Yucca may face more toxic waste

Thursday, July 17, 2003 | 11:14 a.m.

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WASHINGTON -- Obstacles imperil a new Energy Department plan designed to speed its massive effort to clean up radioactive waste at three U.S. nuclear weapons sites, a congressional audit said. And the plan's failure could ultimately translate to more waste bound for Yucca Mountain.

That possibility surfaced as part of an examination of the Energy Department's 2-year-old effort to curb the cleanup cost and reduce the time it takes to dispose of the radioactive material.

A report released Wednesday by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said the Energy Department effort faces technical and legal challenges that could actually increase costs and blunt attempts by the Bush administration to do the job faster.

If the plan fails, it could also increase the amount of waste headed for Nevada's Yucca Mountain, which would have a limited capacity of 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste.

It was not immediately known how much more waste was at stake, but an Energy Department official today said it would be "significant."

Yucca clearly was not intended to hold the waste that the Energy Department planned for disposal at the three sites, Robin Nazzaro, author of the General Accounting Office report, told the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee today.

"Yucca Mountain can't handle it, and the costs would be prohibitive," Nazzaro said.

Bob Loux, director of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency, said, "Clearly, it will have some implications for Yucca Mountain."

Loux said the nuclear material at the three sites was just a portion of the growing stockpile of waste -- both commercial and defense waste -- that won't fit in a 77,000-ton repository.

Dealing with highly radioactive weapons waste that has accumulated at Energy Department weapons sites -- especially at Handford in Washington, Savannah River in South Carolina and at the INEEL facility in Idaho -- has perplexed officials and scientists for decades.

The waste generally is the result of plutonium production and other weapons-related activities dating back more than half a century. The cleanup program "has been estimated to cost nearly $105 billion and take decades to complete," the GAO said.

Much of the waste, including plutonium and highly enriched uranium, are in concentrations that will require permanent isolation from the environment.

A particular challenge is disposal of 94 million gallons of untreated high-level waste that has been stored for years in metal -- sometimes corroding -- tanks at the Hanford, Savannah River and Idaho facilities.

"This waste would fill an area the size of a football field to a depth of about 260 feet," according to the GAO report.

The Energy Department's latest plan has been to separate the most highly radioactive material and prepare it for shipment to the planned underground repository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, once it is constructed.

The rest, after separation, would be treated and buried where it is already located in the three states. That would reduce the volume of waste bound for Yucca.

The new approach also would save as much as $29 billion and cut the time to achieve final cleanup goals by 20 to 30 years, according to an Energy Department analysis.

But the GAO said there are "technical challenges" to separating the waste and that the department has not adequately tested the separation processes that are expected to be used.

In the past, the GAO said, attempts to speed up disposal by using techniques that have not been sufficiently tested ended up costing tens of millions of dollars with no progress in cleanup.

The GAO also cited potential legal challenges from states or environmentalists on the plan to treat and permanently leave so much radioactive material at the sites. A federal judge in Idaho has already ruled against the department's attempt to reclassify some of the waste to allow it to be buried on site.

That ruling will "significantly hinder" the accelerated cleanup program, Jesse Roberson, assistant Energy secretary for environmental management, told a House panel today in prepared remarks.

By law, any waste classified as "high level" must be buried in a central repository such as Yucca Mountain. The DOE has not decided whether to appeal the ruling in a lawsuit brought by the Natural Resources Defense Council. But an appeal is an option, Roberson told reporters after the House hearing today.

Roberson said another option was for Congress to change the federal law so that it would allow the department to continue with its plan to separate some waste and bury it on site.

If the issue is not resolved -- and it is likely a long way from settled -- the Energy Department faces the daunting dilemma of where to put the "extra" waste.

Some of the material at the three sites will remain deadly for thousands of years. In some cases, such as with the wastes in dozens of metal tanks at Hanford, scientists have no clear idea what's in the soup of chemicals because of poor record-keeping over the Cold War years.