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Yucca project assailed
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LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
Updated: Jan. 27, 2010 | 11:05 p.m.
Nevada's lead attorney took a stab Tuesday at killing the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project, arguing before a licensing board that the Department of Energy neglected to consider the failure or absence of a key safety feature.
Also, Marty Malsch, a lawyer with a Washington, D.C.-area firm retained by the state, told nuclear regulators the repository's design should be rejected because it is only 20 percent complete.
Those were two of 11 legal challenges the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Construction Authorization Board heard in the first day of oral arguments. The hearing comes two years after the DOE submitted its license application for building a repository for the nation's highly radioactive waste and used reactor fuel at a disposal site inside a volcanic-rock ridge 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The hearings continue today at the NRC's Las Vegas facility on Pepper Lane.
Based on questions asked by one of the panel's three judges, Malsch's most convincing argument dealt with the failure or absence of 11,000 titanium shields that would protect waste containers from corrosive water, dust and rocks that could fall inside a maze tunnels. The "drip shields" wouldn't be installed for a century.
Malsch said the repository's design relies heavily on the drip shields, which are a part of the system of engineered barriers to prevent deadly radioactive materials from escaping into the environment.
"We're talking a million years, and uncertainties are rampant," Malsch told the panel, describing how a "defense-in-depth" system must stay intact long after the initial 10,000-year requirement for containing the waste.
"Defense in depth is the elephant in the room, and the message from DOE and (NRC) staff is to ignore that elephant, but you can't," Malsch said. Without the drip shields, he said, the repository fails to meet the radiation safety standard.
Administrative Judge Richard Wardwell repeatedly asked DOE and NRC lawyers how dependent the repository's design is on the drip shields to ensure it is safe and functions as planned.
"Wouldn't you, as DOE, want to know if the drip shields are providing 99 percent of the protection?" Wardwell asked Donald Silverman, one of two attorneys representing the Energy Department at Tuesday's hearing.
Silverman answered: "My understanding is that is not what the commission wanted."
Again Wardwell asked, "If drip shields provide 99 percent of the protection, wouldn't you want to know that?
Silverman responded: "I imagine we would."
While DOE attempted to consider the probability of the drip shields failing from corrosion or rock falls after many thousands of years, Malsch said during his final statement, "they did not evaluate the absence of the drip shields at the very beginning."
DOE does not plan to install the drip shields for about 100 years after 77,000 tons of used reactor fuel and highly radioactive defense waste are loaded into the repository.
Malsch and Nevada officials have described the plan as "science fiction," because the robotic system needed to install the shields in such a hot, radioactive environment doesn't exist. And they have questioned the availability of enough titanium to complete the shields.
Perhaps more importantly, Malsch said, no guarantee exists that Congress would have an appetite or the means to fund construction of the drip shields.
The licensing panel will have to decide if there is reasonable assurance that DOE will be able to follow through with its plan and that it will work as designed.
Decisions on the 11 legal challenges discussed Tuesday aren't expected for weeks.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration and Energy Secretary Steven Chu maintain that Yucca Mountain is no longer an option for disposing the nation's high-level nuclear waste and that a yet-to-be-announced commission will chart a new strategy for the future.
Bruce Breslow, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects and a Yucca Mountain opponent is not so convinced that will happen.
"Their word is 'off the table,'" he said during a break in the hearing. "You can always put it back on the table. They haven't said it's dead. They haven't withdrawn the license (application) and declared the site unsuitable. That's something the energy secretary could do and that's something we're urging."
Contact reporter Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308.
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@Virgil-
You confuse proceeding with extreme and redundant caution with paralysis through analysis.
If every human who ever lived sat and dwelled on the "what ifs" of every choice, we'd still be eating raw squirrel and have a life expectancy of about 19.
You can suppose yourself into a corner by staring at the horizon, or you can look over the horizon by having faith in the power of nature, man's place in it, and the inventive nature of man.
Virgil - not only are you ignorant to the process of receiving and transporting nuclear waste; you are also working at the 7th grade level by spelling the plural word terrorist's with only one "T". Go to the library and check out a few books at the 8th grade level and get to learning good.
Q-Dog
Ignorance of matters about science are abundant in the American public. Has man ever built anything that has lasted 10,000 years?
Whenn it is stated that a pound of plutonium has a half-life of 10,000 years that means that at the end of that long period of time one half of a pound of this most dangerous material remains and as dealy as ever. In an additional 10,000 years 1/4 pound remains as deadly radioactive as ever, and so it goes on in time.
Can we ever build any real long term protection for this deadliest of all substances? Can we really prevent man made metal casks to last 10,000 years without rusting, deteriorating from the heat of the radioactive materials contained therein?
