Nuclear cask arrives in time for Yucca tour

Monday, Nov. 5, 2001 | 10:44 a.m.

YUCCA MOUNTAIN -- The first high-level nuclear waste shipping container arrived empty at Yucca Mountain on Saturday, in time for 572 visitors to see it.

But the shiny stainless steel container almost didn't make it to the mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, in time for the tour.

By late Friday morning, the state Department of Transportation still had not issued a permit for the container, which weighed 30,000 pounds more than is allowed on Nevada roads, to travel the state's highways.

By Friday afternoon Nevada Department of Transportation Director Tom Stephens personally approved a permit for the empty container, all 110,000 pounds of it, to travel the state's highways to appear at a daylong open house at Yucca Mountain, the site being studied for a national high-level nuclear waste dump.

The open house attracted people from Las Vegas, Beatty, Pahrump and Southern California. Visitors rode buses to the site under the strictest security imposed at the Yucca Mountain Project. They walked into the exploratory, 5-mile-long tunnel and looked at the shipping container sent by NAC International.

If the Department of Energy, the president and Congress approves Yucca Mountain as the world's first high-level nuclear waste repository, up to 100,000 trucks could carry stainless steel shipping containers like the NAC one to the site for 30 years.

It cost the DOE and nuclear ratepayers $300,000 for the one-day tour. Most of the cost was for renting the container from NAC International, DOE spokesman Allen Benson said.

Judy Treichel, executive director of Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force, handing out information packets on nuclear waste as visitors boarded buses at the Las Vegas Science Center on Meadows Lane, shook her head in disbelief at the price tag. "The DOE says it can't afford to continue scientific studies, yet they can pay for this tour," she said.

Many people on the tour were opposed to bringing 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain, but said they were curious about the project. Many visiting the mountain had lived in the area less than 10 years.

Retirees Bob and Leah Dobyne had heard about it from a local television newscast and wanted to tour the site.

Las Vegas residents Martha and Jack Campbell said they don't want nuclear waste in Nevada. "Besides fighting this, we are fighting zoning battles, too," she said of their life in the northwestern part of the Las Vegas Valley.

"We are against it," the Campbell's neighbor, Julie Head, said.

Inyo County, Calif., resident Jason Warren disagreed with burying the nuclear waste 18 miles east of the California border. "The whole project is wrong -- economically, socially and culturally -- and it affects every aspect of society," he said.

If the president and Congress approve the site, it would not be ready to receive nuclear waste until 2010 at the earliest, DOE's chief scientist Michael Voegle said. Scientific studies are ongoing inside the mountain.

A giant heating test, warming Yucca's rock up to 392 degrees Fahrenheit, will be shut down in mid-January, Yucca Mountain test manager Mark Peters said.

Then it will take four years for the rock to cool enough for scientists to finish studying the interaction of water, chemistry and heat to see how the combined effects might react with buried nuclear waste. The DOE is studying whether hot water might corrode the containers, he aid.

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