Wednesday, March 17, 2004 | 10:48 a.m.
A former member of a nuclear waste review panel said Tuesday that a peninsula in Michigan would offer a better, more stable environment than Yucca Mountain to lock up highly radioactive waste.
Paul Craig said he favors Michigan rather than the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear repository site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas because of the stable ground there.
"My favorite site?" he said. "The northern peninsula of Michigan."
Michigan's peninsula contains layers of clay with copper metal, said Craig, a retired engineering professor and former member of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board.
"That copper has been there for a billion years," he said.
The copper in Michigan would keep radioactivity in place, Craig said. He said the radioactivity could spill out of the repository at Yucca Mountain.
He said the Michigan peninsula could safely store the waste for up to 1 billion years.
The Energy Department searched for a site for the nation's nuclear waste more than 20 years ago and by law was required to look for a site where the geology could hold in the radioactivity.
In 1987 Congress voted to narrow the search to Nevada. Since then the Energy Department has been studying the volcanic ridge as it prepares to apply for a license to build the repository. The studies have included looking at how well the rock will hold back the radiation and whether water will seep through the rock and potentially carry radiation into the groundwater.
The Energy Department continues to pursue the site for the planned repository and plans to apply for an application to build it.
Nevada's Yucca Mountain is an area prone to earthquakes and volcanic activity, features that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the agency that must permit the Energy Department to build a repository, has put at the top of a list of problems with the site.
The Energy Department proposes to use the metal alloy C-22 for its storage containers to bury the waste at Yucca, Craig said. The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board has questioned the corrosion rates of the C-22 metal in numerous reports.
The 11-member technical review board's mandate is to evaluate technical and scientific activities undertaken by the Energy Department at Yucca Mountain.
The Energy Department, led by former U.S. Sen. Spencer Abraham, R-Mich., has not made its case for burying 77,000 tons of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Craig said.
Energy Department scientists once thought Yucca's volcanic ash layers were dry. They discovered that water ran through the mountain, perhaps fast enough to corrode, erode and allow radiation to escape long before the 10,000-year life of the repository ends, Craig said.
"The present proposal for Yucca Mountain is not compelling," Craig told about 50 people who attended a Sierra Club forum at Winchester Community Center on Tuesday.
As a member of the technical review board from 1996 until January when he resigned, Craig listened to the studies, research reports and technical explanations produced by the Energy Department.
"The problem is the models are so complex, no one understands them," Craig said. "I can tell you, I spent a great deal of time with them and I can't understand them."
However, Craig sympathized with the Energy Department's daunting task after Congress set a deadline of 1998 for opening a repository. After the department missed its goal, nuclear utilities sued and could collect millions of dollars in damages.
Energy Department officials insist that the department will submit a license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Agency by December.
"I don't see any way the DOE (the Energy Department) can submit an application," Craig said. "If the Nuclear Regulatory Commission accepts the DOE's application, there may be a problem with the NRC."
If another repository site cannot be found, Craig said that nuclear power plants could safely store spent fuel in dry casks for up to a century.
"Above-ground dry cask storage is safe and acceptable scientifically," he said.
The problem with Yucca stems from an institution bent on keeping to a schedule, Craig said.
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