Yucca Mountain News Clips
Sunday, October 30, 2005
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Las Vegas Review-Journal
October 29, 2005
Nuclear waste storage undergoes simple shift
By Keith Rogers
Review-Journal
In the world of nuclear waste, simpler is better.
That's the case with the so-called "new path" that government scientists embarked on this week to improve the design and safety of the planned nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
In another respect, it's also the course spelled out by independent experts in the Oct. 21 issue of the prestigious journal Science.
For different reasons, the simple-is-better philosophy appears to be gaining momentum among scientists for tackling what many of them consider to be a huge environmental problem: how to safely dispose of the most lethal radioactive materials on Earth, the stuff left over from splitting atoms to generate nuclear power.
Thomas H. Pigford, professor emeritus of nuclear engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, says the best way to attempt to protect generations for hundreds of thousands of years from dissolved radioactivity escaping into groundwater from 77,000 tons of nuclear waste entombed in the mountain is to surround the metal disposal containers with sand and gravel.
Ten percent, or 7,700 tons, would be in the form of solidified, heavy metal from highly radioactive defense waste turned into glass logs. The rest would be solid spent fuel from commercial power reactors.
In the Science article, Pigford and co-author Luther J. Carter, an independent science writer, suggest that a layer of dry, coarse gravel topped with a layer of fine sand or finely ground volcanic tuff -- the same stuff the mountain is made of -- would create a capillary action system. The layers would slowly draw away water that seeps through the mountain's cracks and drips down from the ceilings of tunnels where metal waste canisters are sealed.
"All the waste containers beneath the gravel will corrode over time from the water vapor and oxygen present," Pigford and Carter wrote. "Eventually radioactive elements dissolved in water will emerge from the failed containers, diffuse along gravel particle surface and ... remain trapped there for hundreds of thousands of years."
Their calculations, based on a 1995 performance assessment by a Yucca Mountain Project contractor, show that "the radiation dose to future people from a repository using a capillary barrier would be lower at all times by a factor of 1 million than the one envisioned by the Yucca Mountain Project today," the article states.
Instead of sand and gravel, the current design calls for installing expensive drip shields made of titanium to divert water migrating through the mountain.
However, Pigford and Carter say neither the drip shield nor nickel-based Alloy 22, which forms the outer shell of the waste-disposal canisters, is needed. The cost savings would be considerable, considering the price tag for each of the 14,700 canisters with drip shields would be $900,000.
In an e-mail, a spokesman for the Energy Department's Office of Repository Development in Las Vegas said the idea of using backfill and even depleted uranium as a barrier system previously has been reviewed.
"Currently, we are undertaking an exploratory study related to the potential benefits of backfilling," wrote Allen Benson, the DOE spokesman. "The safety case at Yucca Mountain will be outlined in the license application when it is submitted to the" Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Nevertheless, Benson said the drip shield design is still under consideration by project scientists. In addition, he said the waste package, or disposal canister, for spent nuclear fuel from commercial power reactors hasn't changed.
"The waste package still consists of an outer corrosion barrier of nickel-based Alloy 22, approximately 1 inch thick, and an inner vessel of stainless steel, approximately 2 inches thick," Benson wrote in an e-mail Wednesday.
His message came in response to a new design approach for using standardized canisters to deliver spent nuclear fuel to Yucca Mountain.
DOE's announcement Tuesday said this "new path" design differs from the previous design in that solid, spent fuel pellets inside metal cladding assemblies would be sealed in these canisters at reactor sites, then hauled to Yucca Mountain on rail cars or trucks.
Once at the mountain, they would remain sealed with the transport canister being put inside a double-layered, disposal sheath canister for being moved by rail into permanent storage tunnels, or drifts.
Paul Golan, DOE's acting director for Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, stated that with this "new path forward ... we are confident that the simpler we make the design, the more reliable the project will be."
He said this eliminates the need for huge, multibillion-dollar surface facilities for handling and repackaging spent fuel assemblies to be put into disposal canisters.
"It also reduces the potential hazards caused by the oxidation of bare spent nuclear fuel during handling," DOE officials stated in their announcement.
In an interview Tuesday, Golan said there still will need to be a special, inert facility at Yucca Mountain for repackaging "off-normal" spent fuel that arrives in damaged cladding.
A previous study found that thousands of fuel assemblies would arrive damaged including some with undetected leaks and cracks from which fuel could oxidize and result in powderlike contamination.
