Ex-DOE official says mothball Yucca dump

Wednesday, May 30, 2001 | 11:11 a.m.

The principal author of the policy that identified Yucca Mountain as a potential site for a high-level nuclear waste repository now says the project plans should be scrapped.

W. Kenneth Davis, who was the Energy Department's undersecretary from 1981 to 1983 in the Reagan administration, wrote in an unsolicited letter to the Bush White House saying that Yucca will not be approved as a repository by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and that the project should be abandoned.

"Yucca Mountain, which is unlikely to be licensed, in any case is not a reasonable solution in view of the shipping required if nothing else, and in my opinion should be put in mothballs," Davis wrote in a three-page memo last week on the Bush-Cheney energy plan.

"Most of my friends are going to be mad at me," Davis said in an interview from his California home last week. "A lot of people think Yucca Mountain is going to be licensed. That is baloney."

Davis said he sees two reasons Yucca Mountain cannot be licensed.

The first reason is Nevada's opposition to storing 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste at the site, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The second involves technical problems -- such as the potential for water and radiation to escape Yucca Mountain -- that keep emerging as DOE scientists study the site.

Davis said burying nuclear wastes in a permanent repository was never intended when he authored the policy. Now Yucca Mountain is the only site being studied for permanent storage of highly radioactive commercial and defense waste.

"The problems of building a spent fuel repository are enormous, particularly when the state of Nevada is so opposed to it," Davis said.

DOE officials in 1982-83 envisioned storage at regional plants, where technicians would reprocess the nuclear fuel, he said. Regional repositories, one in the East and one in the West, would have stored the remaining wastes for up to 300 years.

At the time, scientists were studying breeder reactors, a technology that in effect cleans the uranium and plutonium of toxic byproducts and recycles it to produce electricity.

"Spent fuel ... lasts for hundreds of thousands of years," Davis said. "Reprocessing would take out the long-living materials and use the plutonium in reactors."

That approach was abandoned during the Ford and Carter administrations, partly out of fear that the recycled fuel could be stolen by terrorists or rogue nations to build nuclear weapons.

President Reagan sought to rekindle the technology, but officials in the nuclear industry said it was too costly, and reprocessing has remained in limbo.

However, scientists have begun research on transmutation, which promises to change the highly radioactive substances to less radioactive waste. That research is being funded by the Energy Department but is not being considered seriously as an alternative to a repository.

Daniel Hirsch, technical adviser to the Committee to Bridge the Gap, an environmental watchdog group in California that stopped a new low-level nuclear waste site from opening near Needles, Calif., and the Colorado River, said that reprocessing was too dangerous to pursue.

"Reprocessing doesn't remove the need for a repository," Hirsch said. "The process leaves half of the plutonium in the wastes and it doesn't touch other long-living radioactive elements."

Reprocessing either increases the volume of the radioactive waste or creates liquid nuclear wastes, Hirsch said.

Under the strategy developed by Davis, any U.S. repository would have been temporary, and the stored fuel pellets would have been retrievable for future use. But in April 1986 the former Soviet Union's Chernobyl Unit 4 reactor disaster occurred, bringing a halt to nuclear reactor development in the United States. The following year, the U.S. passed its Yucca Mountain repository strategy.

Another problem with a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain is public opposition to shipping the wastes across country, Davis said.

If the DOE built special sites, called monitored retrievable storage facilities, across the country near the reactors, the costs of shipping would be reduced, he said.

"At Yucca Mountain, you are going to run into a hailstorm of protest over shipping," he said.

Davis said he left the DOE before a decision was made to turn temporary nuclear waste storage into a permanent solution. He went from the federal agency to Bechtel Inc., a government contractor, from where he retired in 1995. Bechtel is now part of the partnership, Bechtel-SAIC, that holds the main Yucca Mountain contract.

"It (Yucca Mountain) was never intended to store spent fuel, and I can't find out who made that decision," Davis said. "For some 20 years I have wondered how that happened."

Congress amended the original Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1987, singling out Yucca Mountain as the only site for the DOE to study as a permanent repository. About 70,000 tons of commercial spent nuclear fuel could be buried starting in 2010, if the project is found scientifically suitable. Another 7,000 tons would come from building the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal.

"Congress changed the act to get a permanent repository built before monitored retrievable storage sites," Davis said.

The Bush-Cheney energy plan signaled a revived interest in nuclear power. Nuclear industry executives have set a goal to build up to 50 new nuclear reactors in the next two decades.

Nuclear Energy Institute spokesman Steve Kerekes noted that Yucca Mountain was singled out in 1987 by Congress as the sole U.S. site for the DOE to study.

"It has been scientific opinion for many years that the safest way to dispose of the nuclear wastes is a deep geological repository," Kerekes said.

"If Davis wants to change the policy, maybe he should take it up with Congress," Kerekes said. Only Russia, France and Britain reprocess fuel for civilian reactor operations.

In 30 or 40 years, if scientists turned their attention and funding to research and development, breeder reactors could be ready to produce power, Davis said.

"The need for a Yucca Mountain repository is a psychological thing," he said. "In the real world, that's not the way to go."