Wednesday, May 21, 2008 | 2:05 a.m.
On May 14 Sun reporter Lisa Mascaro wrote (on the Las Vegas Sun Web site’s blog “Politics: The Early Line”) that the Energy Department intends to submit a license application for operation of a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain the first week of June.
Anyone who has been following this issue for as long as I have (since 1984) knows there’s not enough information available to submit an adequate application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, made up of professional engineers. There are too many unanswered questions about the Yucca Mountain environment.
Nobody knows how Yucca Mountain’s internal soup will change over a long period of time. What sort of hybrid corrosive agent will be created inside the mountain? We don’t know. Not only that, we also don’t know how well the C-22 alloy container will hold up in this hybrid chemical environment.
Relying on the information now available, the NRC will be very uncomfortable with this license application. As a matter of fact, no NRC will ever be confident unless the C-22 alloy is tested in all likely soup compositions at Yucca Mountain. This has not been done, nor is it likely to ever be done, simply because there are too many variables.
My guess is that Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman wants to be able to say he delivered on what he promised. He knows the application will never make it, but he’ll be gone and won’t worry about it. And that’ll be the end of Yucca Mountain as a possible high-level nuclear waste site.
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