After Pigford heard about DOE's "new path" design, he said, "It's certainly a change ... that brings so many potential changes that it's going to require a lot of study."
He was referring to a claim in a trade publication, "The International Radioactive Exchange," that the new design eventually would involve reprocessing of spent fuel at reactor sites. While reprocessing is a way of recycling some unused fuel back for commercial power generation, the waste left for disposal at Yucca Mountain would have to be solidified, such as the 10 percent received as highly radioactive defense waste.
"These words about reprocessing are major," Pigford said in a telephone interview Wednesday. "Instead of spent fuel elements, they would be borosilicate glass containing fission products and containing some radioactive, transuranic elements."
If this course is pursued, the whole aspect of the Yucca Mountain Project would change in light of new data required for heat loading on the repository and many other factors, Pigford said.
"That's not just storing spent fuel from reactors, that would be storing a new material," he said. "Sure the military waste at Savannah River (S.C.) and Hanford (Wash.) looks like reprocessing waste. But it's different from commercial spent fuel. There's an enormous difference that has a big effect upon the design of Yucca Mountain. ... It puts us in a whole new era."
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Senator Barbara Boxer(D-CA)
October 25, 2005
DOE Peddles Plan For Supposed "Clean" Nuclear Garbage Dump in Nevada; Berkley Points to Continued Terror Risks
(Washington, DC -- October 25, 2005) U.S. Representative Shelley Berkley (D-NV) today refuted Department of Energy claims that newly proposed containers to store nuclear waste will create a “clean’ radioactive garbage dump 90 minutes from Las Vegas. Berkley´s response follows an announcement this morning from DOE that it will abandon its current plans for packaging radioactive waste and will be developing a new system that seeks to make Yucca Mountain easier to operate.
"Calling plans to dump radioactive garbage in Nevada ‘clean´ is an insult to the intelligence of families in the Silver State and ignores the fact that nuclear waste is one of the deadliest substances on Earth. Regardless of how they repackage this waste, at the end of the day, it´s still going to be dumped in Nevada, and it´s still going to threaten the lives of millions of Americans living along transportation routes,’ said Berkley. “This proposal creates a standard container for use by the nuclear industry, but it will not reduce the enormous vulnerability of thousands of waste shipments to an accident or terrorist attack,’ said Berkley.
"The DOE is desperate to show that Yucca Mountain is moving ahead, despite the fact that it´s already years behind schedule and poses an enormous threat to public safety and the environment. The DOE´s announcement is but the latest example of the disarray that has been a hallmark of the Yucca Mountain Project from the outset. The fact they are still changing the design and have abandoned any timetable for submitting a license for the dump, only proves how desperate they´ve become and how many obstacles remain. The only safe solution is to keep nuclear waste at the plants where it was produced and where it can be safely stored,’ Berkley said.
"I fear that this is but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this Administration´s plans to bury Nevada in nuclear waste. President Bush has made the nuclear industry huge promises in exchange for campaign dollars and they are pressuring him to deliver one way or another. That could include plans for interim waste storage at the Nevada Test Site, even though such a plan has been rejected by Congress in the past,’ said Berkley.
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Salt Lake Tribune
October 29, 2005
Feds plan redesign on hot-waste containers
By Judy Fahys
The Salt Lake Tribune
The U.S. Energy Department may have thrown a new complication last week into plans for proposed reactor-fuel storage in Utah's Skull Valley.
The department on Tuesday said it would ask its contractor to redesign the containers that would be used to ship waste and bury it permanently underground at Yucca Mountain, Nev., so that it does not need repackaging. That could be an issue for proponents of the Skull Valley site, a utility consortium called Private Fuel Storage LLC, which has just completed eight years of licensing reviews using an existing canister system.
PFS spokeswoman Sue Martin said Friday that the problem will wind up being the Energy Department's because nuclear companies have for two decades packed waste in so-called "dry storage" containers that are pre-approved by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
If the Energy Department, which has responsibility for permanent disposal of high-level nuclear waste, proceeds with its new containers, it would mean repacking all of the waste that's already in dry storage.
"They [Energy Department officials] have an obligation under the law to take the fuel for the utilities," she said, adding that PFS's plan is to use the two-part cask system developed by New Jersey-based Holtec International.
