep in the earth, he said.

Salt domes below the earth's surface have been mined and proposed as sites for waste burial, Hanson said, "but you still have to make space for the wastes."

The Waste Isolation Pilot Project near Carlsbad, N.M., opened in 1998 to contain plutonium defense waste, used such salt caverns.

Drillers would have to create space by dissolving the salt with liquids under the company's scheme or with large boring bits, Hanson said. "For storage, you have to create space somehow," he said.

If Yucca Mountain doesn't pass scientific muster, the DOE will need an alternative proposal, Gardes said.

Strategic Environmental Technologies contacted the DOE two years ago about the alternative disposal method, but heard nothing, he said.

"Personally, I think Yucca Mountain is a disaster," Gardes said. "It's above the water table, the volcanic ash that made it ought to tell you where it came from."

The last volcanic activity in the area occurred about 70,000 years ago, U.S. Geological Survey scientists have said. A 5.6 magnitude earthquake occurred less than 12 miles from Yucca Mountain in June 1992.

The deep bore-hole solutions would save billions, Gardes said. Instead of spending more than $58 billion to build a repository inside Yucca Mountain, his company can do the job for $7 billion and start within five to seven years, Gardes said.

Both the Department of Energy, which is studying Yucca Mountain, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the agency that would permit building and operating a repository, said the idea for deep burial has been investigated and abandoned.

After Congress singled out Yucca Mountain as the lone site for study in 1987, the DOE did not pursue such alternatives as deep subseabed disposal of commercial reactor fuel and nuclear weapons wastes, because international law forbids it, spokesmen for both agencies said Monday.

However, the sites suggested by Gardes in the Gulf of Mexico are not in international waters.

"It sounds good," said the NRC's Breck Henderson of Arlington, Texas, after hearing the proposal. But the DOE did study the idea, he noted.

The late Charles Hollister, a subseabed researcher at Woods Hole, Mass., wrote in 1992 and 1997 that nuclear wastes could be buried below the ocean's floor -- but not necessarily thousands of feet -- where it would stay put for millions of years.

The DOE and the National Academy of Sciences both suggested continuing research on subseabed nuclear disposal, but Congress never funded that approach, said Steven Nadis of Cambridge, Mass., a science writer who co-authored two articles with Hollister before he died in a Wyoming hiking accident in 1999.

Subseabed disposal differs from the deep bore-hole method because the waste is buried in the muddy layers beneath the sea, rather than thousands of feet under the bottom of the ocean.

The International Maritime Organization in London has promoted banning any such nuclear waste dumping in the oceans, and the United States has signed onto the ban along with 12 other nations. The proposal could become international law by 2003.

Asked why his company came forward with the idea, Gardes said he believes the Bush administration will listen.

"When people ask me whether I'm Democrat or Republican, I tell them I'm American," he said. "I think President Bush is reasonable."