by Kevin Kamps, Nuclear Waste Specialist, NIRS
June 28, 2001
After nearly twenty years, the battle over whether Yucca Mountain, Nevada will become the United States’ national dump for irradiated atomic fuel rods and high-level nuclear waste is heating up like never before. From the “halls of power” in Washington, D.C. to the neighborhoods of 43 States through which waste shipments would be transported to the Great Basin Desert in the American West, forces for and against the Yucca Mountain Project are preparing for a series of big fights and important decisions in the coming year. A brief re-cap of recent events is needed to understand what is soon to come.
Beginning in 1995, the main battleground against the Yucca dump was in the U.S. Congress. With President Clinton’s veto of the “Mobile Chernobyl bill” in April 2000 (ironically signed, unbeknownst even to Clinton, almost on the exact minute of the 14 th anniversary of the Chernobyl catastrophe), the nuclear power industry effort to rush shipment of its irradiated fuel rods to Nevada was stopped in its tracks on Capitol Hill. Although House Republicans still threaten to re-introduce the bill, the recent power shift in the Senate seems to have killed Mobile Chernobyl legislation: Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle has declared Yucca dead legislatively so long as Democrats control the Senate, his second in command being none other than leading anti-Yucca Senator Harry Reid of Nevada. Unfortunately, the Yucca dump does not need Congressional action to move it closer to opening: the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) itself is close to declaring Yucca suitable for serving as the national dump.
Last December, DOE (which has studied Yucca’s suitability since 1983) was charged with violating scientific objectivity by being biased in favor of opening the dump. DOE had planned to publish a “Site Recommendation Considerations Report” (SRCR) at the end of 2000 – its first official announcement that, despite growing evidence, Yucca is suitable. DOE intended the SRCR to build political momentum for opening the dump. A two page memo, written by a subcontractor working for DOE, that was leaked to the Las Vegas Sun newspaper threw a major monkey wrench into those plans. It stated the SRCR could be used to “sell” the Yucca Mtn. Project on Capitol Hill, and also that Members of Congress were not concerned about the scientific suitability of Yucca, but rather cared only about the financial and political feasibility of the project. Dump opponents cried foul, and Nevada Senator Reid demanded the DOE Office of the Inspector General investigate the apparent bias. The Inspector’s investigation took four months, but found no bias. It should be noted that internal DOE e-mail records relevant to the investigation had been mysteriously erased, and that the Yucca Mtn. Project and Inspector General Offices are literally next door neighbors at DOE headquarters in Washington. Although not surprised by the official findings, dump opponents were left wondering whether the investigation of bias was itself biased, a classic case of the fox guarding the hen house. DOE had hoped to recommend Yucca to the President by June, 2001, but the investigation has pushed back the schedule by at least six months.
In mid-May, George W. Bush announced his Energy Policy Plan. With DOE Secretary Spence Abraham (formerly a US Senator who voted numerous times to send nuclear waste to Yucca) and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Christie Todd Whitman at his side, Bush advocated building new nuclear power plants in the US for the first time in decades. Nuclear power means nuclear waste, so Bush called on his Cabinet officials to speed up the process for opening a national dump. Although he didn’t mention Nevada by name, Yucca is the only site under consideration.
Yucca, limited under current law to receiving no more than 70,000 tons of waste, would nearly be filled by what already exists in the U.S. Building new reactors, re-licensing old reactors, or even continuing operations at current reactors will generate more waste than Yucca could legally hold. Unwise as it would be in terms of the heat and radiation impact on Yucca’s rock, Congress could simply change the law, cramming twice as much waste into Yucca. Otherwise, a second national dump would be needed. Citizens in Utah fear that the proposed Private Fuel Storage dump targeted at the Skull Valley Goshutes Indian Reservation in their State just might be that second repository, a nuclear industry initiative that could launch the beginning of 4,000 cross country waste shipments as early as 2003.
Just two weeks later, on June 6 th, EPA finalized its long-awaited radiation release regulations for Yucca. EPA had already published repository regulations in the mid-1980’s, but it soon became clear Yucca could not live up them: too much radioactive gas (primarily carbon-14) would be released through Yucca’s cracks and fissures. So, in 1992, nuclear power advocates in Congress changed the law, requiring EPA to set weaker regulations unique to Yucca. Dr. Arjun Makhijani, director of Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, served on the scientific panel that advised EPA on its original repository regulations. He calls the weaker regulations unique to Yucca “the double standard standard”.