"That's what we are licensed for," she said.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has reviewed the Holtec containers to serve as a pre-approved option that allows utilities to store their waste at their reactor sites. Last month the commission licensed the PFS facility with those containers.
The Energy Department has struggled for more than 20 years to build Yucca Mountain as a permanent repository for high-level waste. Meanwhile, PFS' storage is contemplated as long-term parking of up to 40 years for reactor waste on its way to Yucca Mountain. Described as a stop-gap solution for reactors that were running out of storage space while waiting for the Energy Department to come up with permanent disposal, the PFS site has been analyzed for safety based on the Holtec containers.
The containers include an inner cask to hold the highly radioactive fuel and two types of outer containers, one for shipping, the other for above-ground storage.
Critics of the Energy Department's Yucca Mountain plan say the proposed changes are intended to smooth the way politically for the repository, cutting the costs and making the facility "cleaner."
In the law that designated Yucca Mountain as the national disposal site, the federal government promised to take the waste from the utilities in 1998.
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Las Vegas SUN
October 28, 2005
Letter: State benefits from nuclear energy
Ben Grove's Oct. 17 story, "Nuclear irony finds French power company ads in Nevada," fails to note one key point in his review of Areva's effort to promote clean, safe and affordable nuclear power: Nevada does receive nuclear-produced electricity.
According to the Western Electricity Coordinating Council, 3.8 percent of electricity used by the Nevada's residents and businesses is produced by nuclear power plants outside of the state's borders.
So, while there may not be any nuclear power plants in Nevada, the state certainly benefits from nuclear energy. Why then, should it not also learn about the role nuclear energy could play in the future of this state and the country?
Scott Peterson
Washington, D.C.
Editor's note: The writer is vice president of communications for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear power industry's advocacy group and a supporter of efforts to build a high-level nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
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Las Vegas SUN
October 28, 2005
Columnist Jon Ralston: Examining the Miers fallout, Malone's case and Porter's fundraising
Don't discount Reid's role
Jon Ralston hosts the news discussion program Face to Face on Las Vegas ONE and publishes the Ralston Report. He can be reached at (702) 870-7997 or at ralston@vegas.com.
It's Friday, so it must be time to empty out the reporter's notebook with pithy thoughts and nuggets ...
Feeling the president's pain: How does it feel to have your nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court withdraw her name after you worked so hard to get her considered?
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid obviously is crushed after nominating her -- by proxy, at least -- and persuading President Bush to be the front man for the selection. And Reid is furious -- just furious -- that the conservatives forced her out. Just listen to him:
"The radical right wing of the Republican Party killed the Harriet Miers nomination. Apparently, Ms. Miers did not satisfy those who want to pack the Supreme Court with rigid ideologues. I had recommended that the president consider nominating Ms. Miers because I was impressed with her record of achievement as the managing partner of a major Texas law firm and the first woman president of the Texas Bar Association."
Oh, yes, Reid recommended her to Bush because of her record of achievement, not that he foresaw this implosion. That explanation is about as credible as, albeit much funnier than the president -- whom Reid once called a liar -- saying he based his decision on Yucca Mountain on "sound science." I only hope Reid called the White House to console the president on the loss of their nominee.
* * *
Start counting the days: Dominic Gentile, ex-County Commissioner Lance Malone's lawyer, says he believes the Operation G-Sting trial will begin in Las Vegas next March. But, he said in an interview Thursday, not before he gets a new trial for his client in San Diego.
Gentile acknowledged that he has only been granted a new trial once in 3 1/2 decades of practicing law. But he believes that the failure of San Diego prosecutors to prove key elements of the corruption case in San Diego is so blatant that a judge will grant, perhaps as early as next month, a new trial. That would be something.
Gentile, a First Amendment expert who represents news media outlets, also had some trenchant words on the Judy Miller controversy and the ancillary issues during an interview that will air tonight on "Face to Face."
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Las Vegas SUN
October 27, 2005
Critics: Changes doom Yucca Mountain nuclear dump plan
By Brendan Riley
Associated Press
CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) - State lawmakers were told Thursday that the federal Energy Department's latest changes in plans for storing nuclear waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain are "ludicrous and preposterous."
"Things really are going our way in the entire Yucca Mountain arena," Marta Adams, a senior deputy state attorney general, also told the lawmakers' Committee on High-Level Radioactive Waste. "The federal government is in total disarray. There is no reason to believe this repository will ever be constructed."
Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, told the committee the Energy Department's Yucca Mountain dump project "is hopelessly mired in a briar pit" of problems. He labeled Tuesday's announcement of a change in the way that waste would be packaged a "diversionary tactic" to shift attention away from those problems.
The Energy Department said high-level wastes would be sealed in canisters that could be put directly into the ground, eliminating the need to repackage the radioactive material at the proposed dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
"That eliminates much of the potential radiation exposure to workers in Nevada," project official Russ Dyer told legislators, adding, "The burden would be placed on the generators of the material" to ensure the canisters are secure.
Dyer also said the change would do away with the need for large handling facilities where spent nuclear reactor fuel would be transferred from transportation canisters into different containers for underground storage.
While it's not known what the change will do to the project's timetable, Dyer said the end result would be a "simpler, safer and cleaner" way of handling radioactive wastes.
The opening date already has slipped from 2010 to 2012 at earliest. Adams said she didn't think that the dump, if it survives various challenges, could be ready by 2025.
Both Loux and Adams also said the proposed packaging change would add to the cost of the $58 billion project - and Loux said the canisters still would be breached in as little as a few hundred years because of the highly corrosive minerals in the soil where they'd be entombed.
The dump would hold 77,000 tons of highly radioactive used reactor fuel from commercial nuclear power plants and military installations.
The change comes amid project delays, budget shortages and calls by some in Congress for the administration to supplement the dump with interim waste storage or to reprocess spent fuel.
The government was forced to rewrite its radiation safety standards after a federal court threw out the first version, and the Energy Department is redoing some scientific models after e-mails surfaced last spring indicating government workers on the project might have falsified data.
---On the Net:
Yucca Mountain project: http://www.ymp.gov
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Las Vegas SUN
October 27, 2005
Editorial: A 'clean' load of rubbish
Despite the Energy Department's touting of a new plan for a 'clean' way of loading high-level nuclear waste into Yucca Mountain, the proposed project is as dangerous as ever
Las Vegas Sun
The Energy Department as much as admitted Tuesday that an aspect of its Yucca Mountain plan long criticized by Nevada was flawed. Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is where the federal government is planning to bury high-level nuclear waste from the nation's power plants and military bases. The department's acting director announced a new plan -- a "clean" plan -- for actually loading the waste in burial vaults beneath the mountain.
In the past the department has talked of building a multibillion-dollar facility near the mountain for repackaging the deadly waste once it was off-loaded either from trucks or trains. Under that plan, containers for permanent burial would have replaced the containers used to enclose the waste during transport. During this process, the waste would have been exposed, creating the potential for contaminating workers and the site.
Paul Golan, acting director of the Energy Department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, the agency charged with building and licensing Yucca Mountain, publicly introduced the new plan in a conference call to reporters. He said the department now intends to have the waste permanently sealed in standardized containers at its point of origin, then loaded into transport containers. This way, he said, when the waste is repackaged into permanent burial casks at Yucca Mountain, it will not be directly exposed.
The Energy Department maintains this new plan will leave the Yucca Mountain site "primarily clean or uncontaminated." What this tells us is that the old plan did indeed carry risks for contamination. Can there be any doubt now about the legitimacy of Nevada's 20-year-old fight against this dangerous project?
In announcing the plan, Energy Department officials said it would make the project "simple, safer and more cost-effective," and that it would simplify the waste repository's "design, licensing and construction."
In our view, the plan changes nothing. It doesn't address the safety issues involved with transporting the waste. And it doesn't for a minute make the mountain a safer place to store the waste for hundreds of thousands of years.
No matter how knowledgeable they think they are, there are no scientists on Earth who can say with certainty what chemical reactions will take place deep inside the mountain's watery, man-made caverns once they are filled with corrodible canisters loaded with super-hot nuclear waste.
We believe the correct course is to continue storing the waste in water-cooled ponds, dry storage casks or underground tanks at nuclear power plants and specialized facilities. These methods have proven to be safe. They will be sufficient until technology advances beyond the nightmarish notion of transporting the waste all over the country, burying it under a mountain and taking the chance that it will seep into ground water and eventually work its way into the food chain.
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Eos Magazine
October 27, 2005
Yucca Mountain Could Face Greater Volcanic Threat
Eugene I. Smith and Deborah L. Keenan (pdf-245K)
see: http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news2005/pdf/eos20050830.pdf
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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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