Yucca Mountain News Clips - Wednesday, June 25, 2003

Yucca Mountain News Clips
Wednesday, June 25, 2003
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Las Vegas SUN
June 25, 2003

Test sheds light on waste storage

By Benjamin Grove
<grove@lasvegassun.com>

Las Vegas SUN

ROCKVILLE, Md. -- Scientists who loaded nuclear waste into a metal storage container in 1985 and opened it up nearly 15 years later discovered no evidence of container stress or decay, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission official said.

While the experiment offered some new insights, it's not clear the test has much relevance to Yucca Mountain, experts said.

For an experiment unusual in its scope and duration, scientists took waste from the Surry nuclear power plant in Virginia and loaded it into a cast-iron Castor V-21 brand waste container, along with sensors for temperature and other readings. While the waste was the kind that ultimately would be stored at Yucca Mountain, the container was not. Department of Energy officials plan to use a high-tech metal alloy waste container at Yucca, the site of the the proposed national high-level nuclear waste repository.

Still, the experiment shed some new light on how waste decays inside a storage container and how "dry cask" storage containers -- now in use at power plants nationwide -- contain waste.

Harold Scott, a scientist with the NRC Office of Research, today presented the experiment results to the NRC's Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste, which advises the five-member Commission on Yucca issues.

High-level nuclear waste is in the form of fingertip-sized solid uranium pellets. The pellets are arranged in thin, metal 12-foot rods. The rods are bundled together and used to generate electricity in a nuclear reactor. When the rods are "spent," they are removed from the reactor as highly radioactive waste. The rods are typically put in cooling pools for several years and then loaded into waste containers.

When scientists at Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory opened the test container in 1999, they launched experiments on four rods from a bundle stored near the middle of the massive container, Scott told the NRC panel.

They discovered the fuel pellets and the metal rods had not cracked or released unusual amounts of dangerous gases, Scott said. As waste decays, it releases heat, and scientists had arranged the experiment so that the temperature inside the waste container would approach 400 degrees Celsius, the NRC-standard limit for the container, Scott said.

The container itself was completely intact, and there were no signs the cask would fail in another 20 or 40 years, Scott said.

"The cask didn't leak," Scott said after his presentation to the panel. "They didn't find anything strange or damaged in the cask or the (fuel-rod) basket."

Several of the waste panel members discussed whether the experiment had relevance to Yucca Mountain, where waste would be stored for 10,000 years or more. But they generally agreed that it was difficult to apply conclusions from the experiment to waste containers that would be used in the underground tunnels at Yucca.

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Las Vegas SUN
June 25, 2003

Energy Department unveils plan to answer Yucca Mountain issues

Associated Press

LAS VEGAS (AP) - The Department of Energy has unveiled a new plan to answer more than 200 scientific questions about a proposal to bury the nation's nuclear waste in southern Nevada.

Energy Department officials said Tuesday they plan to bundle 194 questions about the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository into 14 categories and have scientists answer them in groups over the next year and a half.

Another 13 issues would be answered individually, DOE officials told members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste in Washington, D.C.

Officials said the streamlined process should help the department meet a December 2004 target to submit an operating license application to the NRC.

The questions remain from 293 "key technical issue agreements" the Energy Department is trying to resolve before applying for the license. The federal agency wants to begin in 2010 entombing 77,000 tons of radioactive waste at the site, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Also Tuesday, an audit report said the Energy Department may have wasted millions of dollars by failing to coordinate development of nuclear waste canisters.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, the Hanford site in Washington state and the Energy Department program that manages nuclear waste from naval reactors simultaneously developed three different spent nuclear fuel canisters, investigators found.

Additionally, the naval reactor program and the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management were independently acquiring different shipping casks to transport waste to the planned Yucca Mountain repository.

"While there were site-specific reasons for some of this activity, we concluded that substantial cost reductions could be achieved through greater coordination and consolidation of these activities," auditors said in an 11-page report issued by DOE Inspector General Gregory Friedman.

Information from: Las Vegas Review-Journal

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Las Vegas Review Journal
June 25, 2003

DOE scientists unveil strategy on Yucca issues

Officials plan to bundle questions into categories and tackle them in groups

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- The Department of Energy unveiled a new strategy Tuesday to resolve more than 200 unanswered scientific questions about a Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

DOE scientists plan to bundle 194 questions into 14 categories and tackle them in groups over the next year and a half.

Officials said the streamlined process should help the department meet a December 2004 target to submit a repository license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Committee.

Another 13 issues would be answered individually, DOE officials said at a briefing for members of the NRC's Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste.

Those items are what remain of 293 "key technical issue agreements" the Energy Department is trying to resolve to the NRC's satisfaction in advance of a license application.

For instance, the DOE plans to integrate 14 outstanding issues related to water chemistry within the mountain repository. Robert Andrews, a manager for project contractor Bechtel SAIC, said studying them together would add efficiency and improve understanding of how a repository would perform.

"It's a bundling of information of like kind that affects total system performance," Andrews said. "This will allow us to more directly address the agreements."

The strategy was born in part from Yucca Mountain Project budget cuts that have forced managers to seek efficiencies, officials said.

They said the DOE still plans to address all the agreements before licensing, although a small number will require studies beyond 2004.

At the briefing, Lisa Gue, an energy analyst for the Public Citizen public interest group, warned against seeking shortcuts in the repository studies.

The NRC advisers said they liked the bundling idea but warned there might be pitfalls, such as prioritizing issues for study and agreeing on how to categorize individual topics.