Shortly after the news, DOE Secretary Abraham announced Yucca could live up to the new regulations. What he didn’t mention is that DOE played a big role in shaping the new EPA regulations. EPA was supposed to have published its new Yucca rules over a year ago. However, the nuclear power industry, along with the DOE and U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC, the agency that must grant DOE permission to open the dump), had been pressuring EPA behind closed doors to further weaken its proposed regulations. A broad coalition of environmental and public interest organizations met with EPA officials numerous times to counter the pro-dump lobbyists.
The main issue in dispute was the level of protection to be applied to the groundwater beneath Yucca. The aquifer is already the sole source of drinking water for farming communities downstream, including the largest dairy herd in Nevada that exports milk across the State and to California for children’s school lunches. Radiation leaking from Yucca would contaminate the groundwater, thus contaminating the drinking water and milk downstream. Environmental voices demanded that the Safe Drinking Water Act be applied, limiting radiation doses to 4 millirem per year in the groundwater. Pro-dump lobbyists argued for a 25 millirem “all pathways” annual dose limit, and argued against a separate groundwater protection standard. In the end, EPA preserved the Safe Drinking Water Act on paper, but undermined it in fundamental ways. For instance, EPA’s new rule does not require regulatory compliance until 18 km downstream from the actual dump site, creating a large, unprecedented nuclear sacrifice zone in the aquifer. EPA also unrealistically assumes that future drinking water supplies would mix contaminated water with large volumes of uncontaminated water, another large dilution factor. EPA only requires compliance with its regulation for the first 10,000 years, even though the wastes would remain deadly for hundreds of thousands of years. The environmental and public interest coalition criticized these new EPA regulations as seriously undermining public health and environmental protections and setting a dangerous national precedent.
On the very day EPA announced its regulations, the nuclear power industry launched lawsuits against the application of the Safe Drinking Water Act, seemingly indicating that it is fearful Yucca cannot even live up to the weak EPA regulations. On Wednesday, June 27 th the State of Nevada, adamantly opposed to the dump, filed a lawsuit in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco against the 18 km buffer zone and arbitrary 10,000 year cut-off. On the same day, a coalition of environmental and public interest organizations — NIRS, Citizen Action Coalition of Indiana, Citizen Alert of Nevada, Natural Resources Defense Council, Nevada Desert Experience, Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force, and Public Citizen – filed a separate lawsuit in the same court, similarly blasting EPA’s weak standards.
Now that EPA has acted, numerous federal actions may quickly fall like dominoes. DOE recently published a Supplemental Draft Environmental Impact Statement, laying out its most recent design for the dump. This includes a huge water storage pool for 5,000 tons of waste, even though earth quake activity at Yucca raises the specter of a loss of coolant accident and catastrophic radiation release. The design also includes a mountainside of solar panels to provide electricity for ventilation fans to cool the buried waste for decades into the future, which would make Yucca the world’s first solar-powered atomic waste dump. DOE’s recently released 1,200 page Science & Engineering Report and soon to be released Preliminary Site Suitability Evaluation Report (PSSER, “the pisser”) will lead to public hearings later this summer – the last chance for dump opponents to voice their opposition, even though their countless earlier comments have never been responded to. Conspicuous by its absence is any adequate environmental impact study on the tens of thousands of cross country waste shipments required to move the waste to Yucca. Pro-dump forces hope to downplay the transport issue for as long as possible, so that millions of Americans will remain unaware they live on targeted highway and railway routes.
DOE is also weakening its own “Site Suitability Guidelines” because the 50 year old rainwater found deep within Yucca violates its own rule that proposed dump sites having water flowing through them in less than 1,000 years must be disqualified from further consideration. In 1998, 220 environmental and public interest groups petitioned DOE to stop the Yucca Project on these grounds; DOE is instead changing its rules in the middle of the game. NRC is also in the process of weakening its licensing regulations for opening a repository, because Yucca cannot live up to its original dump rules.
DOE Secretary Abraham is expected to officially announce his support of the Yucca dump at the end of 2001 or in early 2002. This would kick the decision up to George W. Bush, who seems intent on giving the go-ahead for the dump. The State of Nevada has already publicly announced its intention to veto that decision. The U.S. Congress could then override Nevada’s veto with a simple majority of votes in both the Senate and House of Representatives. With Congressional approval, DOE could then apply to NRC for a license, a process that itself would take several years. The earliest that DOE could haul waste into Yucca is 2010. Lawsuits against the dump could tie things up for months or years longer.
Grassroots activists are gearing up for a long, intensifying battle ahead. The International “Confronting Nuclear Power with People Power” conference in Chicago this August 18 to 24 will focus on how to stop Yucca and other ill-conceived dumps around the world.