Nevada Sues Again to Block Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository

LAS VEGAS, Nevada, September 10, 2004 (ENS) - Nevada Attorney General Brian Sandoval filed a new lawsuit Wednesday in another bid to derail the federal government’s plan to build a massive nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.

The suit directly challenges the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) transportation plan for nuclear waste shipments to the proposed repository.

Yucca Mountain is located about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas on the edge of the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. (Photo courtesy DOE Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management)

The plan, announced by the DOE in April, would bring nuclear waste mostly by train from 127 sites across the nation to the repository in Yucca Mountain.

The facility, some 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the intended destination for 77,000 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste from Defense Department sites and spent nuclear fuel from the 103 operating nuclear reactors across the United States.

In order to connect the Yucca Mountain site with an existing rail line, the plan will require the construction of a rail spur at Caliente, Nevada and a 319-mile rail line between the two sites.

Caliente is located 150 miles northeast of Las Vegas in the eastern portion of Nevada near the state’s border with Utah.

The DOE has no right to take the lead in the new rail project, according to the suit.

Nevada Attorney General Brian Sandoval has filed numerous lawsuits opposing the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository (Photo courtesy State of Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects)

In addition, the suit challenges DOE’s evaluation of the environmental impacts and land use conflicts within the one-mile swath of the 318-mile Caliente Route.

“No landowners were contacted or given any notice that DOE was about to appropriate their land,” said Sandoval, who added that the DOE has already applied to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to have set aside 308,600 specifically itemized acres for the new track.

“DOE stood the mandatory review process on its head,” according to the Nevada Attorney General. “First, DOE unilaterally proclaimed a new route, then it applied to withdraw the land, and only now has it announced it will begin to evaluate environmental impacts along that route. The whole point of environmental review is to study the impacts before you make the decision, not after.”

The suit also contends the plan wrongly relies on transporting the waste in lightweight truck casks.

“It is uncanny how the DOE manages to do precisely the wrong thing,” Sandoval said. “With no public input whatsoever, the DOE chose a new transport mode that the DOE itself had rejected for study because it is the most expensive by a billion dollars, the most impractical, and has the highest health and safety risks.”

Dr. Margaret Chu is Director of DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Managment in charge of the Yucca Mountain Project (Photo courtesy DOE)

Federal officials have raised an array of concerns about the project, including a finding that the manufactured storage containers in which the government plans to store nuclear waste at the facility will probably leak.

The site is also on a fault line and sits above a freshwater aquifer that provides drinking water to residents of Nevada and California.

In July the D.C. Court of Appeals rejected Nevada's constitutional challenge to the repository, but ruled the federal government’s 10,000-year federal safety requirement for the highly radioactive waste is illegal because it is inconsistent with the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences.

Nevada has also asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to reject the DOE’s application for a license to open the facility.

Last month the NRC said the Energy Department must make more documents available to the public before it can apply for the license.

The Commission said the DOE's certification that it made available to the public all of its documentary material on the proposed Yucca Mountain repository failed to meet NRC regulations.

The debate over Yucca Mountain has also seeped into the Presidential campaign.

President George W. Bush is anxious to see the project progress - Democratic challenger John Kerry is opposed.

Kerry says the safe storage of the waste has not been scientifically proven and the safety, security and economic risks of sending nuclear waste to the Yucca Mountain site are too great for the plan to proceed.

The Democratic nominee recommends creating a National Academies advisory panel to determine how best to deal with the nation’s nuclear waste.

That problem is growing in scope and expense.

Spent nuclear fuel rods are stored under at least 20 feet of water, which provides adequate shielding from the radiation for anyone near the pool. The rods are moved into the water pools from the reactor along the bottom of water canals, so that the spent fuel is always shielded to protect workers. (Photo courtesy Nuclear Regulatory Commission)

Sustained delay to or failure to proceed with the Yucca Mountain project would force state governments to deal with the waste.

In several court cases judges have ruled that the federal government is liable for the costs of storing the nuclear waste until the Yucca Mountain site is ready.

The industry says that total bill could be some $56 billion - the first of several cases that could determine that figure began last month.

Last month, Exelon Corporation, which operates 17 nuclear reactors in the United States and provides some 20 percent of the nation’s nuclear power, said it had agreed to settle its case with the DOE.

Under the settlement, Exelon will immediately receive $80 million in reimbursements for costs incurred for storing spent nuclear reactor fuel.

That figure will total some $300 million if a national repository opens by 2010 and the DOE begins accepting spent nuclear fuel.

View an interactive map of highway, rail and barge routes for transport of nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain at: http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/maps2002/roadrail/index.htm