sun editorial:

‘A fool’s errand’

Nuclear waste company rightly pans feds’ faulty plans for Yucca Mountain dump

Tuesday, June 10, 2008 | 2:06 a.m.

The Energy Department’s plan to build a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is a “doomed undertaking,” a private waste storage company has declared.

In a newsletter sent to customers and suppliers, Holtec International blasted the proposal and singled out the department’s plan to let casks of nuclear waste cool aboveground for years before interring them in the mountain. The Los Angeles Times reported last week that the casks would sit unanchored. A major earthquake, Holtec said, would send the casks flying, creating a “chaotic melee of bouncing and rolling juggernauts.”

“Pigs will fly before the cask(s) will stay put,” the company added.

Holtec, which is well-known in the industry, had bid for work at Yucca Mountain, proposing a plan it said was safer and would anchor the casks. The department turned the company down, turning instead to the lowest bidder. In other words, the Energy Department put cost ahead of safety, which is not a surprise.

For more than two decades the Energy Department has used shoddy scientific work to try to justify its plans to dump more than 77,000 tons of nuclear waste in Nevada.

Holtec said the safety plans are a “fool’s errand,” which is a fitting description of the entire project. The Energy Department has glossed over serious issues, such as earthquakes, in its zeal to try to defend what is indefensible.

The department was tasked with finding a site that was geologically suitable for containing radiation and ended up with Yucca Mountain, a porous volcanic ridge in an area that is seismically active. More than 30 faults run near or under the site. And last year the department had to scramble to try to modify its plans because it had called for letting casks of nuclear waste sit unsecured above an earthquake fault.

Still, the department has asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for permission to build the dump. The commission should tell the department: When pigs fly ...

Discussion: 1 comment so far…

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By Ardent

June 11, 2008

9:13 a.m.

Suggest removal

Gee, imagine that. A company that placed a bid for a lucrative contract was refused, and they are maintaining their position that the service they wanted to provide is still needed....

Talk about hyperbole. I have to admit, it's even a bit poetic: "a chaotic melee of bouncing and rolling juggernauts."

So you're telling me that a 50-ton cask is going to "go flying"? And where is it going to roll, all the way to the front doorstep of Bellagio? And what is the consequence of this unlikely event? Is the cask going to break open and spill its contents? Is it going to explode and send a mushroom cloud up over the Strip?

C'mon, people. Stop drinking the Kool-Aid. Read about the tests those casks are subjected to: crashing into 700-ton concrete walls at 80 mph, immersion in 1400-degree fire for 90 minutes, drops onto steel spikes 8 inches in diameter, drops onto surfaces as hard as concrete from 40 feet (falling at 230 mph).

If you want something to worry about, then think about the amount of waste currently sitting in cooling pools and aboveground facilities at the 100-plus nuclear plants in our country. Think about the 6.8 earthquake that hit Japan in 2007: it affected a nuclear plant and the result was that water containing radioactive material was released into the Japan Sea. So far the cleanup costs have been $5 billion.

I don't think that placing waste in virtually indestructable casks in a remote desert location above a miniscule water table used by no one and near the most irradiated place on earth (the Nevada Test Site) compares in any way to the risks of the alternative, risks we've been living with for far too long. We can ring our hands all we want over "grave risks" such as earthquakes at Yucca Mountain, but we all know that the facts don't bear out the concern, and nor do the potential consequences.