U.S. Forges Ahead With Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Dump

By J.R. Pegg

WASHINGTON, DC, March 2, 2006 (ENS) - The federal plan to bury nuclear waste in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain will proceed despite a long list of delays and scientific controversies that have put the facility years behind schedule, Bush administration officials told a Senate panel on Wednesday.

"Yucca Mountain is a good site," said Paul Golan, acting director of the Energy Department’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management. "It is a safer and more secure location than the temporary storage options."

Golan said the Energy Department will publish a new schedule this summer detailing how and when it will submit its license application for Yucca Mountain to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

Paul Golan is acting director of the Energy Department’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management. (Photo courtesy FACREP)

Critics say there is ample evidence the project should be abandoned.

"The Yucca Mountain project is a failure," said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat. ""It is mired in scientific, safety and technical problems. It will never open."

Even proponents of the site acknowledge it has been best by problems.

Committee chair James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, said the project is "17 years behind schedule."

A 1982 law required the Energy Department to provide a federal repository for used nuclear fuel no later than January 31, 1998.

Legislation authorizing Yucca Mountain was passed by Congress in 2001 and signed by President George W. Bush.

It was originally scheduled to open in 2010 – Energy Department officials say 2015 is the earliest the repository will be ready to receive nuclear waste.

The project has been beset with criticism and skepticism about the safety of the site as well as concerns about the security of shipping nuclear waste by rail and road from sites in 39 states across the nation.

The site, which lies 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas within the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, is also on a fault line and sits above a freshwater aquifer that provides drinking water to residents of Nevada and California.

In 2004 a federal court rejected the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) radiation exposure standard for Yucca Mountain because it did not include exposure limits beyond 10,000 years.

Aerial view of the crest of Yucca Mountain, Nevada 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas (Photo courtesy OCRWM)

The new proposal, released last August, sets a radiation exposure limit at 15-millirems a year for 10,000 years and then increases the limit to 350-millirems a year for up to 1 million years.

The proposed standard represents a total radiation exposure "that is no higher than natural levels people live with routinely in other parts of the country," Wehram told the committee.

The proposed standard is "a farce," said Senator John Ensign, a Nevada Republican.

The agency should have extended the 15-millirem per year standard for the 10,000 year to 1 million year period, Ensign said.

"We know why EPA did not do this," he said. "It did not do it because Yucca Mountain could not be engineered to meet that standard. The EPA was forced to create this ridiculous standard to make Yucca Mountain look scientifically feasible on paper – it is not."

Wehram defended the standard and said the way EPA devised the radiation exposure limits "is very consistent with the approach used internationally."

Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, predicted the EPA’s proposal would not satisfy the court ruling.

The 350-millirem standard is three times what is currently allowed at nuclear plants and covers a time period when leaks are more likely.

"It seems to me that you are not really correcting the issues," Boxer said. "This thing is going round in circles."

View of the engineered barrier system test at Sandia National Laboratory, the newly designated national lab for all Yucca Mountain testing. This test is designed to help scientists better understand how manufactured barriers work with natural barriers. (Photo courtesy OCRWM)

"This is such a nightmare that we are abandoning all of our traditions, all of our history, in what we consider to be an acceptable cancer risk," Boxer said.

Critics are ignoring the health risks of not moving forward with Yucca Mountain, said Senator Jim DeMint, a South Carolina Republican.

Failure to proceed with the repository would force the 104 operating nuclear power plants in the United States as well as Defense Department facilities to store their high-level radioactive waste on their own sites.

"We need to move ahead yet we continue to be looking for every reason in the world not to move ahead," said DeMint. "We have already studied Yucca Mountain more than any other piece of land in the world."

Inhofe said the debate about nuclear waste "appears to be more of a political issue than a scientific issue."

The Oklahoma Republican told colleagues he would support revising the Yucca Mountain project to allow more waste to be stored in the repository.

The original plan calls for storage of 77,000 tons of waste – this means the repository will essentially be full as soon as it is completed.

"We run into the statutory capacity sometime next decade," said Golan, who indicated the Yucca Mountain site could probably hold more than 100,000 tons if the law creating the repository is revised.

The delays to the project will cost taxpayers more than $2 billion through 2010, Golan added, and "after that the additional costs would be several hundred million a year extra on top of that."

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid says Nevadans are overwhelmingly opposed to the Yucca Mountain Project. (Photo courtesy Office of the Senator)

"We have spent upwards of $10 billion and we have nothing for it," he said. "It is time we addressed the problem at hand and stop pouring taxpayer money down the drain on a project that could endanger all of our citizens,"

Reid and Ensign have introduced legislation calling for the securing of wastes on sites in dry cask storage.

Dry cask storage allows spent fuel that has already been cooled in a spent fuel pool for at least one year to be surrounded by inert gas inside a container called a cask, typically a steel cylinder that is either welded or bolted shut.

Each cylinder is surrounded by additional steel, concrete, or other material to provide radiation shielding to workers and members of the public. Some of the cask designs can be used for both storage and transportation, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Spent fuel is currently stored in dry cask systems at a growing number of nuclear power plant sites, and at an interim facility located at the Idaho National Environmental and Engineering Laboratory near Idaho Falls, Idaho.

Find out more about the Yucca Mountain Project online at: http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/ymp/index.shtml