Snubbing of Utah site may boost Yucca fight

Benjamin Grove

Tuesday, March 11, 2003 | 11:21 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Nevada officials say the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's denial of a license to a temporary nuclear waste dump in Utah bodes well for the state's battle against a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain.

The agency's licensing board on Monday denied a consortium of eight nuclear power companies a permit to construct an above-ground waste site for spent nuclear reactor fuel, some of the most radioactive waste in the nation, at the Goshute Indian Tribe's Skull Valley Reservation in Utah.

The licensing board said the Utah site is too vulnerable to a crash of a fighter jet. Pilots based at Hill Air Force Base, which is north of Salt Lake City near Ogden, train in the skies above the proposed waste site about 50 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. The Air Force flies thousands of training flights each year over the Utah Test and Training Range.

The Utah project has been proposed as a temporary waste storage site until the government can complete Yucca Mountain, which Congress and President Bush designated last year to be the nation's permanent high-level waste repository. Managers of the nation's 103 nuclear reactors are eager to get rid of the waste that has been piling up at their plants for decades.

Nevada officials and environmentalists cheered Monday's NRC ruling because they said it could aid their case against Yucca Mountain. The NRC also is responsible for licensing the Yucca project and must consider its proximity to Nellis Air Force Base.

"If they couldn't license the Goshute site, I don't see how in the world they could license Yucca Mountain," Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said.

Jet crashes have not been at the top of a long list of concerns Nevada officials have about the proposed Yucca project. But state officials over the years have raised the possibility.

Yucca Mountain, which is 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is owned by the Bureau of Land Management and the Air Force as part of the Nellis Air Force Range.

Private Fuel Storage, LLC, the consortium of nuclear power utilities that had applied for the NRC license, in partnership with the Goshute Tribe, can appeal the licensing board's ruling to the five-member Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or file a lawsuit. Officials said they may do both.

"We were cautiously optimistic that the license would be approved, so we were a bit disappointed," PFS spokeswoman Sue Martin said.

Waste at Yucca Mountain, unlike waste at the Utah site, would be stored underground. But some amount of waste -- perhaps thousands of tons -- could be piled up at a surface facility at any given time as it awaits emplacement in Yucca tunnels.

Nevada officials said Yucca Mountain and waste transportation routes would be just as vulnerable to a jet crash or bombing accident as the proposed Utah site.

"It would seem that the same analogy would apply," said Bob Loux, director of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency, the state's top Yucca watchdog. "It's potentially very good news."

If Skull Valley is unsafe, "Yucca is without question unsafe," Attorney General Brian Sandoval said.

"If federal regulators say no to Skull Valley, yet continue to say yes to Yucca, it strengthens our position that Nevada is being treated differently with regard to standards of safety and regulation," he said.

Nevada lawmakers in Congress agreed. Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., a former Air Force pilot, has long been concerned about the threats jets pose to Yucca, spokeswoman Amy Spanbauer said. Yucca, like the Utah site, is "an unsafe and unsuitable answer to our nuclear waste problem," Gibbons said in a written statement.

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said, "I hope the ruling on the Utah facility will further highlight the danger of the Yucca Mountain proposal."

It is too early to say if concerns about military jets could make it more difficult for the Energy Department to obtain an NRC license, NRC spokeswoman Sue Gagner said.

"We don't even have a license application yet," Gagner said. The Energy Department is scheduled to submit the application to the NRC in December 2004.

Energy Department officials declined to comment on speculation that a Yucca license could be denied based on concerns about jets.

"We are moving forward with our Yucca Mountain project," Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis said.

The Energy Department has not been eager to consider a plane crash at Yucca because officials have said the chances of a crash are remote -- "incredibly small," in the words of Richard Morissette, a department contract engineer, speaking on the issue at a Las Vegas meeting in July 2001.

But the NRC told the department not to dismiss the possibility, and the department has since produced a 112-page report called "Identification of Aircraft Hazards," which it will not release to the public.

Yucca Mountain is not in commercial flight paths because it is part of the Nellis Range. About 20,000 military flights a year criss-crossed the skies above Yucca between 1998 and 2000, the Air Force reported in 2001.

Air Force officials did not immediately comment on Mondays' ruling. Nellis is a busy training range for the Air Force, with thousands of miles of ranges and test sites, including the Tonopah Test Range.

The Air Force has not taken a formal stance against Yucca Mountain. But Pentagon officials have expressed deep concerns about the project -- specifically, that the government could consider restricting Air Force flights over waste transportation routes. Such restrictions would "severely affect national security" and "seriously degrade the training of our friends and Allies," Secretary of the Air Force Sheila Windnall wrote in a letter to Congress in 1995.

"The Air Force, behind the scenes, is not wild about Yucca Mountain," Loux said Monday.

The Nuclear Energy Institute declined to comment today as officials at the industry's top trade group reviewed the NRC ruling.

Environmentalists hailed the decision.

Kalynda Tilges, executive director of the anti-nuclear organization Shundahai Network, said the NRC decision was "an historic moment." Shundahai Network, a coalition of environmental groups and Native American tribes, has been outspoken against Yucca and the Goshute project.

"Private Fuel Storage has shown the same disregard and contempt for the Goshutes, Utah and the rest of the American public as the Department of Energy has with Nevadans on the Yucca Mountain Project," Tilges said.

The NRC's ruling, coupled with its plans for a new review of nuclear waste transportation containers, indicates that the regulatory agency is taking its responsibilities seriously, said Peggy Maze Johnson, executive director of Citizen Alert, a statewide watchdog group in Nevada.

"This is the first step," Johnson said, "but it's not the final one."

Sun reporters

Mary Manning and Cy Ryan, and the Associated Press contributed to this story.

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