British hydrologists enlisted in battle against nuke dump

Monday, Sept. 8, 2003 | 9:29 a.m.

A trio of British hydrologists spent last week in Las Vegas doing research for Nevada's scientific team in its battle against a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.

Michael Thorne, director of Mike Thorne & Associates, said last week that a review of scientific reports gathered over the past 20 years by the Energy Department and other scientists had just started.

Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, was chosen by President Bush and Congress as the nation's first high-level nuclear waste repository. It is expected to open in 2010 if it is licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Thorne and his team -- Adrian Butler, a senior lecturer in subsurface hydrology at Imperial College, and Howard Wheater, hydrology professor at Imperial College, both at the University of London -- also visited Yucca Mountain Wednesday.

"We are just at the beginning," Thorne said in a telephone interview. "There is a great deal of science that needs to be looked at. DOE has put itself in a difficult position; they have selected a system that causes them to work at or beyond the limits of existing science to justify the project."

No other prospective nuclear waste burial site in world attempts to create a repository "in such a thermodynamically unstable environment," Thorne said, adding that questions persist about the adequacy of previous studies at the mountain.

Both volcanoes and earthquakes have occurred around Yucca Mountain in the past.

The state hired the experts to review both DOE and Nuclear Regulatory Commission data, said Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.

The three hydrologists have reviewed nuclear waste sites in the United Kingdom and Sweden, Loux said.

"Based on what they have discovered so far, the DOE probably could not have found a more unstable site in the entire country," Loux said.

Groundwater combined with chemicals leeched out of Yucca's rocks could corrode containers holding radioactive waste in less than 500 years, Loux said.

The Energy Department studies say that radiation will not reach the groundwater, 1,000 feet below the proposed repository, for hundreds of thousands of years.

Nevada's studies will delve into the behavior of groundwater inside the mountain, Loux said, in preparation for a hearing on five consolidated lawsuits pending before a U.S. Appeals Court. After that, the NRC could take up until four years to examine Yucca studies before granting DOE a license to build a repository.

Thorne, who formed his company in 2001, has developed several studies on radioactive waste transfers in sludge and water in Great Britain and Australia. His specialties are radiological protection, the assessment of the radiological safety of nuclear waste disposal and how radiation moves in the environment.

Butler, a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and a member of the British Hydrological Society, is studying ground-water flow and the migration of radiation in near-surface waters.

Wheater, a member of the American Geophysical Union and the International Water Academy, is an expert in unsaturated zone and groundwater movements.

The three could become expert witnesses during the trial, Loux said.