Yucca Mountain News Clips - Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Yucca Mountain News Clips
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
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Las Vegas SUN
November 18, 2003

Energy bill includes $580 million for Yucca Mountain

By Suzanne Struglinski
<suzanne@lasvegassun.com>
Las Vegas SUN

WASHINGTON -- The energy and water spending bill expected to be approved by the House today includes a $580 million budget for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage project and almost $200 million for other projects in Nevada.

Nevada's members of the House said they would vote against it because of the Yucca Mountain project funding. Yucca Mountain is about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Once approved later today, the conference report will go to the Senate for final consideration. It is expected to be approved by the Senate and after it is it will go to the president to sign it into law.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said she will continue to vote against any funding for the Yucca Mountain project "until this nation realizes that this nation's future is not in using nuclear power."

She said she would rather see the "horrendously large" amount of money for Yucca used in renewable tax credit to consumers and business could use solar, geothermal, wind or other renewable energy sources to produce power.

Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., said on the House floor this morning he was glad language creating interim storage at the site called for in the first bill remained out of the final bill. Gibbons and Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev. worked on an amendment in July to block the interim storage language.

Regardless though, he said the $580 million is slated for a "fatally flawed federal boondoggle," and that he will "never give up the fight" against spending money on the project.

Porter said he could not support the bill as long as the Yucca funding remained.

House and Senate negotiators approved the $580 million for the project --an increase of $120 million from the current fiscal year on Nov. 5. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev, one of the negotiators worked the figure down from the $591 requested by the administration and $765 million approved by the House.

The bulk of the money -- $525 million -- will go toward preparing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing application for the federal nuclear waste repository, planned for Yucca, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Beyond Yucca Mountain, the bill has roughly $180 million for Nevada projects.

Negotiators included $24.9 million for Enhanced Test Readiness, which includes the Nevada Test Site. This matches the president's request, but the approved langauge also restricts the National Nuclear Security Administration to improve test readiness capability to a 24-month gear up rather the the proposed 18 months.

The Modern Pit Facility program received $10.8 million, but the president wanted $23 million for the program. The Nevada Test Site, located about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, though not the front runner, is one of five sites under consideration for the facility, which would build new plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons.

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
November 18, 2003

Yucca Mountain: Secret sessions upset Reid, state officials

Regulators, Energy Department scientists meeting privately

By Keith Rogers
Review-Journal

Secret meetings between a team of nuclear waste regulators and Department of Energy scientists drew criticism Monday from Sen. Harry Reid, who said the department is getting special treatment to cover up flaws in the planned Yucca Mountain repository.

"The only reason I can imagine for the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to meet and deny access to the public is because they have something to hide," Reid, D-Nev., said in a statement late Monday.

"The Yucca Mountain project is a haphazard program that cannot pass public scrutiny, so the federal agencies promoting the project must meet and plot behind closed doors," the statement said.

His comments concerned closed-door discussions this week between NRC staff members and DOE scientists at the Las Vegas campus of the main Yucca Mountain Project contractor, Bechtel SAIC Co.

A telephone message left with local NRC representative Robert Latta was not returned, and an NRC spokeswoman could not be reached late Monday.

A spokesman for the Energy Department's Office of Repository Development, Allen Benson, said the NRC decided to close the meetings, which he described as "an assessment of DOE technical information, all of which will be available in a license application."

The DOE must seek a license for the nuclear waste repository, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The secret discussions, described by DOE officials as "evaluations" and "inspections," are taking place while a NRC advisory committee tours the Yucca Mountain site today and holds public meetings Wednesday and Thursday at Texas Station.

Such closed-door discussions that exclude the public and state observers are unprecedented and violate procedures, said state Nuclear Projects Agency chief Bob Loux and his full-time consultant, Steve Frishman.

"We're very perplexed about this. To my knowledge, there has never been a closed meeting before," Loux said.

"We've been quizzing NRC officials from the bottom rung all the way to the top, and nobody has given us an answer why these are closed," he said.

Frishman said he was told the assessments are similar to inspections that the NRC would give to the operator of a nuclear plant after a license has been issued. But the Department of Energy has not yet submitted a license application for the planned repository and does not plan to do so until December 2004.

"They're following a procedure that resembles what they do when they have an inspection of a licensee, but DOE is not a licensee," Frishman said.

He said the regulators' anxiety is driven by quality-control problems with tracking and verifying some of the scientific information about the site and the repository's design needed for a license.

"The first decision they made was to close the meetings then figure out what procedure to follow. Their answer is they just don't have time to work out a new policy," he said. "We can't discover why they need these meetings closed unless it's about something they don't want anybody to hear."

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Las Vegas Review-Journal
November 18, 2003

Chemists' new findings raise concerns about Yucca

Estimates of how fast buried fuel rods would disintegrate could be off

Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO -- By 2010, if the U.S. Energy Department gets its way, an underground burial site for the nation's spent nuclear reactor fuel will open for business thousands of feet beneath the Nevada desert.

