More e-mail messages on Yucca revealed

Suzanne Struglinski

Tuesday, May 10, 2005 | 9:21 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- More e-mail messages support Nevada's position that the Yucca Mountain nuclear dump will not work, the state said today.

Nevada released additional e-mails it has discovered through the Licensing Support Network, a database of Energy Department documents related to the Yucca Mountain project.

The "Chronology of Selected Yucca Mountain Project Emails" includes excerpts from selected messages from 1996 through 2000.

"The e-mails give an inside picture of the project that is quite different from the one that DOE (the Energy Department) presented to the public," according to the state.

The state has been compiling e-mails from the Agency for Nuclear Project's Web site for months. The e-mails contain long conversations between Energy Department employees or contractors peppered with acronyms and scientific jargon, but Nevada believes they hold the key to what can finally stop the project.

Nevada has fought the department's plan to build a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, for decades.

One of the state's main arguments is that the mountain itself cannot provide a suitable barrier to isolate the radiation that the waste will emit. The document lists multiple messages that discuss the rock's makeup and the design of the man-made barriers.

A federal appeals court ruled last year that neither the law nor the Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules assigned a percentage to how much the rock needs to contribute to isolating the waste.

But the state still argues that once the containers holding the waste corrode over time, the rock will provide no barrier to radiation, which should be reason enough not to use the mountain as a nuclear dump.

Meanwhile, the department and the nuclear industry believe the dump, as planned, will be safe and want it to move forward.

Among the e-mails posted by the state on its Web site is one attributed to department employee Larry Rickertsen that was sent to Robert Andrews, Jean Younker and Thomas Statton in 1996.

"We have been able to get by NWTRB (Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board) reviews and other similar situations, but... we will have severe difficulties when we get into the real arenas," the e-mail notes. "I am convinced that the data we have been using are not only uncertain, they are not even representative of the ranges that we will be able to defend when we get into those arenas."

In a 1997 e-mail to Jan Docka, Rickertsen wrote, "I think it is impossible to show the doses will be less than 10 rem/year even for drip shield."

The EPA set a 15 milirem per year standard for 10,000 years, but a court subsequently ruled against that standard.

Another 1997 e-mail from Bob Levich to Paul Dixon says: "We CANNOT and CAN NEVER rely completely (or even mostly) on engineering barriers for protection of the public health and safety in a geologic repository system. If we try to do so, this program is dead! Just build concrete pads on Jackass Flats and shove the waste inside concrete bunkers... It is ridiculous to completely rely on engineered barriers, the lifespan of which has never been tests for even 10s or 100s of years."

The Energy Department has ongoing investigations into messages written by U.S. Geological Survey employees that suggest they made up scientific information while working on the project.

It has also maintained that as part of its license application, it will outline the safety basis for Yucca Mountain. The e-mails are "part of the back-and-forth that is reflective of any collaborative scientific process," according to the department.

The industry has maintained that radiation decays over time so by the time the waste packages would fail, the radiation levels the mountain itself would have to contain would be lower than when the waste was place inside.

Steve Kraft, director of waste management of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's lobbying arm and a top Yucca supporter, said "no system man devises or nature devises is perfect." The main goal is to keep radiation away from human beings. Kraft said the department's Total System Performance Assessment plan, which measures how the mountain works with its plans for man-made barriers, has modeled numerous scenarios.

The state lost its fight in Congress, when Congress voted for the project to move forward in 2002. That was followed by President Bush's approval of Yucca Mountain as the nation's nuclear dump site.

The state won one of its six court cases argued more than a year ago that threw out the radiation protection standard, which delayed that program until the Environmental Protection Agency can write a new one.

Now lawyers working for the state are collecting the e-mails to use for the anticipated licensing hearings once the departments submits a license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, if it still chooses to do so.