Institute says scrap Yucca project

An independent environmental research institute called for the federal government to halt its nuclear-waste project at Yucca Mountain today, offering an alternative to burying the waste 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research offered an interim storage policy that would have the Department of Energy compensating utilities for on-site storage because of delays in a permanent disposal solution.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson has already proposed to Congress that high-level nuclear waste be kept at nuclear power plants until a permanent repository is ready. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said it is safe to keep the waste at the plants in hardened casks for up to 100 years.

Arjun Makhijani, president of the institute, said that both Yucca Mountain and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., are unsound. The New Mexico WIPP site accepted the first two shipments of plutonium-laced debris this month. Yucca Mountain is not expected to accept nuclear waste before 2010, if at all.

Instead of dumping the waste at Yucca Mountain and at WIPP, the group suggests turning both sites into high-tech research facilities using nonradioactive materials for experiments.

The plan lays out three alternatives to be researched:

To develop a long-term plan for waste management, the institute recommends abolishing the DOE and creating a new federally chartered nonprofit corporation to do the job.

Nuclear weapons would be managed by the Defense Department under the plan and other duties would also be reassigned.

The Department of Energy has heard members of Congress suggest before that the agency be abolished, DOE Yucca Mountain Project spokesman Allen Benson said.

"We've been down that road before," Benson said. "So far we're moving forward. We have a plan and I'm not sure what would be gained by stopping at this point."

Politics and a lack of alternatives to manage the thousands of tons of commercial and defense nuclear wastes are the reasons Yucca Mountain and the WIPP site keep getting funded, Makhijani said.

Joining the institute during a media conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., this morning were representatives of environmental groups from Nevada, North Carolina and New Mexico.

Northern Nevada Director of Citizen Alert Lee Dazey said the geologic risks posed by 620 earthquakes ranging in magnitude from 2 to 5.6 on the Richter scale at or near Yucca Mountain in the past 20 years should cause the DOE to halt the project.

"The waste-management crisis is partly due to the fact that the DOE has kept pouring money into the Yucca Mountain site despite evidence that it is a poor site for a waste repository," Dazey said. Citizen Alert is a statewide grass-roots environmental group.

The DOE may fall short of funds both to complete studies at Yucca Mountain and move waste off the sites of nuclear power plants soon, as nuclear utilities want.

The institute says its plan offers the federal government a way to evaluate waste-disposal performance and to focus on keeping future generations from stumbling onto buried or stored nuclear waste.

The institute called for a moratorium on the creation of any new sources of nuclear waste until a sound national policy is in place.

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