What if casks with this deadly material
are compromised and its contents leaks and percolates into the lower strata leading to the water table and maybe eventually to the Virgin River and the Colorado River? What would be the result for whatever civilization in this area is around at that time?
What if in the transport of these deadly materials from nuclear reactors to Yucca Mtn is attacked by terroriss hell bent on obtaining such material or speading its deadly contents? How can we be assured that such transportation through our cities, commnities and rural areas are safe?
These are questions and concerns that must be answered and included in any final consideration of Yucca Mtn or any other permanent storage cite of Plutionium and other deadly radio-acive materials. Think about it: how safe and dependable can humans make any such storage facility and containers? Can it really be safe, ever?
Now that the President has endorsed more nuclear power plants in his state of the Union address, and Harry Reid's re-election is in doubt it definitely seems probable that Yucca Mountain will be back on the table. I find it most revealing that Sec Chu has announced that his litmus test for potential committee members to look for an alternative must declare in advance that Yucca Mountain is not an option. That is not an acceptable limitation to impose on a scientific based committee and hence they have no one willing to accept these terms and hence there is no committee or results.
Yucca MOuntain was previously selected from over 80 sites and therefore cannot be just disregarded.
Per Obama's State of the Union Address:
"The confirmation of well-qualified public servants should not be held hostage to the pet projects or grudges of a few individual senators."
Likewise, the execution of a federal law like the NWPA should not be held hostage to the grudge of an individual senator....
Per Obama's inauguration speech: "We will restore science to its rightful place"...
So, let the Yucca Mountain Repository license application be reviewed and determined to be either scientifically adequate or not.
President Obama, words are cheap. Actions will define how history remembers your administration. Not health care, not buying union votes, not bowing to foreign leaders - OK, I lied, the last is unforgivable....
This is an old argument. Nevada should be begging the Feds to build this project. It could be the only positive news on the employment horizon for a long time. it is non-gaming, science based long term employment. It could lead to a science center that could anchor a whole industry. But the luddites want to kill nuclear power, so they must kill a repository. Nothing will appease them. Nevada should wise up.
@MamaBear:
The day you actually substantiate your hyperbolic assertions with actual evidence, I believe the sky will fall. Until then, continue raging on with your enviro-fundamentalist zeal. I will seek comfort in the fact that I actually tried to understand the matter of Nevada v. YMP objectively, while you are free to revel in your victory at the expense of truth and reason.
@BasicTruth:
You implicitly claim to have some understanding of the complex process of siting a nuclear waste repository. Given that you’ve discounted the current proposed site solely on the basis of alleged proximity to a population center, what would you recommend as the appropriate distance for such a site? If 90 miles isn’t enough, what is? Moreover, once you disclose the appropriate distance, what would be your criteria for the geology, hydrology, geomorphology, etc., for such a site. Have you thought that one through? No, of course you haven’t. In truth, you don’t know jack about the myriad factors that went into choosing the current site, as opposed to another location.
@ marc smith:
The feds have not already spent the money set aside for the Yucca Mountain Project. That money resides in the Nuclear Waste Fund, as established by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. Currently, the Fund has around $23 billion in it; the money comes from nuclear utilities, who by law levy a charge on their customers (ratepayers) and then hand the proceeds over to the government. The settlement of lawsuits brought against DOE for not taking possession of nuclear waste from the utilities is paid out of the government’s Justice Fund, also by law, which means the taxpayer foots the bill. In other words, by law, DOE cannot use the Nuclear Waste Fund to settle lawsuits.
Some points to raise about this article:
Nevada hired gun Martin Malsch merely alleged that the design of the proposed repository is “only 70% complete.” This is nothing more than an allegation, and in no way has been demonstrated by the State. The allegation, by the way, is a bit hard to believe given the massive amount of data produced by the Yucca Mountain Project. What Malsch and the State consistently fail to mention is that the license application for the proposed repository is essentially a “summary” of the thousands of individual reports AND design drawings that present the repository design in considerable detail.
While it is true that some details cannot be completed because they depend on design decisions and findings made during the construction phase of the Yucca Mountain Project (which, for purely political reasons, will probably never come about), the simple demonstrable fact is that the repository design is substantially complete by any definition, far beyond the ridiculous estimate provided in the State’s characteristically inaccurate legal brief.
Second, the article cherry-picks an offhand comment by a DOE lawyer to suggest that the State’s absurd contention about failure or absence of drip shields is “an elephant in the room” or a “smoking gun.” What the clearly biased RJ leaves out are the details surrounding the quote, which any independent-minded person could have learned by attending the actual hearing or watching it on the Internet. Simply put, the real elephant in the room is that DOE has performed sensitivity analyses that address the absence or failure of certain components of the design, such as drip shields. The DOE clarified that point today, citing relevant sections of the license application, and there are supporting documents as well that completely contradict the State’s claims.