Yucca Mountain News Clips - Wednesday, April 30, 2003

Yucca Mountain News Clips
Wednesday, April 30, 2003
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Las Vegas SUN
April 30, 2003

Berkley seeks new Yucca probe

Workers reportedly reassigned

By Benjamin Grove
<grove@lasvegassun.com>

LAS VEGAS SUN

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., has asked for a federal probe of reports that three Yucca Mountain audit workers were reassigned to different duties after they documented flaws in project procedures.

In a letter to the General Accounting Office sent Tuesday, Berkley asked that the investigation be added to an ongoing investigation of two other Yucca workers, James Mattimoe, who was fired, and Robert Clark, who was reassigned, after they complained about how worker concerns were handled.

"I am extremely concerned about the motive and timing of these measures taken against these three quality assurance employees, and am also worried about the chilling effect these actions will have on other employees who might also have legitimate concerns regarding deficiencies of the project," Berkley wrote.

Berkley was referring to three members of a four-member Yucca audit team working for a Yucca contractor, Navarro Engineering and Research, who were reportedly reassigned. Auditor Don Harris was given his job back on Friday after three weeks off the job. Navarro officials said he was temporarily reassigned pending an internal investigation into his misconduct, but he was quickly cleared.

Navarro also disputed that auditor George Harper was "reassigned" because he was borrowed from another department to help with the audit and then returned to his old duties.

The audit team had spotlighted problems with the procedures that dictate how Yucca work is conducted.

On Tuesday a Yucca manager shed more light on problems inside the project's quality assurance program, including "inadequate supervision," failure to identify "behavior-based problems" and a lack of accountability for complying with procedures.

"Major changes" are being made to fix the problems, said John T. Mitchell, general manager for Bechtel SAIC, the top contractor at Yucca, proposed site of a repository for the nation's high-level nuclear waste.

Energy Department officials, along with their contractor managers, met via teleconference Tuesday with Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials in Rockville, Md., for a quarterly meeting.

Bechtel and the Energy Department are collecting and organizing that data for an application for a license to construct the repository at Yucca, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Department officials plan to submit the application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by December 2004.

Procedure flaws that recently surfaced inside the quality assurance program are not likely to slow the department's plans, observers say. But critics have said the problems are emblematic of inattention to detail that bodes a troubling future for the nuclear waste repository project.

"You are saying all the right words," Susan Lynch, a technical programs administrator for the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, told Yucca managers at a meeting Tuesday after they outlined how the program was fixing problems. "But we have heard this so many times over the years."

Because the NRC will be responsible for licensing Yucca, commission officials are keeping close tabs on the project. So far Yucca managers have not said publicly how the recently discovered flaws would affect the project or its timeline, if at all. They may shed more light on that during the second day of the two-day meeting today, NRC officials said.

The flaws prompted the Energy Department's Yucca quality assurance director R. Dennis Brown to issue a stop-work order, essentially forcing Bechtel to scrap its newly revised Yucca work procedures and revert to a set of out-of-date procedures until problems are fixed.

Brown also issued a report to Bechtel for fixing the problems, including instructions for better delegation of authority and properly handling document signatures, Brown said.

Mitchell said part of the problem was that Yucca personnel "chose not to comply with procedures" and that there was an "inadequate definition of roles and responsibilities" in the quality assurance program.

In other action Tuesday Mitchell revealed that Bechtel this month launched a "corrective action" program to "re-establish the authenticity of the (project) data." Mitchell said Bechtel began reviewing Yucca data in January and that Yucca managers found enough problems that they decided to launch a more comprehensive review.

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Las Vegas SUN
April 30, 2003

Contractor questions documentation of Nevada nuclear dump plan

ASSOCIATED PRESS

LAS VEGAS (AP) - A review has raised questions about documents supporting the federal government's plan to build a nuclear waste repository in Nevada, an official with a project contractor said.

The Energy Department found the problem serious enough to start corrective action earlier this month, said John Mitchell, general manager of Bechtel SAIC, a contractor on the Yucca Mountain Project.

Mitchell said Tuesday that Bechtel managers reviewing years of material to prepare a repository license application discovered in January that data management problems recurred during the past four years, despite efforts to fix them.

"We're talking about the ability to objectively defend the history and pedigree of the data," Mitchell said.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission must be able to trace the agency's conclusions that Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, can safely store highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel.

Mitchell disclosed the problem at a Las Vegas meeting of Yucca Mountain Project quality control managers. He said Bechtel must "go back and re-establish the authenticity of the data."

Project spokeswoman Gayle Fisher said, "I'm told this is not significant, but anything dealing with quality is a serious issue."

Mitchell's comments represented the latest of recent problems with quality control at the Yucca Mountain project.

In March, the Energy Department issued a "stop work" order on one program segment after auditors found flaws in procedure-writing.

Mitchell said he stepped in to investigate the audit findings. They concluded Bechtel was failing to update procedures that direct scientists and technicians on what is necessary to document their tasks.

Auditors found that sign-offs on procedure changes were not documented properly. In one reported case, a Bechtel manager signed approval sheets for 97 procedures before their preparation was complete.

