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Yucca Mountain unknowns will sink project
Wednesday, May 21, 2008 | 2:05 a.m.
On May 14 Sun reporter Lisa Mascaro wrote (on the Las Vegas Sun Web site’s blog “Politics: The Early Line”) that the Energy Department intends to submit a license application for operation of a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain the first week of June.
Anyone who has been following this issue for as long as I have (since 1984) knows there’s not enough information available to submit an adequate application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, made up of professional engineers. There are too many unanswered questions about the Yucca Mountain environment.
Nobody knows how Yucca Mountain’s internal soup will change over a long period of time. What sort of hybrid corrosive agent will be created inside the mountain? We don’t know. Not only that, we also don’t know how well the C-22 alloy container will hold up in this hybrid chemical environment.
Relying on the information now available, the NRC will be very uncomfortable with this license application. As a matter of fact, no NRC will ever be confident unless the C-22 alloy is tested in all likely soup compositions at Yucca Mountain. This has not been done, nor is it likely to ever be done, simply because there are too many variables.
My guess is that Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman wants to be able to say he delivered on what he promised. He knows the application will never make it, but he’ll be gone and won’t worry about it. And that’ll be the end of Yucca Mountain as a possible high-level nuclear waste site.
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Ron Bourgoin asserts that the DOE license application for Yucca Mountain is fundamentally flawed. This would be a surprise, since the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, in its independent reviews, has found no fundamental problems that would keep the Yucca Mountain site from meeting the one-million year safety standard that the Environmental Protection Agency requires.
The important point is that once the application is sent to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, they will perform an independent technical and scientific assessment. The NRC has been performing its own studies, including work by the Southwest Research Institute, and the NRC's conclusion on whether or not to grant a construction license will provide the strongest and most credible conclusion to the questions about Yucca Mountain's suitability.
In the mean time, while NRC's review is underway, Nevadan's should remember that Yucca Mountain is the only case where the EPA has ever required a million-year safety standard. There are plenty of hazardous chemical that remain dangerous permanently, which the EPA does not regulate for any more from a few hundred years to at most 10,000 years.
Nevada's gold mining industry, for example, has already created 40 deep open pit mines that will create highly toxic lakes as the evaporation of ground water concentrates heavy metals from the nearby ore bodies in these permanent lakes, over thousands of years.
This is not to say that Yucca Mountain should not be required to demonstrate compliance with a million-year safety standard, but instead to say that this is pretty safe, and if the NRC decides that the technology and science warrant issuing a construction license, there are more important things to work to fix than Yucca Mountain.
The fundamental difference is that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has to be able to defend its decision.
I wonder what is Mr. Bourgoin's point? DOE is required by law to submit a license application to the NRC. The NRC is required by law to review the application and decide whether or not to grant a license application.
This is not news, its been the law since 1982.
NRC will either decide the science and
technology support repository construction at the site, or it will decide not to grant a construction application. That's how the process was designed by Congress to work. No great insights here; its just the system working the way it was designed.