Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2003 | 9:09 a.m.
Let's look at a possible reason for the closed meetings between the Nuclear Regulatory Agency and the Energy Department over the Yucca Mountain Project.
As everybody knows by now, the Energy Department is not being allowed to reclassify what are now categorized as high-level liquid wastes in tanks at Hanford, Savannah River, and Idaho sites. Several of those tanks are single-walled and are leaking.
Since the wastes, as high-level wastes, have to be buried in a repository, perhaps the secret meetings are about placing those wastes, and not spent-fuel rods, in Yucca.
It seems several utilities are sensing the delay in spent-fuel rod burial because they're building several above-ground storage facilties. The Energy Department had expected to bury the liquid wastes as low-level, and so had not planned to have to bury them in a repository.
Perhaps, therefore, the secret meetings are about how Yucca Mountain would have to accomodate liquid wastes.
RON BOURGOIN Rocky Mount, N.C.
Editor's note: Ron Bourgoin was a consultant to the town of Rolesville in Wake County, N.C., in 1984 when a site in that area was being considered by the Energy Department as the location for a high-level nuclear waste repository.
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