But chemists' new findings raise questions about the repository at Yucca Mountain, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Monday. The findings come at a crucial time, only 13 months before the agency plans to ask for federal nuclear regulators' approval to build the site.

During the past year, two DOE-funded scientific teams discovered that the buried fuel rods could experience unexpected chemical changes. Those changes could alter present estimates of how fast the buried fuel rods would disintegrate, leaking poisonous plutonium, neptunium, iodine and other radionuclides into the surrounding terrain and groundwater.

On the one hand, the chemists' findings might be good news for advocates of the Yucca Mountain burial site.

Their research suggests that as the super-hot fuel rods radioactively decay and are exposed to dripping groundwater, the resulting chemical interactions would breed odd forms of uranium minerals. Like miniature cages, these minerals would tend to lock bits of plutonium and neptunium in the minerals' crystalline atomic lattices. Hence, the disintegrating nuclear fuel probably wouldn't escape very far into the groundwater.

What troubles the chemists is that they've made their discoveries so late in the game. DOE has been funding research into the chemical behavior of buried fuel rods for decades, yet the chemists made their discoveries only during the past year.

"What I find amazing in this story is that the Yucca Mountain story had gone this far without (anyone previously) finding out that these (chemical events occur)," said one co-writer of the article, Peter Burns, a geology professor at the University of Notre Dame. "I wouldn't have thought you'd want big surprises before (you seek) your licensing application."

The main discovery came in two main steps. Last year, Edgar Buck and Bruce McNamara at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a DOE lab in Richland, Wash., discovered in lab tests that a type of uranium mineral called studtite forms from decaying reactor fuel in a pool of water.

In Friday's issue of Science, scientists at the University of California, Davis and Notre Dame report that the interaction of radioactivity and groundwater would form a type of studtite called uranyl peroxide. The crystalline atomic structures of uranyl peroxides would tend to trap long-lived, dangerous radioactivity decay products such as plutonium and neptunium.

Their findings don't surprise Bob Loux, director of Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects, which has fought for years against the Yucca Mountain repository. On Jan. 14, the state plans to argue against the repository on legal and environmental grounds in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C.

Despite DOE's plan to cover the spent fuel with titanium to keep out groundwater, "our experts think no metal will last underground more than 400 or 500 years. Titanium goes away in 50 to 60 years because of fluoride in the water."

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Las Vegas SUN
November 17, 2003

Last-minute glitches in Nevada nuclear-waste burial plan

Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - By 2010, if the U.S. Energy Department gets its way, an underground burial site for the nation's spent nuclear reactor fuel will open for business thousands of feet beneath the Nevada desert.

But chemists' new findings raise questions about the dump at Yucca Mountain, just northwest of Las Vegas, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Monday. The findings come at a very bad time, only 13 months before the agency plans to ask for federal nuclear regulators' approval to build the site.

On the one hand, the chemists' findings might be good news for advocates of the Yucca Mountain burial site.

"What I find amazing in this story is that the Yucca Mountain story had gone this far without (anyone previously) finding out that these (chemical events occur)," said one co-writer of the article, geology Professor Peter Burns of the University of Notre Dame. "I wouldn't have thought you'd want big surprises before (you seek) your licensing application."

In Friday's issue of Science, scientists at UC Davis and Notre Dame University report that the interaction of radioactivity and groundwater would form a type of studtite called uranyl peroxide. The crystalline atomic structures of uranyl peroxides would tend to trap long-lived, dangerous radioactivity decay products such as plutonium and neptunium.

Burns and his team have "exposed quite a hole in our understanding of (buried) spent fuel. In that sense, it's a very important piece of work," Buck said.

Their findings don't surprise Bob Loux, director of the state of Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects, which has fought for years against the Yucca Mountain dump. On Jan. 14, the state plans to argue against the repository on legal and environmental grounds in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C.

"The uncertainties that are involved in the Yucca Mountain assessment are so large that literally neither DOE nor anyone else knows what's going to occur underground if waste is stored there," Loux said. Despite DOE's plan to cover the spent fuel with titanium to keep out groundwater, "our experts think no metal will last underground more than 400 or 500 years. Titanium goes away in 50 to 60 years because of fluoride in the water."

DOE officials have reacted respectfully to the chemists' findings. Still, the officials are sticking to their schedule: They expect no delay in applying for the license in December 2004, as presently planned.

The chemists "have done a good job" and their work is "an interesting addition to what is known already about the behavior of spent fuel in a system that has (ground)water available to it," said Abe Van Luik, a physical chemist who is senior policy adviser for performance assessment at DOE's Las Vegas office.

Van Luik is confident that the new findings don't undermine the DOE's theoretical models for the behavior of buried spent fuel. At worst, the discoveries indicate that radionuclides would escape even more slowly than presently projected, he said.

