DOE unshaken by Test Site quakes

Six earthquakes that registered above 3.0 on the Richter scale at the Nevada Test Site the last seven days of January shook up the political debate surrounding Yucca Mountain.

But at Department of Energy headquarters in Nevada -- where scientists are studying the feasibility of the mountain as a repository for high-level nuclear waste -- the quakes weren't cause for concern. They were all part of their master plan.

DOE scientists have known since they began studying Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, that the area is prone to temblors. Nevada ranks third among states in seismic activity, behind California and Alaska.

Over the past 20 years, the Yucca Mountain area has experienced 621 quakes greater than 3.0 magnitude.

Instead of abandoning the project before Congress designated the area in 1987 as the only site to be studied for the nation's dump for the highly radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, DOE worked future earthquakes into its design.

The recent quakes, as DOE scientists see them, are a chance to get a real-time look into what happens during a seismic event near Yucca Mountain.

"Earthquake shaking we can experience, we will experience," said Jerry King, a key DOE scientist on the project. "We believe it is a design issue rather than a suitability issue."

The recent earthquakes occurred on the eastern edge of the Test Site, 30 miles from Yucca Mountain, and shook up DOE workers at a low-level nuclear waste facility, knocking a few pictures off the walls and popping open file cabinets.

No injuries were reported and there was no major damage because the largest of the quakes -- 4.7 magnitude -- occurred early in the morning when no one was there, DOE officials said.

The temblors erupted on the Rock Valley fault system, part of the quaking zone that includes most of Nevada north of Clark County. The Great Basin's mountains have been forming for millions of years, and Mother Nature is not finished, earthquake experts say.

Aftershocks in D.C.

The earthquakes also provided added ammunition for the political forces mustered against making Yucca Mountain the country's nuclear dumpsite.

Nevada's entire congressional delegation seized on the seismic shocks as proof that their fight against storing or burying high-level nuclear waste in this state is a hopeless goal for the Department of Energy's Yucca Mountain Project.

Sens. Richard Bryan and Harry Reid, along with Rep. Shelley Berkley, all Democrats, and Republican Rep. Jim Gibbons denounced the DOE's plans to continue trying to bury high-level nuclear waste in such an unstable area.

"Surely, Congress and the U.S. Department of Energy will not be so irresponsible as to risk the health and safety to any person living in the western United States by placing nuclear waste in the nation's strongest earthquake zone," Bryan said.

Berkley and Gibbons persuaded Massachusetts, California and Illinois representatives to sign a letter to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson calling for the site to be disqualified as a repository for nuclear waste.

In the meantime, the delegation has to fight the drive to bring nuclear waste to Nevada on another front.

A bill is before the House of Representatives to temporarily store the high-level nuclear waste at the Nevada Test Site until a permanent repository is ready. Sen. Joe Barton, R-Texas, has scheduled testimony on the bill beginning Wednesday.

"These earthquakes should stop the nuclear waste lobbyists in their tracks with their misguided bill," Reid said of the legislation for temporary storage.

Allowing for quakes

The DOE's study aims to establish scientific certainty of the safety of storing nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain. The trouble comes from the amount of time the mountain would have to contain the radioactivity -- more than 10,000 years. Some of the radioactive elements in the waste would be around for millions of years.

Yet DOE engineers believe they can combine natural volcanic rocks with man-made barriers to prevent the repository from leaking.

That plan includes contingencies for large quakes -- those bigger than a 6.5 magnitude, DOE geologist Tim Sullivan said.

The government scientists expect to see that size of quake at least every 10,000 years, Sullivan said. Large faults around Yucca Mountain have rumbled within the past 20,000 years. There are 36 known faults at the site.

As scientists dig into the mountain, they are discovering evidence of unknown faults, and they are likely to find more as they continue searching, Sullivan said.

The DOE's plan is to keep the tunnels leading into the repository, almost 1,000 feet beneath Yucca Mountain, open until the underground caverns are packed with 77,000 tons of radioactive commercial and defense wastes.

Then if Yucca Mountain collapses, it will help cover the waste packages and contain the radioactive contents deep within the earth. "The quakes would hasten the process," Sullivan said.

"It is within engineering expertise to build the repository," Sullivan said. "First we have to convince the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (which would license any repository) that DOE's numbers are appropriate."

During licensing hearings sometime after 2003, the DOE will have to prove to the regulatory commission that Yucca Mountain is suitable to contain the wastes if the site is declared suitable by the president and Congress.

Mountain on the move

But Yucca Mountain does not merely quake, it creeps. The mountain's movement was documented by scientists from California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and Harvard University in Boston during the 1990s.

That development means a catastrophic event -- a volcano or a large earthquake -- is likely to occur 10 times more frequently than the DOE predicted, scientists noted in a paper published in the journal Science last March.

Geologist Brian Wernicke, leader of the study, and his team have put monitors in Clark County at Angel Peak in the Spring Mountains and near Apex north of Sunrise Mountain to help determine how often the Las Vegas Valley rocks. That information will give them a regional perspective on the movement at Yucca Mountain.

Federal scientists already do everything they can to keep surface facilities at Yucca Mountain, such as loading docks and buildings where waste canisters are packaged, away from known faults.

To put above-ground nuclear waste facilities on a fault "would be unacceptable," King, one of the DOE scientists, said.

Gibbons, who holds a master's degree in geology, has been unimpressed with the DOE's plans, and its assurances.

The recent earthquakes at the Test Site are "a warning to this nation that nuclear waste does not belong at Yucca Mountain, Nevada," Gibbons said.

"Congress is going to have to pay more attention to these hard scientific facts and ignore the nuclear industry lobby's pro-nuclear-waste-to-Nevada rhetoric," he said.

Gibbons pointed out that former DOE geologist Jerry Szymanski has warned officials for the past 15 years that Yucca Mountain is not a safe place to bury nuclear waste. A magnitude 8.5 quake is possible on one of 32 faults at the mountain, Szymanski has said.

"This shouldn't be a surprise, though, because Yucca Mountain -- get it? A mountain -- is not geologically stable," the congressman said. "It's a mountain, and it's tectonically active.

"It's no surprise that these most recent quakes are popping up," Gibbons said. "As history repeats itself, I'm sure we can expect more of the same."

Richardson has pledged that Yucca Mountain will not become the nation's nuclear dumping ground unless science proves that the site is safe and that the repository will keep highly radioactive elements away from people and the environment.

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