Mitchell said workers felt pressure to complete the task and sought shortcuts to simplify what appeared to be routine work.

Information from: Las Vegas Review-Journal

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Las Vegas Review Journal
April 30, 2003

Review questions Yucca Mountain documentation

Data verification necessary for dump's license

By STEVE TETREAULT
STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON -- A review has raised questions about years of documents that support the government's plan to build a nuclear waste repository in Nevada, an official said Tuesday.

The Energy Department found the problem serious enough to start corrective action April 17, said John Mitchell, general manager of Bechtel SAIC, a contractor on the Yucca Mountain Project.

Mitchell said Bechtel managers in January began reviewing years of material to prepare a repository license application when they discovered data management problems were reoccurring over the past four years despite efforts to fix them.

"We're talking about the ability to objectively defend the history and pedigree of the data," Mitchell said.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission must be able to trace the agency's conclusions that Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, safely could hold highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel.

Mitchell disclosed the problem at a Las Vegas meeting of Yucca Mountain Project quality control managers. He said Bechtel must "go back and re-establish the authenticity of the data."

Project spokeswoman Gayle Fisher said, "I'm told this is not significant, but anything dealing with quality is a serious issue."

Mitchell's comments represented the latest of recent problems with quality control at Yucca Mountain Project. In March, the Energy Department issued a "stop work" order on a program segment after auditors found flaws in procedure-writing.

Auditors found that sign-offs on procedure changes were not documented properly. In one case, a Bechtel manager presigned approval sheets for 97 procedures before their preparation was complete.

Mitchell said workers felt pressure to complete the task and sought shortcuts to simplify what appeared to be routine work.

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Sierra Times
April 30, 2003

Energy: The War Behind the War

Radwaste, Part 4. Burying It In The Back Yard

By Susanna Harding

All through history, whenever man has wanted to do something, the first thing he does is to build a fire. This is to say, all is thermodynamics, and to get this you need a heat source. So, in this week's column, there is nothing really new, except perhaps the nature of the heat source. We will be looking at isotope powered electrical generators.

The radwaste planned to be buried at Yucca Mountain (in Nye County) is fission fragments. These include such things as cesium and cobalt, which are useful in themselves, but do not include the transuranic wastes such as plutonium, curium, californium, and so forth. The transuranic (TRU) waste is going to the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) site in New Mexico. Let's pull some of it out and see what can be done with it.

Our choice of heat source is based on a primary requirement for safety, coupled with a need for as small a device as possible. Accordingly, we crack open the CRC Handbook (if you don't have a recent copy you really should get one) and find that amongst the alpha emitters there is an isotope of plutonium (Pu-238) with a half-life of 87.74 years. Now, while the beta emitters are more numerous, easier to get, and are in the raffinate, alpha particles are stopped extremely easily (a sheet of paper is more than adequate shielding) and will deposit all their energy therein. So, we should design with an alpha emitter. Since we want to minimize the size, we want something with a fairly short half-life, and Pu-238 is a pretty decent choice. So, on to the design calculations.

Some elementary algebra (it took one sheet of paper to work out the whole thing) gives a decay constant (different than the half life) of 3.99E9 seconds. With our canonical power requirement of 74 amps at 24 volts, and given that the energy per decay is 5.593 MeV (million electron volts), we find that we will need 3.18E15 decays per second. This is in fact fairly hot, given that a Curie is 3.7E10 decays per second, so we are pushing the megaCurie range. However, remember that we have chosen an alpha emitter, so the shielding requirement is not so terrible. A quick check of the CRC table shown that there is some very light low-energy x-ray emission as secondary emission, so when we get to the shielding portion of the design we should keep that in mind. Turn the crank, and we get a total requirement of 1.27E25 atoms, or 21 moles of Pu-238. This works out to 5 kilograms. And if we recover the energy via thermionic or thermoelectric generators and assume an efficiency of 15 percent, we are looking at a total fuel load of about 33 kg - somewhat bigger than a softball, but not by much.

Let's now look at the shielding and housing requirement. First, the fuel must be immobilized as much as possible. Glassification and/or synrock technology seems appropriate, although putting some metal rods for heat transport in might be required. If the fuel is kept about an inch from the surface of the synrock slug holding it, then there is no problem whatsoever from the alpha particles. And if there is an inch of lead around the slug, the x-rays won't be a problem.

Now, we want no mechanical contact between the fuel slug and the surroundings except through the thermionic generator, as any such contact would constitute a heat leak However, there is a requirement for emergency cooling, and cooling when the system is being transported. So, we look at some of the work on convection cooled reactors, and we find that there are several excellent designs for passive cooling systems, no moving parts larger than air molecules, based entirely on the fact that hot air rises. These cooling systems are designed for higher power outputs than what we have, so we can swipe the design with good confidence that it will work as advertised.

Now, since I want it in my back yard, (yes, you CAN put this in my back yard), we will dig a nice deep hole - about two metres, put in a small concrete vault to hold the generator and cold shoe, drop the generator into it, stick a couple of air intakes for the backup cooling system, and cover it up again. Figure four to six inches for the thickness of the concrete, any less and it won't take the weight, reinforce it with rebar per standard practice, add a sump pump to keep the water out. No moving parts, no user serviceable components inside. Expected service life, about 40 years.