Besides Burns, the Science article's other authors are Karrie-Ann Hughes Kubatko, also of Notre Dame, and Katheryn Helean and Alexandra Navrotsky, both of UC Davis.

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Las Vegas SUN
November 17, 2003

EPA Plan Would Ease Rules on Nuke Waste

By Nancy Zuckerbrod
Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration is considering allowing low-level radioactive waste to be dumped at toxic waste sites and other facilities that currently aren't permitted to receive it.

The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to issue a notice Tuesday seeking public comments on the proposal.

The notice, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press, asks the public to weigh in on whether certain levels of radioactive waste can be stored in landfills or hazardous material disposal sites.

Nuclear power companies can dispose of low-level radioactive waste at a handful of sites around the country, and about 20 sites can dispose of hazardous material.

The EPA notice says a rule change could simplify the process for getting rid of hazardous and radioactive waste for nuclear power companies and others that generate it.

"The need to comply with two separate regulatory systems, each of which is targeted to a different component of the waste, creates a certain regulatory and economic burden on mixed waste generators," the EPA states in its notice.

Companies have stored a lot of waste instead of disposing of it because of the burden of getting rid of it properly, the notice says.

Environmentalists criticized the new proposal.

"They can save a lot of money if their waste doesn't have to go to a facility designed to safely contain it," said Daniel Hirsch, president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a Los Angeles-based nuclear watchdog group.

Environmentalists urged new EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt, the former governor of Utah, not to make the changes.

"EPA's proposal, within days of Gov. Leavitt's confirmation as the new EPA chief, to deregulate radioactive wastes, is a deeply troubling assault on the environment," said Diane D'Arrigo, nuclear waste project director for the Washington-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service.

EPA spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman said the agency will consider public comments before taking further action.

The notice focuses on commercial nuclear waste but asks for input on whether the Energy Department should also loosen its rules governing the disposal of radioactive waste from weapons plants.

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On the Net:

EPA: http://www.epa.gov/

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KLAS
November 17, 2003

Jon Summers, Reporter

Barbara Searcy is a Las Vegas realtor visiting Yucca Mountain during a public tour. "I hear a lot of conversation about Yucca Mountain from people who are coming in from out of state and I have not been here. So I thought it would be very wise for me to learn first-hand a little bit more about it," said Barbara Searcy.

She's learning from the people on the front lines of the federal government's efforts to store 77,000 tons of nuclear waste 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. As a realtor, Searcy is concerned about the financial impacts of the proposed nuclear waste dump.

A new impact report created by Clark County's Nuclear Waste Division doesn't paint a pretty picture. Irene Navis predicts home values would decrease at least 3-percent, even more if there's a transportation accident.

"Actually, that's kind of the lower end of the spectrum. The high-end of the spectrum is more like a 30-percent drop in property values depending on the land use you're talking about and what types of incident you were talking about," Navis said.

Navis says an accident could also impact our local economy by creating a stigma. "If the accident happens 50 miles outside of Las Vegas, the words "Las Vegas" will show up in the newspaper article or CNN or anywhere."

Then there's the county hospital. "They just don't have the equipment or the room, or the facility set up to respond to such an accident," Navis said. She says UMC needs an isolation area for people who may be contaminated and funding to train staff.

Former Nevada Governor Bob List works on behalf of the nuclear industry. He says a lot of this information is fear mongering. "The reality is there have been over 3000 shipments, safely done of spent nuclear fuel all around the planet, with no release of radiation damaging to anybody," List said.

"The worst thing people can do is well this is no big deal, because we're doing a lot of other shipping. This is a totally different deal than what we have done in the past," said Fred Dilger, Clark County Nuclear Waste Division.

Dilger studies nuclear waste transportation for Clark County and says Yucca Mountain officials don't have a completed transportation plan, but he doubts it will be by rail. "We have a lot of mountains, yes they're very low, but we've got a lot of them. It's difficult to build, we have flash floods, we have steep grades, and the United States doesn't have a lot of experience building rail roads anymore," Dilger said.

"I believe it will be brought by rail, we're gonna build a rail road and while there may be few shipments by truck, most of it will be by rail," List said. He thinks 95-percent will come by rail.

The woman in charge of creating the DOE's transportation plan says nothing has been finalized, but waste would probably be brought in by rail and trucks that would likely travel through Clark County.

The plan is for the waste to be brought in by rail, where it'll travel through a tunnel about one mile into Yucca Mountain where it will be stored about 1,000 feet below the surface. Proponents say it's safer to store the nation's nuclear waste in one place rather than in 39 states. Navis doesn't buy that argument.

"We don't think this eliminates a danger, it adds another place for a danger. If you're talking about 103 places where waste is stored right now, this just adds a 104th. Reactor sites will still produce and store waste," Navis said.

Searcy says her tour made her more confident about yucca mountain as a site, but she's still not sold on how the waste will get here. With so much information coming at her, she needs time to think it over. "I'm going to have to digest what I've seen and heard here today and come up with some reasonable answers."

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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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