Thursday, March 27, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
Del Papa said she regards the dating of calcite deposits and zircons found in the mountain's veins "evidence as a show stopper," a scientific basis for removing Yucca Mountain from consideration as a nuclear waste dump.
Del Papa sent a letter Tuesday to Jared Cohen, chairman of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an independent scientific panel appointed by the president to review the Department of Energy's work at the site, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
"If the board will give this evidence a fair review, it will reach the conclusion that Yucca Mountain is not suitable for a repository," she said.
Scientists independent of the DOE have gathered evidence that hot, deep water rises and falls within Yucca Mountain every few thousand years. The high-level nuclear waste dump has to isolate its radioactive burden for at least 10,000 years.
Del Papa asked Cohen to investigate the possibility of this water invading a dump site 1,000 feet beneath the surface of Yucca Mountain. If that happened, the radiated water could get into the drinking water for area residents.
"We need to turn our opposition up a notch and get proactive with the institutional boards and commissions charged with the oversight of the Department of Energy's program," Del Papa said.
The DOE intends to decide whether Yucca Mountain is suitable for developing a nuclear dump there "without having collected sufficient data" or scientific analysis, Del Papa told Cohen in her letter.
The DOE could decide whether to intensify studies there as soon as next year.
Former DOE scientist Jerry Szymanski first posed the theory that there's too much water in Yucca Mountain when he headed the geological team studying the site in 1984.
Szymanski resigned from the DOE in 1992, after his theory was rejected.
But a study by an international scientific team for Technology and Resource Assessment Corp. of Boulder, Colo., continued to gather evidence from the zircon crystals and calcite veins.
They indicated water invades the mountain for a couple hundred years every few thousand years, said lead scientist Charles Archembeau.
"It's all consistent," Archembeau said in a telephone interview Tuesday. The periodic rise and fall of water began occurring after extreme volcanic activity in the region 10 million years ago, he said.
Zircons formed by uprising hot water have been discovered in calcite deposits threading through the mountain's veins, Archembeau said.
"They're all giving the same story," he said. "It's important to know how often it occurs. It's very frequent in geologic time."
After Szymanski posed his theory, a 17-member panel for the National Academy of Sciences discounted it and disbanded in 1991.
But Archembeau, Szymanski and the scientific team have continued to gather data from the rocks in the mountain.
While the DOE may declare the site suitable for a dump, it's doubtful that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission can license it based on the most recent findings, Archembeau said.
The team has estimated that water could rise about 450 feet within the mountain.
The DOE believes rainwater trickling through the volcanic tuff formed the calcite deposits and the water cannot reach buried nuclear waste.
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