Officials from both agencies plan further meetings on the strategy.

Janet Schleuter, chief of the NRC's high level waste branch, said the concept sounded favorable but the agency will need to examine the details before agreeing to it.

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Las Vegas Review Journal
June 25, 2003

Wasteful spending on nuke waste canisters detailed

By Steve Tetreault
Stephens Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department may have wasted millions of dollars by failing to coordinate development of nuclear waste canisters, auditors said in a report issued Tuesday.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, the Hanford site in Washington state and the DOE program that manages nuclear waste from naval reactors simultaneously developed three different spent nuclear fuel canisters, investigators found.

Additionally, the naval reactor program and the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management were independently acquiring different shipping casks to transport waste to a repository being planned at Yucca Mountain.

Had DOE eliminated redundancies at the outset, "a significant portion" of $13.8 million spent on designing the multi-ton containers might have been saved, the report said.

Auditors added it is not too late to consolidate shipping cask development for the Yucca Mountain Project, programs with a combined cost of $9 million to $24 million.

The investigation, which took place between April and December of last year, raised other issues.

It noted that canisters that store nuclear waste on an interim basis at Hanford were not designed for use in disposal, raising the possibility that the spent fuel may have to be repackaged for burial at Yucca Mountain.

The inspectors recommended more coordination in developing spent fuel technology, and analysis of whether standard canisters could be used at Hanford. It also called for studies to determine whether the DOE's needs could be served by developing a single canister.

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Public Citizen
June 24, 2003

Don´t Rely on Government to Tell the Whole Story About Nuclear Power

Statement by Wenonah Hauter, Director, Public Citizen´s Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is holding a closed-door workshop today for reporters covering the nuclear power industry. Based on how they agency has handled safety issues in the past, we have every reason to expect the agency will spend today glossing over past near-disasters, rather than seriously discussing legitimate public concerns. Today´s event likely will do nothing to boost public confidence in an agency that too often appears more concerned with helping out the nuclear industry than protecting the public.

Here are some of the facts about nuclear power that you probably won´t hear from the NRC:

• Nuclear security.
The NRC´s new nuclear plant security requirements ("design basis threat" requirements) were crafted in secret meetings with the nuclear industry and issued by fiat, circumventing required processes for public notice and comment. The NRC and nuclear industry have opposed congressional efforts to mandate stricter regulation of security at nuclear power plants.

• Vulnerability of pools of highly radioactive nuclear waste to catastrophic failure.
The NRC has allowed nuclear operators to reconfigure cooling pools at reactors across the country to pack in more radioactive waste. As a result, if an accident or attack caused water to partially drain from a pool, the densely packed waste could ignite and cause a radiation catastrophe "worse than Chernobyl," according to a study published in Princeton´s Science & Global Security journal this spring (the "Alvarez study"). Rather than taking these concerns seriously, NRC Commissioner Edward McGaffigan Jr., in a March 27 meeting, directed the agency´s staff to refute the study.

• Nuclear waste transportation.
Proposals for high-level nuclear waste dumps at Skull Valley, Utah, and Yucca Mountain, Nev., would initiate the transport of unprecedented quantities of nuclear waste. The NRC does not require physical testing of the transportation casks it licenses. Plans for one-time physical tests of certain casks (the "Package Performance Study") stop short of evaluating cask response to being submerged in deep water or subjected to explosives.

• Radioactive recycling.
The NRC is forging ahead with a rulemaking that would open the floodgates for the deregulation and release of nuclear waste materials, allowing them to be incinerated, dumped into unlicensed landfills, reused for non-nuclear purposes, and even "recycled" into everyday consumer products. While agreeing that any amount of radiation poses health risks and admitting that "the radioactive component may be concentrated in the recycling process" and that potentially "the material will be recycled in a form resulting in more actual contact with the general public," the NRC has held only one public meeting on this issue, at its Washington, D.C. -area headquarters. So much for prioritizing public health and safety.

• Uranium enrichment.
Louisiana Energy Services (LES), a company seeking to build a uranium enrichment plant in Hartsville, Tenn., has brazenly asked the NRC to restrict consideration of six specific issues when it reviews the company´s application for a plant license. These same six issues prevented the company from opening a similar facility in Louisiana a decade ago. The NRC has refused to make public its full consideration of the request, apart from a two-page letter summarizing the agency´s acceptance of two of the six LES requests.

• Davis-Besse.
Boric acid corroded a hole nearly all the way through the lid of this Ohio reactor, while its licensed operator, FirstEnergy, and the NRC looked the other way. An NRC Inspector General report concluded that the agency "appears to have informally established an unreasonably high burden of requiring absolute proof of a safety problem, versus lack of reasonable assurance of maintaining public health and safety, before it will act to shut down a power plant." The reactor was finally shut down in March last year and should stay closed because of the company´s track record of putting profits ahead of safety, but FirstEnergy is planning for an August restart.

• Emergency response.
Earlier this year, an independent review of the evacuation plan around New York´s Indian Point reactors (the "Witt Report"), commissioned by New York Gov. George Pataki, concluded that the public would be inadequately protected in the event of a terrorist attack. As a result, county and state governments refused to certify the Indian Point emergency plan, but the NRC continues to allow the reactor to operate.

The NRC refused a request by a Public Citizen representative to participate in today´s workshop. Instead, Public Citizen staff members presented this and other information to reporters entering the workshop and handed out doughnuts, a reference to the doughnut-loving, bumbling Homer Simpson, a television character who works in a nuclear plant and whose focus on food often leaves the plant vulnerable to a meltdown.

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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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