State’s chief anti-Yucca lawyer sure of victory

Jace Radke

Thursday, Dec. 5, 2002 | 9:54 a.m.

The Energy Department's disregard for the people of Nevada, the scientific method and the law will help the state win its legal battle to stop the federal government from storing high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada's lead attorney on the case said Wednesday.

"We're not talking about small violations, but blatant out-of-the-park violations," said Joseph Egan, a Washington-based attorney hired by the state in the battle against Yucca. "I didn't know how good this case was until I took it and saw the evidence of the DOE breaking laws.

"It's right there in black and white. (The Energy Department) is an agency that has truly lost its way."

Egan's comments came at a news conference in Las Vegas, two days after the filing of a "case in chief" brief in the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

The brief challenges the guidelines the Energy Department used to evaluate Yucca, the agency's environmental impact study of the site, and the approval of the site by Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and President Bush.

Last February, President Bush declared Yucca Mountain, located about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as a suitable site for the nation's repository for 77,000 tons of waste from commercial reactors and the government's nuclear weapons program.

Gov. Kenny Guinn vetoed the decision, but in July Congress overrode the veto. The Energy Department is seeking a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and hopes to open the waste repository by 2010.

In the brief the state argues that the Bush administration is abandoning a 1982 law that mandates that a site's geology serve as the primary barrier to isolate the waste.

Energy Department officials have maintained that the site is in full compliance with the 1982 requirements, saying that the project relies on the geology of Yucca Mountain to contain the waste, and that additional engineered barriers will provide additional protection.

Egan disagrees, and said that the Energy Department has flip-flopped from a position in which geological isolation was the main factor in determining a site to a reliance on man-made barriers and containers.

"They jettison their own rules and get the Nuclear Regulatory Agency and Environmental Protection Agency to change their rules so Yucca becomes suitable," Egan said. "Because of these changes there is nothing in the rules to prohibit a repository from being located on the banks of the Potomac River."

The Energy Department knows that water flows through the mountain to the water table in about 50 to 200 years, a much faster rate than the original estimate of 80,000 years, Egan said.

Contamination of the water table is a real possibility if high level nuclear waste is stored at the site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Egan said.

"Once they discovered that, it should have been determined that Yucca was not a suitable site," Egan said.

Other arguments in the brief include a failure by the Energy Department to determine how the nuclear waste would be transported to the site, and the lack of consideration of terrorist attacks.

Oral arguments in the case could be heard in September 2003.

Nevada officials hope that the case will result in the invalidation of Abraham and Bush's decision, void the environmental impact study and force the Energy Department to rewrite its guidelines.