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Access to electronic Yucca Mountain data ending
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LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
Government scientists who worked on the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository have called the site, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, the most studied piece of real estate on Earth.
Since 1987, the Department of Energy and, to a lesser extent, the Department of Defense have spent more than $10\u2007billion studying the suitability of the site for entombing highly radioactive spent fuel and preparing a license application for review by nuclear regulators.
The task generated more than 40 million pages of studies, emails and notes, including maps of every inch of a five-mile-long tunnel that loops through the mountain and measurements of how fast water trickles through its porous volcanic rock layers.
The separate documents -- 3,692,296 as of Wednesday -- are stored electronically so that parties weighing in on the Yucca Mountain debate and the public can search them on their computers. The electronic format combines each page with an image of the page for a total of 80 million files.
On Friday, a construction authorization panel of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board will close access to this massive collection, known as the Licensing Support Network.
Funding for the Yucca Mountain Project will end Sept. 30, and the network's contractor, AT&T, needs the remaining days to clear any filing backlog and disassemble hardware, network administrator Daniel Graser said.
But one network user wonders how the public will continue to monitor the beleaguered project, which, technically, is still in the licensing mode and at the center of lawsuits.
"The LSN has been a unique element of the process that allows us to have access to information and historical documents needed to have a clear picture of all that has happened and the decisions made throughout the decades regarding Yucca Mountain," Judy Treichel, executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force, a nonprofit watchdog group, wrote in a July 28 letter to the three-judge construction authorization panel.
"Eliminating the LSN but continuing the licensing process is most unfair to those who are not admitted parties -- those who are not represented by attorneys and do not have connections with NRC or DOE to obtain information. Both agencies claim that the process is open and transparent, but it is not."
NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said the timing of the shutdown is necessary to meet the Sept. 30 deadline for decommissioning the network.
"There is nothing budgeted in dollars or manpower for any LSN work for (fiscal year) 2012," he wrote in an email to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
To put the network back on line after Sept. 30 would take two or three years and require annual operating expenses of $1.1 million and a staff of 1.5 full-time equivalents, Burnell said.
Joe Strolin, acting executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, said the agency has been braced for the network's shutdown.
"We don't have a real problem with it," Strolin said, adding that the state, which opposes the Yucca Mountain Project, forged an agreement with the Department of Energy to swap documents in a searchable format.
"Our main concern was getting our hands on DOE's collection," he said.
Strolin said shutting down the network "is appropriate. If licensing is not going forward, then there's no reason to maintain the mechanism."
Last week, Energy Secretary Steven Chu's Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future issued a draft report that recommends Congress change the law that singles out Yucca Mountain for disposing the nation's highly radioactive defense wastes and used fuel from commercial power reactors.
Instead, the law should allow a "consent-based process" for identifying states and communities that are more nuclear-waste-friendly than Nevada to host storage and disposal sites.
Contact reporter Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308.
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I got it!! We'll make Yucca a food storage site! Then Harry and all the brethern will have a place to go when the big whip comes down! Problem solved.....
I'm still not convinced that the waste going to Carlsbad, New Mexico is a done deal, but it certainly looks to be headed that way. And I agree with Abe, that in so doing Nevada seems to have successfully defended it's sovereign right to stay utterly economically dependent on people like Sheldon Adelson forever. Read the current story about how he is under suit for having tried to get out of paying his personal bodyguards their overtime.
Thank you Harry, for all the lost jobs
Yup, looks like this puppy is going to go to Carlsbad, New Mexico. Hey Nevada, you might want to monitor this and see just what you missed out on. Oh, on second thought, you better not. Hate to see a grown state 'cry'!
Yeah, don't count your chickens too fast Mr. Strolin. As the DC Court of Appeals stated last month, until the NRC misses a deadline mandated by law in the NWPA they must assume that the NRC is reviewing the license application and will issue their report. But just this week Nye County joined a new lawsuit to force the NRC to issue their decision since it is now overdue. So game is not over. As to taking 2-3 years to restart the LSN, all of the information is stored and can be restarted within a few months. Hopefully, the DC Court will issue an injunction to stop the shutdown if they are really serious about the NRC doing its legal duties. I am surprised that the lawsuit filed this week didn't ask for it. Far more important than any of this is the unConstitutional actions taken by Obama to ignore the NWPA. The President duties include that he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed. Seems that he didn't read the Constitution prior to becoming President and making deals with Reid
Hate to see the LSN disappear. But it is a good thing key Yucca documents were published and are available in the UNLV library's federal documents archive.
I am very, very pleased with the Technical Evaluation Report the NRC staff wrote. It says that what I and hundreds of others worked on the last 20-some years met their regulatory requirements and expectations. That means they agreed that the million-year estimate of safe performance was scientifically credible. The laypersons' translation of that conclusion is that the repository would have been safe for a million years.
I think at this point the nation would be better served to take its nuclear waste elsewhere. Go to the Blue Ribbon Commission website and watch the video of their meeting in Carlsbad, New Mexico. You will be amazed. Everyone from the Governor on down came and spoke positively of the deep geologic repository DOE has been running for more than 12 years, safely, 46 miles away. They also asked the federal government to come and talk to them about expanding the mission of that repository.
Very different from the reception the federal government has gotten in Nevada.
Is all of New Mexico this way? No, the next day the Commission went to Albuquerque and lost control of the meeting to the anti-nuclear activists that congregated there from all over. But that rabble is NOT the public, neither is it the public's elected leaders.
I feel very bad for Nye County being deprived of this promise for their fiscal future just to allow Vegas to continue to dedicate itself exclusively to its most fickle mistress, the gaming industry that is ever looking elsewhere for new profits, ever diminishing the demand for Vegas.
Sorry, Nye. Nobody cared when ~1,000 bombs were blown up in Nye County, but somehow solid glass and ceramic wastes in high-tech casks inside a mountain is really dangerous in comparison?? Weird!