Terror threat left out of Yucca report

Benjamin Grove

Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2001 | 9:38 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- The final report on whether Yucca Mountain is a suitable place to bury high-level nuclear waste will not contain an analysis of terrorist threats to the site, project chief Lake Barrett said Monday.

Managers of the Yucca Mountain project are in the "chaotic" last stages of preparing a final recommendation on whether to bury the nation's high-level nuclear waste at the Nevada site, Barrett said.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham likely will decide this winter whether to recommend the site to President Bush, Barrett said.

"It's pretty well done," Barrett said of the sophisticated site-suitability report.

The recommendation will come after 14 years of scientific study at Yucca Mountain, but will not include terrorist threat studies beyond a 14-year-old sabotage assessment. Nor will the report include studies of terrorist risks along the cross-country transportation routes that trucks and trains would follow to haul waste to the mountain ridge, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Nevada officials have called for such studies in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The final design of the waste repository won't be developed for years, Barrett said, so there is plenty of time to address potential terrorist risks.

"We certainly can make (proposed designs) better," Barrett said. "We can make it hardened. We'll meet the (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) regulations whatever they are." The NRC would be responsible for licensing the waste site.

Barrett spoke to reporters after a regular fall meeting of the Board on Radioactive Waste Management, a 16-member panel within the National Academies that analyzes and makes recommendations on waste issues.

Concerns about terrorist threats to the nation's waste were on the minds of the panel, in part because of Monday's American Airlines crash in New York.

Yucca is the proposed site of the world's first high-level waste burial ground. Waste would be shipped to Nevada from government storage sites and 103 nuclear power plants around the nation.

The DOE manages the project. The president and Congress have yet to approve it.

Barrett reminded the panel that the Yucca site is a remote site that could fortify the nation's waste in a single, locked-down location.

"I don't know how you can get much better than that," Barrett said of the Nevada site. "It is about the most secure location that you can get to." Barrett said he was confident that transportation casks were robust enough to protect against terrorist attacks.

The nation has a legal and moral obligation to move the waste to a better place, Barrett said.

"Yucca is a better place," he said.

The NRC is reassessing security at nuclear power plants and waste storage sites, NRC Chairman Richard Meserve told the waste panel.

The NRC soon will launch a "top-to-bottom review" of terrorist threats to all nuclear facilities, including the proposed Yucca site, Meserve said after the meeting. NRC officials will set a timeline for that review by the end of the month, Meserve said.

"We're looking at everything," he said.

Meserve and Barrett also spoke to reporters for the first time Monday about an investigation into whether someone at the NRC leaked a confidential Yucca review plan to the DOE's law firm, Winston & Strawn.

The alleged leak -- reported first by the Las Vegas Sun, on Nov. 1, -- would be unethical, possibly illegal, and undermine the NRC's ability to independently review the DOE's application for a waste license, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and other state officials have said.

The NRC's inspector general launched a probe late last month that should be completed soon, Meserve told the Sun. He could not say who specifically is being questioned in the investigation.

"The (NRC) inspector general is investigating, and I don't know anything more," Meserve said. "If there was a leak, (the document) certainly was nothing that anyone was authorized to release."

Barrett downplayed the significance of the alleged leak. He said he did not know of any evidence of a leak.

The document, if it fell into the hands of DOE Yucca managers, would not help the DOE shape its recommendation of the site, Barrett said.

"I haven't seen (the document)," Barrett said. "It's not a major issue to us."

Barrett on Monday also expressed frustration at a $70 million budget cut to the Yucca program for the next fiscal year, which was pushed by Reid. The No. 2 Senate Democrat, Reid negotiated in Congress for a $375 million budget for Yucca next year, $70 million less than what the DOE requested.

Barrett will not be hiring engineers to work on repository designs because of the budget cut, he said. That will slow the DOE's plan to apply for the license from NRC sometime next year, Barrett said.