New DOE strategy won’t help Yucca situation

Bob Loux

Tuesday, April 18, 2006 | 3:07 a.m.

Whatever else one may say about the Energy Department's handling of the proposed Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste dump, you have to give DOE credit for being consistent. Consistently wrong and incompetent, that is.

The new group in charge of DOE's Yucca Mountain program is no exception. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman and his hand-picked acting director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, Paul Golan, have managed in a few short months to take an already teetering project and finally push it off the scientific, political and fiscal abyss.

For years, the Yucca project has been plagued by problems (or more accurately, realities that DOE refuses to face) that have brought the program to a screeching halt.

These include Yucca Mountain's inability to meet health and safety standards, failure to develop and submit a license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, corrosion-prone waste containers, the inability of the site to meet hazardous waste regulations, a seriously inept radioactive waste transportation program, conflicts with Western states' water laws (i.e., the denial of water by Nevada for Yucca Mountain), serious land use conflicts, risks posed by military aircraft operations and a host of other factors that make Yucca entirely unsuitable and unlicensable.

Golan's and Bodman's solution is to ignore the central problem with Yucca (the fact that site is inherently unsafe and unsuitable) and attempt to get Congress to bail DOE out by riding roughshod over federal and state health, safety, transportation and environmental requirements. DOE submitted legislation to Congress in early April that would do just that.

But the Bodman-Golan debacle gets more bizarre. A few months ago, Golan announced, with considerable fanfare, that DOE was completely restructuring the Yucca program in an attempt to turn the Yucca repository into a "clean" facility.

Golan claimed his "Transportation, Aging and Disposal" system would simplify the design and operations of a repository by allowing deadly spent fuel and high-level waste to be transported, stored and disposed of in the same canister, without having to handle the waste again once it has been loaded into the new transportation and disposal system at the reactor location.

Great idea, except for the fact it had already been rejected in the 1990s as impractical and too costly.

A significant percentage of existing nuclear plants are already storing spent fuel in welded containers in an array of different dry storage installations. The problem is those storage containers are not compatible with Golan's new transportation and disposal system.

What's more, DOE is relying on the ability to control temperatures underground at Yucca as a way of trying to deal with the large amounts of water that will corrode the waste packages and rapidly transport radioactive materials to the accessible environment. The new transportation and disposal concept does not lend itself to such thermal management and sends DOE's already jerry-built performance models into a tailspin.

To make this problem go away, Golan and his team of new-thinkers are proposing to simply invent a whole new geology for the site by concocting very low water infiltration rates and slow water movement. Never mind that the science doesn't support such assumptions.

What these initiatives have in common is a fundamental and fraudulent denial of the simple fact that Yucca Mountain is a wholly unacceptable place to dispose of deadly and long-lived nuclear waste.

Bodman's proposed legislation and Golan's restructuring of the Yucca project are aimed at covering up this essential fact, and they continue a long string of failed DOE initiatives over the past two decades that have sought to fashion a silk purse out of this Yucca Mountain pig's ear.