These things actually exist. There are two aboard the Galileo space probe (we didn't bother to shield them, as there are no humans around), and prototypes for fixed-load systems have been developed. Do they work? Do they ever.

Today is April 30. On this day in 1863, at La Trinidad Hacienda, Camerone, Veracruz, Mexico, the 3rd Company of the 1st Battalion of the French Foreign Legion, while providing cover for a French supply train, took on the Mexican Army. For ten hours the sixty-four Legionnaires held off a force of over 2000 Mexican regulars until the survivors, Captain Danjou and four of his men, all wounded, ran out of ammunition. They then fixed bayonets and charged. The supply train got through unmolested.

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Las Vegas SUN
April 29, 2003

Where I Stand -- Brian Greenspun: SARS not only threat

Brian Greenspun is editor of the Las Vegas Sun.

WHAT CAN we learn from the Chinese?

How about how not to handle a public health crisis, for starters?

Like everything else in this very complicated world, whether or not we should breathe a bit easier about SARS depends mostly upon whom we are relying for our information.

The Chinese have, for all practical purposes, ruled themselves out of the reliability mix because of how they handled the initial story of the spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome, for better or worse known as SARS.

The World Health Organization would have us believe that all is well -- at least in some places -- but, their good news notwithstanding, travel to many countries anywhere near Asia is practically non-existent, which gives some reason to question WHO's healthful outlook.

And places like Canada and even the United States are having some difficulty figuring out how to get a handle on the travelers who do make it into our countries and past our attempts to quarantine those who may be infected. The U.S. has even gone so far as to involuntarily quarantine a visitor who may or may not be infected. Out of caution, to be sure, but a civil-rights-affecting decision not lightly taken in an effort to save many more from possible trouble.

The bottom line, thus far, seems to be that we don't know how wide or how deep is this epidemic, but we do know that we don't yet have a cure and, therefore, we must do anything and everything in our power to prevent its spread to the community at large. Does this sound familiar? Like in the earliest days of the AIDS virus when all we knew about it was that we knew nothing and had no way to stop what looked like the 20th century version of the Black Plague?

You will please forgive my one-track mind but a story in the paper Monday about SARS made me refocus on a subject of critical importance to every person living in Nevada. I am going to tell you the specifics of the story and see if you can figure out where I am going.

The headline read: "Outbreak of Disease Forces Steep Plunge in Chinese Economy."

The story told of the fastest-growing financial power in the world, China, and how this mess with SARS has brought the economy of that country of billions to a virtual standstill.

Countries in the region who do business with China are restricted in their comings and goings to the point that those who must be there can't get in without risking quarantine at home. That is if they can get into China in the first place, which is getting increasingly difficult because of China's attempts to stem what could become the first major health epidemic of the 21st century.

For example, in the largest city in southern China, Guangzhou, what should have been a huge buildup for the May Day celebration has turned into a fizzler with no chance of a turnaround in sight. Guangzhou is the center of a SARS outbreak last winter that we didn't know about until recently. That's because it was treated as one of those Chinese state secrets.

The good news is that, unlike earlier centuries in which medical knowledge and technology consisted of bloodletting and more bloodletting, there is every reason to believe that a cure for SARS will be forthcoming and that anything resembling the plagues of yesteryear will be defeated. At least we hope so.

But what of those medical disasters for which medical technology has no cure, no treatment, no hope? If entire countries can be brought to their economic knees just because a few hundred or few thousand people out of billions worldwide get sick, what will become of cities that cater to those same people when death threats abound with seemingly no help in sight?

If you haven't already guessed, I am talking about the federal government's plan to ship thousands of tons of nuclear waste across this country, through Las Vegas and bury it just miles from the epicenter of international travel.

When President George W. Bush decided to ignore his commitment to the people of Nevada to let science determine our fate and ordered, instead, the process to start immediately, which will lead to the burying of deadly plutonium in our desert, he created an environment that could cause a public health crisis far greater than anything that could result from SARS.

One single accident on Interstate 15 could result in a high-level plutonium spill that will cause a quarantine the likes of which China can only imagine. How about 35 million people deciding not to visit Las Vegas until every bit of that nuclear waste is gone -- which could take years? Think about the economic disaster that will cause!

And, yet, that is where we could find ourselves unless the president rethinks his decision and stops this madness. Perhaps when he does come a calling on Nevada -- and he will because election time is just around the corner -- the first question out of Nevadans' mouths should be about the health risks he has created for us by not telling us the truth.

SARS is bad news but the good news is that science will probably find an answer pretty soon. Radioactive poisoning and death is also bad news but the worse news is that science will remain baffled for years and the tourists will remain home for much longer.

So, what can we learn from the Chinese?

You don't see them deliberately condemning their people to sickness and death for the benefit of a few big companies. Do you?

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State of Nevada
Agency for Nuclear Projects
www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/
nwpo@nuc.state.nv.us
775-687-3744
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