Yucca will be open 300 years

The U.S. Department of Energy plans to keep a high-level nuclear waste repository, if one is built at Yucca Mountain, open up to 300 years so irradiated fuel can be removed and used to generate nuclear power.

This was the DOE's first public announcement that uranium and plutonium would not be permanently sealed 1,000 feet beneath the mountain located 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Current law requires a repository be sealed after 50 years.

Russ Dyer, DOE's acting manager for the Yucca Mountain Project, said Monday the department is asking for more flexibility in nuclear waste management.

"In reality, developing a repository with the retrievability aspects, like Yucca Mountain, will preserve the options available to future generations for disposition of nuclear materials," Dyer told scientists attending an international high-level radioactive waste conference at Bally's hotel-casino.

The DOE plans to assess its progress at Yucca Mountain by the end of the year, Dyer said, adding there are plenty of scientific questions that remain unanswered about the old volcano.

The country's top geologists have discovered the earth's crust at Yucca Mountain is moving. They estimate that the ground could stretch more than 3 feet in less than 1,000 years, enough to crush buried nuclear waste canisters and release radiation.

Brian Wernicke, lead scientist from the California Institute of Technology, said the DOE will fund further studies on the mountain's creeping crust.

Dyer confirmed that the DOE will fund further studies using the global positioning satellite system to track earth movements.

Wernicke and his colleagues published the study results in a recent edition of Science.

"We didn't expect to see any movement at all," Wernicke said.

The major question arising from what Wernicke and eight other scientists working for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission saw focuses on the cause of the movement. Was it a 5.4 magnitude earthquake at nearby Little Skull Mountain in 1992 or is the area more active than scientists believe?

U.S. Geological Survey scientist James Savage said Wernicke's team saw the movement because of the Little Skull Mountain earthquake.

"You have to take the earthquake out of the equation," Savage said.

If the earth continues to move, Wernicke said the study's findings prove that earlier estimates on Yucca Mountain's stability are 10 times to 100 times too low compared to the potential for actual disruption in the proposed repository.

However, Tim Sullivan, the DOE's chief for the Yucca Mountain assessment, said seismic and volcanic hazards would have little affect on long-term storage inside the mountain.

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