Nuke expert says no data shows Yucca suitable for repository

Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2002 | 11:01 a.m.

PAHRUMP -- A former Department of Energy nuclear waste chief said he has reviewed numerous scientific reports on Yucca Mountain and can find no information that would prove the site is suitable to serve as the nation's nuclear waste repository.

John Bartlett, who was director of DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management under former President Bush and is now a consultant for Clark County, said he has reviewed 5,000 pages of scientific studies done by the Department of Energy, which is guiding the Yucca project.

"You could have come up with any result depending on the assumptions you made," Bartlett on Tuesday told the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an independent panel overseeing DOE's work at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"As a result, the documentation does not provide a sound foundation for the basis of a site recommendation," he said.

Bartlett said the DOE tended to focus on the containers, built with a metal alloy known as C-22 that must, according to Nuclear Regulatory Commission guidelines, be strong enough to prevent radiation from leaving the repository for at least 10,000 years.

"The performance of the repository for that long is genuinely unknowable," he said, noting that the proposed metal has been in existence for about 20 years.

Bartlett, while working for the DOE in 1972, studied the Nevada Test Site as a possible burial ground for nuclear waste leftover from the Department of Defense. He currently works as a consultant for Clark County and S. Cohen and Associates in Washington.

Technical Review Board Chairman Jared Cohon said he was not surprised by Bartlett's criticism. In fact, the board has produced its own report on the project, which was released last week. In it the board called the DOE's science "weak to moderate."

The board and Bartlett agreed that the DOE's study included neither a final design for the repository nor a final container package, in which spent nuclear fuel and defense waste would be buried.

Many of the DOE's assumptions regarding Yucca Mountain are extreme and unrealistic, said board member Paul Craig, a hydrologist.

"That's an astute observation," Craig said, referring to Bartlett's yearlong review.

Physicist John Garrick of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste said that the DOE fails to define potential risks to people and the environment should a repository at Yucca Mountain be built.

Any repository decision would be based on cost, potential risks and potential benefits, he said. "But it (the DOE) does not answer the question, What is the risk?" Garrick said.

Garrick stopped short of saying the DOE failed to prove its case for a Yucca Mountain repository. He did concede, however, that, "I think there are shortcomings," he said.

Conversely, there is no single variable that would at this time derail the project, said Lake Barrett, acting director of DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management.

The DOE is continuing scientific studies as it prepares to submit a license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2004. The process was delayed about a year because Congress this year trimmed $70 million from the DOE's $375 million budget, he said.

The DOE has earmarked $4.1 million of its budget to begin addressing transportation issues involving the Yucca project, Barrett said. The DOE has yet to announce what highways or rail lines it would use to transport waste to Yucca Mountain should it become a repository.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham is prepared after Feb. 10 to recommend Yucca Mountain as the nation's nuclear waste repository to President Bush.