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June 4, 2012

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Feds withheld negative Yucca data, say Nevada officials

Data shows proposed nuclear waste facility would fail, says state agency

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Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2009 | 4:21 p.m.

Yucca Mountain

The U.S. Energy Department plans to store spent nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain, an extinct volcano about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Launch slideshow »

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Nevada officials say they have found evidence that the Energy Department withheld data in a licensing request that would prove a proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain would fail.

The Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects discovered two documents in a computerized database not included in a licensing application sent to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that show how unsafe buried nuclear waste would be at Yucca Mountain, said Bruce Breslow, executive director of the state agency.

In May and in July the state agency sent its concerns to the NRC about the repository operating without titanium drip shields to protect buried containers of high-level nuclear waste and spent fuel from the nation's reactors, Breslow said.

In the 1990s, Energy Department and state studies showed that water ran through Yucca's layers of volcanic ash much faster than scientists had calculated. Special metal was needed for the containers, as well as sheets of titanium that would be installed after the repository closed, to prevent water from corroding the containers and releasing radiation to the environment.

Among the millions of pages of Energy Department documents posted on a shared computer data bank, two indicated that the containers would fail much sooner than 10,000 years, disqualifying Yucca Mountain as a repository.

"We don't think this is a safe scenario," Breslow said today. "This was left out of the license application."

The NRC responded in a one-paragraph letter on July 23 that the staff review "will include careful consideration of the items you mention."

That wasn't the answer the state was seeking, Breslow said. "It doesn't mean that the NRC staff will require the DOE to run the models without drip shields in it and provide that information for a license application," he said.

"It certainly wasn't meant to be a brush-off of the state's concerns," said David McIntyre, an NRC spokesman.

Last month Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said that he had negotiated an agreement with President Barrack Obama's administration and the Energy Department to stop all funding in the FY 2011 budget for proceeding with the NRC license application review. The commission is now chaired by former Reid staffer Greg Jaczko.

The NRC has also signaled it could delay the final version of the Safety Evaluation Review, the key to determining whether Yucca is considered safe enough for a license, based on funds provided by Congress.

By failing to include the worst-case scenario inside Yucca without drip shields, the state has a major argument against further licensing proceedings, Breslow said.

The state found documents dating back to 2004 asking the Energy Department for a review of the drip-shield scenario, Breslow said. The results contained in the department's own documents would have disqualified the site before the license application was submitted.

The license application proposes to install such drip shields after the repository is closed, both too full of nuclear waste and too hot for human workers to install them, Breslow said.

To install 11,000 drip shields inside the repository, the Energy Department plans to use robots. The state challenged that assumption.

"In 75 years they would have to go back to Congress and try to get some money," he said.

The state contends that the Environmental Protection Agency's 15 millirem per year limit on radiation leaking into the environment would be violated long before 10,000 years, disqualifying Yucca.

The Energy Department did not respond for requests for comment by deadline.

U.S. Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., called the scheme to use robots inside a Yucca repository "straight out of a bad science fiction plot."

Berkley said the nuclear industry needs to start over again on a policy to store and dispose the radioactive wastes safe and secure.

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