Scientist: DOE shifts Yucca reliance to waste containers

The U.S. Department of Energy's report to Congress on whether Yucca Mountain is a viable nuclear dumpsite is based on the tenuous argument that waste containers will protect people and the environment, a nuclear analyst says.

This shift from confidence in the mountain rock's ability to contain highly radioactive wastes to a reliance on nuclear waste canisters clashes with existing health and safety regulations, said Arjun Makhijani, nuclear scientist and director of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Md.

"There is an immense reliance on the canister," Makhijani said. "It's the magic-bullet canister."

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's current rules place the primary barrier in the rock formation.

The DOE should build safety into both containers and the nuclear waste repository, said Makhijani, whose works have been published worldwide.

"To go from a situation from relying on the geology to the canister is saying, 'We may not have the best site, but we have great canisters,"' he said. "The DOE is moving the goal post. We have run into this before with Yucca Mountain. Whenever they run into an obstacle, they change the rules."

Makhijani said DOE's nuclear waste chief, Lake Barrett, briefed him on the viability assessment, a report card for Congress on the Yucca Mountain project.

No one outside the DOE has seen the report. The DOE does not plan to send the assessment to Congress until the end of the year, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said Friday. It will come after extensive internal reviews by DOE experts.

One of the realistic goals Makhijani credits Barrett with setting is a radiation exposure rate based on the highest levels of radioactivity that will be released at Yucca Mountain. The highest radiation levels are expected to contaminate ground water used for irrigating crops.

The trouble with the assessment's estimates of radiation is that the first line of defense is the canister, Makhijani said.

"Canisters and the geology should contain the material, so one is backing up the other," he said.

The DOE and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal agency in charge of issuing a license for the nation's first high-level nuclear repository, should wait until the federal Environmental Protection Agency issues health and safety standards, Makhijani said.

The DOE's assessment relies on computer analysis, not the field studies continuing at Yucca Mountain. In-the-ground studies include heating rock above the boiling point of water, how water moves through the volcanic ridge and if rainwater can invade the repository rock block.

Nevada's senators, Harry Reid and Richard Bryan, both Democrats, blasted the DOE's assessment as a "cozy relationship with the (nuclear) industry."

Reid said the worst threat to the state is an attempt by Congress to start storing nuclear waste at the Nevada Test Site by 2002. "Temporary storage is the greatest threat, and the industry will try to pass legislation through Congress next session," he said, referring to two attempts in the past two years that failed.

The failure comes from a veto threat by President Clinton, who does not want to divert permanent nuclear waste study funds to temporary storage.

"DOE bureaucrats have admitted the assessment is purely their views of their own work," Bryan said. "This time they are doing it by concocting a meaningless study and putting a false value on its relevance to choosing a nuclear waste site."

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