Geologic disposal was meant to isolate nuclear wastes from the biosphere for as long as they remain deadly.
Now with Senate Bill 1287, DOE, NRC, and EPA seem intent on developing a dump that they know will leak.
Ground water and drinking water are at the very heart of the growing controversy about the proposed national high-level radioactive waste dump targeted at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Ground water is the main pathway by which harmful radiation doses from the leaking dump will reach people downstream.
Rain water will percolate down through Yucca Mountain’s fractured rock to the level of the nuclear waste repository. This process may take just a few decades, rather than the thousands of years previously assumed. Once in contact with the wastes, water can rapidly corrode the metallic waste containers. Radioactive contaminants would then mix with the water, flow down into the aquifer beneath Yucca Mountain, and eventually be drawn up in well water downstream. Even plutonium, once thought to be highly insoluble in water, now seems to be highly soluble in water in certain chemical states (see the January, 2000 issue of Science). This may explain why plutonium from nuclear weapons test explosions at the Nevada Test Site immediately adjacent to Yucca Mountain has migrated nearly a mile in just the past few decades, rather than the fraction of an inch that was predicted. Such discoveries raise grave doubts about the wisdom of attempting to isolate forever deadly nuclear wastes inside the leaky, watery innards of Yucca Mountain.
Why will Yucca Mountain fail to isolate nuclear waste? Why is it fractured? The answer is simple: there’s a whole lot of shaking going on. The Yucca Mountain area is as seismically active as the San Francisco Bay area. There have been more than 600 earthquakes registering more than 2.5 on the Richter scale within a 50-mile radius of the site just within the past 25 years. A major 5.6 jolt epicentered just 10 miles from Yucca Mountain knocked windows out of a DOE field office studying the proposed repository in 1992. In 1998 and 1999, there have been a whole spate of tremblers, at greater frequencies than previously observed. A recent quake derailed a train on a rail route that would be used to transport high-level nuclear waste casks to Yucca Mountain. All this shaking has fractured the relatively soft rock (volcanic tuff) that forms this low snaking ridge. There are 35 active fault lines running through the area, including two that traverse the proposed repository itself. The entire mass of Yucca Mountain is a sieve with tiny fractures that allow water and gas to flow right on through.
The ground water beneath the proposed repository site is already the sole source for drinking water, agricultural irrigation, and watering livestock in communities downstream. Just 12 miles from Yucca Mountain, Amargosa Valley boasts a 5,000 head dairy herd, alfalfa farmers, pistachio farmers, specialty crop growers, and 1,300 residents. Yucca Mountain’s ground water eventually bubbles forth as springs in Death Valley National Park, sustaining unique, fragile, and threatened species and ecosystems, for which reason the U.S. National Park Service has spoken out against the proposed repository.
The question is not if Yucca Mountain will leak, but how soon. Given high-level nuclear waste’s hundreds of thousands of years of persistent deadliness, massive ground water contamination at Yucca Mountain is inevitable over time.
Despite this, different federal agencies – DOE, NRC, EPA — and the U.S. Congress are all engaged in a contest to see who can carve the BIGGEST LOOPHOLES in public health and environmental protection laws, regulations, and policies so that the proposed national repository for high-level nuclear waste can still be sited at Yucca Mountain, despite the site’s ever more obvious unsuitability. If a certain lowered standard is still too tough for Yucca Mountain to meet, then the rules are just changed in the middle of the game, and the Yucca Mountain Project keeps going forward. See below for details…
Congress
On February 10 th, 2000 the Senate passed S. 1287, the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act. This bill would speed up developing Yucca Mountain, and would block EPA from publishing radiation standards until June, 2001 – well into the next Presidential Administration (nuclear power proponents’ hope being that the next President will be less resistant to simply locking in Yucca Mountain, irregardless of the site characterization process). The same bill passed the U.S. House on March 22 nd. Both votes, however, fell short of the 2/3rds majority needed to override Clinton’s promised veto. President Clinton indeed did veto the bill, on April 25 th – the eve of the 14 th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe. Senate proponents of S. 1287 will attempt to override the President’s veto on Tuesday, May 2 nd, at 3:15. The environmental and public interest communities stand united in urging Senators to sustain the President’s veto of a this very bad nuclear waste bill that would undermine EPA authority to protect ground water, drinking water, public health and the environment.
Department of Energy
Current DOE guidelines for determining whether a site is suitable to serve as a national repository for high-level nuclear waste clearly state that certain conditions would disqualify a site from further consideration. DOE Guideline 10 CFR 960.4-2-1, “Post-Closure Disqualifying Condition for Hydrology,” states “A site shall be disqualified if the pre-waste-emplacement ground-water travel time from the disturbed zone to the accessible environment is expected to be less than 1000 years along any pathway of likely and significant radionuclide travel.” Yet, DOE’s own scientists have found rain water less than 50 years old that has percolated deep down through Yucca Mountain’s fractured rock to the level of the proposed repository. In 1998, over 200 environmental and public interest organizations from across the U.S. petitioned the Secretary of Energy to disqualify Yucca Mountain based on DOE’s own guideline. DOE denied the petition. Instead, DOE is now trying to simply do away with that troublesome guideline altogether. In fact, DOE is trying to remove any individual disqualifying conditions from consideration at the Yucca Mountain site. So much for an objective site characterization process based on sound and rigorous science…
Nuclear Regulatory Commission
NRC would not even separately protect the ground water at Yucca Mountain, even though this would be the main pathway of exposure to humans. It would allow for 12 miles of dilution in the ground water before measuring for compliance, rather than preventing the contamination in the first place. 1 latent cancer fatality per 1,144 “average” individuals exposed to 25 millirems per year would be allowed. Maximally exposed individuals suffering doses higher than 25 mrem would not be protected. Compliance would only be required for the first 10,000 years, even though peak doses would occur after that. No overall limit would be placed on the total amount of radiation that could leak from Yucca.
Environmental Protection Agency
The environmental and public interest community has fought hard for years to defend EPA’s role as the Yucca Mountain standard setter and EPA’s right to set a separate ground water protection standard consistent with the Safe Drinking Water Act (limiting radiation doses to 4 mrem/yr via drinking water). Despite this, EPA is contemplating setting such unacceptably weak standards for Yucca Mountain that the site might still qualify to serve for the repository despite its unsuitability. Such unprecedented, weakened standards would also set very bad precedents undermining other EPA regulations, such as those that apply to Safe Drinking Water Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, Superfund and EPA policies that aim to prevent rather than delay or dilute ground water contamination. EPA is, like NRC, considering not requiring compliance until 12 miles downstream. This is a much bigger dilution zone than the 3 miles EPA regulations allow for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. Are Nevadans less deserving of protection than New Mexicans? EPA also assumes a mixing in of pure water when contaminated well water is drawn up – another large and unprecedented dilution factor. EPA would not protect the maximally exposed individuals – subsistence farmers living very close in to Yucca Mountain, especially the vulnerable fetus in the womb. EPA would also cut off compliance at 10,000 years, before peak doses would be delivered. National environmental groups met with EPA in April, 2000 expressing grave concern over these weak proposed standards. EPA’s finalized standards are due out in the summer of 2000 – unless S. 1287 becomes law and blocks them!
Prepared by Kevin Kamps, Nuclear Waste Specialist, Nuclear Information & Resource Service, 6930 Carroll Avenue, #340, Takoma Park, MD 20912; ph. 301-270-6477; fax 301-270-4291; e-mail: kevin@igc.org. 4/27/2000