Yucca change would up cost $1 billion

The Department of Energy's preferred high-level nuclear waste repository design for Yucca Mountain adds more than $1 billion to the estimated cost and DOE officials fear Congress could kill the project if it becomes too expensive.

The latest scenario is designed to enlarge the project and keep the repository cool by keeping it open for 125 years, but those changes will add considerably to its cost, Russ Dyer, DOE Project Manager in Nevada, said Thursday.

As the DOE has struggled to design a repository 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas for highly radioactive reactor wastes -- the bulk of the 77,000 tons destined for Yucca Mountain -- the agency favored more long-term monitoring, he said.

When the DOE first proposed burying radioactive wastes, scientists considered the best option was to bury the 7,000 tons of wastes remaining from nuclear weapons and then walk away, Dyer told the Legislature's Committee on High Level Nuclear Waste meeting in Las Vegas.

But that was before commercial reactors began generating almost 20 percent of the country's electricity, creating more highly radioactive wastes.

Yucca Mountain, the only site under study in the world as a high-level nuclear waste repository, is not expected to open until 2010, although an industry-backed bill in Congress could bring radioactive shipments to the mountain by 2007.

To keep the proposed Yucca Mountain repository below the boiling point, engineers said the storage area inside the mountain will need to be a third larger than originally proposed. The new proposal also would require a giant ventilation system to help cool the mountain. The ventilation system would operate for 125 years, Dyer said.

Under this proposal, the heat produced by the radioactivity will cool over time and the rock has a better chance of remaining intact, preventing radiation escaping from the mountain, he said.

Scientists do not know what will happen over thousands of years as high-level radioactive wastes heat up Yucca Mountain's volcanic ash layers, but if the heat cracked the rock, water might enter the repository, corroding waste containers and allowing radiation to escape.

"I've never seen a rock without a fracture in it," Dyer, a geologist by training, said.

But keeping the repository cooler will cost more money.

The DOE estimates the fans, filters, maintenance and operations of the ventilation system will add $5 million to $10 million a year to the cost of operating the project for the 125 years, Dyer said.

That amounts to an extra $625 million to $1.25 billion on top of the proposed $36.6 billion to build the repository. The extra expense brings the total close to $38 billion.

The DOE fears that if the Yucca Mountain Project becomes too expensive, Congress could kill it, Dyer said. The Yucca Mountain studies were slashed by more than $50 million this year.

As a result, federal scientists are constantly changing the design. Proposals included in the DOE's environmental impacts, released to the public in September, do not include the ventilation system.

Dyer said the repository could stay open longer than 125 years if human monitors watch the waste.

If a Yucca repository remains open for up to 300 years, future generations would be able to retrieve the wastes if something goes wrong or if the nuclear materials become valuable enough to reprocess, he said.

The DOE was not the only agency concerned about costs.

Clark County Nuclear Waste Division Director Dennis Bechtel said the DOE's analysis of the repository's impacts on Southern Nevada is so poor that the department should be forced to reconsider environmental-impact issues.

"There is no way for the state or local governments to begin to estimate the impacts on a city with a tourist-based economy with the information the DOE has provided," Bechtel said.

Fred Dilger, who works with Bechtel, said the DOE "grossly underestimates" the costs for building new railroad tracks, new roads and for buying rights-of-way.

In order to move three or four heavy-haul trucks each day through the Las Vegas Valley, perhaps on the western beltway passing Summerlin, the DOE would have to build a new lane, Dilger said.

A 220-foot-long heavy-haul truck is equal in length to 25 passenger cars and such shipments would slowly move along the beltway or two-lane rural roads for 24 years, Dilger said.

"The DOE is saying that using heavy-hauls is half the price of shipping wastes by rail," Dilger said. "We don't think so."

In addition, the DOE did not provide comparison costs, he added.

archive