Las Vegas Sun

March 18, 2024

Report outlines steps to revive Yucca Mountain repository

Yucca Mountain tour

John Locher / AP

People walk into the south portal of Yucca Mountain during a congressional tour Thursday, April 9, 2015, near Mercury. Several members of Congress toured the proposed radioactive waste dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Updated Friday, May 26, 2017 | 3:04 p.m.

Yucca Mountain File

Mark Peters from the Yucca Mountain Project describes different areas of the drift scale test tunnel to members of the media during a public open house Saturday, November 3, 2001. The tunnel and surrounding rock has been heated to an average 392 degrees for the past four years and then will be allowed to cool beginning January 2002 for another four years to study the effect on the movement of water through Yucca Mountain. Launch slideshow »

Yucca Mountain tour

People stand inside of Yucca Mountain during a congressional tour Thursday, April 9, 2015, near Mercury, Nev. Several members of congress toured the proposed radioactive wast dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher) Launch slideshow »

CARSON CITY — Federal officials say restarting the Yucca Mountain repository project would require rebuilding capacity at the Department of Energy, among other steps, according to a report published in April and made public today.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office says a variety of factors could impact the amount of time it would take to resume and finish the licensing process for the proposed repository.

“The GAO report confirms the colossal waste of taxpayer resources and time it would take to revive this dead and doomed project,“ Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., said in a statement.

Titus and all but one other member of Nevada’s delegation in Congress have signed onto the Nuclear Waste Informed Consent Act, a measure to require repository approval from affected state, local and tribal governments.

“Nevada is not the nation’s dumping ground for nuclear waste,” Titus said. “We did not create this waste and should not have it shoved down our throats.”

The report identified four key steps to resume the licensing process. First, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission needs to be directed to restart the effort so that officials can estimate a timeline and funding needs.

Project offices would then need to be recreated in the Department of Energy, NRC and other agencies with a role in the process. This also includes rounding up experts and possibly updating key documents needed for the licensing process.

“Because of the volume and complexity of information, former DOE witnesses contacted by GAO generally estimated that it could take a new expert at least a year to prepare to serve as a DOE witness — about twice as long as the former witnesses said they would need themselves,” the report says.

All of this would have to take place before officials can actually hold hearings with the parties involved, depose witnesses and discuss evidence.

Final steps include a decision from the commission to authorize or deny construction of the repository.

Robert J. Halstead, executive director of the Nevada governor’s Agency for Nuclear Projects, says the Government Accountability Office lets the Department of Energy off the hook when it comes to possible expenses.

The report says energy officials have not estimated how much it would cost to restart the licensing process. Halstead said past estimates have led his agency to project the price tag at $2 billion or more.

“We would agree with many of the findings reported by GAO, especially regarding the technical and legal challenges that DOE will face if the full legally mandated NRC proceeding resumes, including the need to secure land access and water rights at the Yucca Mountain site,” Halstead said in an email.

Halstead also said the report makes an important point about Nevada’s pending legal challenges to the Environmental Protection Agency’s groundwater standards and commission regulations.

The report says regulatory commission staff assumed the EPA and NRC’s standards for Yucca Mountain are legally valid. If any of these standards are struck down in court later, this could pose problems for the project’s safety evaluation report.

“The conclusions of the Safety Evaluation Report — which, as noted above, found DOE’s license application to meet the NRC standards — could be thrown into jeopardy,” the report says. “If so, NRC would likely have to change its regulations and require DOE to meet a more stringent standard for radiation exposure. This in turn could potentially result in DOE needing to revise its license application and NRC its Safety Evaluation Report.”

Officials in Nye County, where Yucca Mountain is located, have said that restarting the licensing process would allow the science on the project to be heard.

“We already have the science, we’re just wanting to have that science vetted,” said county spokesman Arnold M. Knightly. “If it turns out that the science points to Yucca Mountain not being a secure and safe site, Nye County’s not going to want it there, either.”

Knightly said nuclear waste around the country has to go somewhere. It’s important to note that the GAO report only looks at the Yucca Mountain site, where the science and work is 20 years ahead of where it would be if officials picked a new location, he said.

“We view the report as being mostly accurate,” Knightly said. “We know this, whether it’s Yucca Mountain or somewhere else, that these steps are going to have to be taken.”

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