At Yucca hearing, Titus calls nuclear dump a ‘boondoggle’

By Kyle Roerink

Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2015 | 2 a.m.

U.S. Rep. Dina Titus and Mayor Carolyn Goodman sent a message to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Tuesday night: Las Vegas still doesn’t want a nuclear repository at Yucca Mountain.

Titus called the long-gestating proposal to place a nuclear waste dump 80 miles from Las Vegas a “boondoggle.” Goodman agreed, saying that it would be “a disaster waiting to happen.”

The two elected officials delivered their comments at an NRC meeting to discuss a draft report released last month on the potential environmental impacts of the project on radiation levels in groundwater. Around 100 members of the public attended the hearing, including former U.S. Sen. Richard Bryan and representatives of U.S. Sen. Harry Reid and Gov. Brian Sandoval.

Titus said the NRC wants to “ram and jam it down our throat,” adding that the report was flawed because it uses out-of-date data and was not conducted by an independent panel. She concluded by offering her own spin on Shakespeare: “A dump is a dump is a dump. No matter how many studies you have, you cannot hide that fact,” Titus said.

Goodman, the mayor of Las Vegas, said that shipping waste in Nevada would “kill” tourism in the state. “We need a consent-based process — Nevada never consented and Nevada never will,” she said.

Others who spoke favored the proposal.

Nye County Commissioner Dan Schinhofen said that nine of Nevada’s 17 counties supported Yucca. He welcomed “the NRC to move forward with the project.”

NRC spokesman David McIntyre said he was not surprised at the tenor of the hearings, saying that it was not uncommon for political concerns to overshadow scientific studies.

The new report argues that a repository would not be a major threat to Nevada’s groundwater, soils, public health or ecology. It looked at the effect of potential container leaks of nuclear waste on Nevada’s water and landscape during the course of a million years, finding that a small amount of waste could flow toward Amargosa and Death Valley National Park.

According to the report, the peak radiological dose of leaks, 1.3 millirems per year, would be less than the background radiation dose — the natural amount that is always present — of 300 millirems per year. The report concluded that the potential impacts of Yucca on groundwater contamination would be “small.”

The NRC has conducted multiple studies since 1987 — meeting with sharp resistance from Las Vegas along the way.

Since 2009, the Yucca Mountain project has been all but dead. Reid spearheaded a successful effort to eliminate funding for the project. The study discussed on Tuesday had been stalled as a result until a 2013 federal court ordered the NRC to conduct it. The court did not order the project as a whole to move forward, which would take an act of Congress.

The comment period on the study will close on Nov. 20 and a final draft of the report will be released in the first half of 2016. That will end public discussion until members of Congress or a president decide to reopen the debate.