December 14, 2001
Carol Hanlon
U.S. Department of Energy
Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Office (M/S #025)
P.O. Box 364629
North Las Vegas, Nevada 89036-8629
Dear Ms. Hanlon:
Nuclear Information & Resource Service/World Information Service on Energy (NIRS/WISE) is the international information and networking center for citizens and environmental organizations concerned about nuclear power, radioactive waste, radiation, and sustainable energy issues. NIRS/WISE has members in every U.S. State. Following are our comments on the Secretary of Energy’s imminent decision on whether or not to recommend to the President that Yucca Mountain be developed as the national high-level nuclear waste repository.
On behalf of our thousands of members across the U.S., NIRS strongly urges DOE Secretary Abraham to disqualify Yucca Mountain from any further consideration as the U.S. high-level atomic waste dump.
Revising its own 17-year-old repository siting guidelines at the last second of the site characterization process amounts to changing the rules in the middle of the game. In 1998, NIRS and over 200 environmental and public interest organizations petitioned DOE to disqualify Yucca Mountain based on DOE’s own Site Suitability Guidelines. The fast flow of water discovered at Yucca met one of DOE’s explicit disqualifying conditions. To not disqualify Yucca from any further consideration would not only violate DOE Site Suitability Guidelines, and violate the Nuclear Waste Policy Act: burying irradiated fuel rods and high-level atomic waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada could very possibly result in an environmental and public health catastrophe. Despite our petition, DOE changed its Guidelines a month ago. DOE thus disregarded the valid concerns of the environmental and public interest movements in the United States, making a mockery of meaningful public participation.
This repeated weakening of the standards to fit the unsuitability of the site cannot be called “sound science” – the Yucca Mountain decision-making criteria George W. Bush promised to apply when he was a candidate campaigning for President in Nevada. DOE has shifted away from the original concept of geologic containment: isolation of deadly radioactivity from the biosphere for the duration of its hazard. DOE’s utter reliance on engineered barriers, and the eventual “dilution and dispersal” of radioactive poisons in a currently-used drinking water supply, could very well doom future generations downstream of Yucca Mountain to severe harmful radiation doses. The State of Nevada has vowed to challenge the new Guidelines in federal court. DOE should withhold finalization of its proposed new Site Suitability Guidelines until the courts have ruled on their legality, or lack thereof, under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act.
DOE seems very confident in the projected performance of its “magic super metal” burial casks for not just centuries, not just thousands of years, but 10,000+ years into the future. How can DOE make such bold predictions, especially considering the poor track record that high-level nuclear waste containers have shown in just the first few years of use? Design, manufacturing, and operational errors involving dry storage casks have included an inadvertent hydrogen gas explosion in Wisconsin in 1996, defective seals and welds and radiation shields on dry casks around the country, and deterioration of dry casks and threatened degradation of the irradiated nuclear fuel rods contained within them.
DOE’s own TN-BRP and TN-REG (Transnuclear-Big Rock Point and Transnuclear-Robert E. Ginna) storage/transport casks at the West Valley Demonstration Project have faulty gaskets that are not even certified for use in extreme cold weather conditions. For this reason, DOE has made an agreement with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that it will not risk shipping these casks between October 31 st and April 1 st, so as to avoid any possibility of encountering cold weather conditions. Those two casks are spending yet another winter stored at the failed and contaminated West Valley, New York reprocessing facility. DOE cannot guarantee a safe shipment of irradiated fuel rods during winter weather, and yet it is confident it can predict reliable cask performance 10,000 years into the future?
A recent article in Physics Today points to uncertainty about how the metal used for disposal containers would react to ground water when it is combined with corrosive chemicals and heated by the waste inside the repository. DOE’s confidence in burial container performance over centuries and thousands of years is unfounded, and beside the point: by depending almost entirely on the performance of the container, DOE is implicitly acknowledging just how geologically unsuitable Yucca is, and that it should have been disqualified long ago for its inability to provide “permanent geological disposal”. Yucca’s geology cannot isolate high-level nuclear waste for the long duration of its hazard, and DOE’s attempt to compensate for this failure by emphasizing burial container performance is inappropriate and inconsistent with the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, as amended. DOE’s reliance on disposal containers to provide most, if not all, the radiation containment is inconsistent with U.S. nuclear waste policy dating back decades to the National Academy of Sciences recommendation for geological disposal in 1957. If the containers are so reliable, making geology’s contribution to containment so irrelevant, then why must the country’s waste be transported thousands of miles to Yucca Mountain, Nevada? Why couldn’t such containerized waste just be kept in the basement at DOE headquarters instead?
The General Accounting Office (GAO) has quoted DOE’s own Yucca Mountain Project contractor, Bechtel-SAIC, as saying that 293 scientific site suitability studies required by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission before any DOE license application will not be completed until 2006. GAO has urged that DOE postpone any further site recommendation and licensing activities until those promised scientific studies are completed. How, then, can Secretary Abraham recommend Yucca Mountain in the next few months?
How can Secretary Abraham close the “final” round of public comments when DOE has not even responded to well over 11,000 previous public comments during the Draft Environmental Impact Statement public comment period, nor published its Final Environmental Impact Statement?
How can Secretary Abraham give his thumbs up to Yucca when DOE has never adequately addressed transporting tens of thousands of high-level atomic waste trucks and trains through 45 States past the homes of 50 million Americans? Whatever happened to Secretary Abraham’s previously stated concern (in an August, 1998 letter from then U.S. Senator Abraham to then Energy Secretary Richardson) for meaningful public participation in, and the very best emergency response preparedness for, nuclear materials shipments? In the absence of a detailed proposal for transporting nuclear waste to Nevada, the Department of Energy lacks a basis for consideration of site suitability.
Does Secretary Abraham intend to recommend Yucca to the President without having dealt with the terrorist threats that 9/11 showed to be a very real danger? Every single one of the tens of thousands of atomic waste trucks and trains that would be required to transport the waste to Yucca would be a potential catastrophic terrorist target. These shipments would give terrorists unlimited attack scenarios to choose from, as casks bound for Yucca would travel through major metropolitan areas, suburbs, and the agricultural heartland, past schools, hospitals, sports stadiums, and drinking water supplies, just to mention a few potential nightmares. It must be remembered that each truck cask would contain up to 40 times the long-lasting radiation released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb – each train cask up to 260 times as much as Hiroshima. NIRS advisory board member Dr. Marvin Resnikoff has calculated, using DOE’s own computer models, that severe accidents (or terrorist attacks, for that matter) releasing radiation from casks could cause hundreds of latent cancer fatalities (not to mention other forms of health damage), and could cost billions to tens of billions of dollars to clean up. Such potential catastrophe demands a thorough environmental and socioeconomic impact analysis, which DOE has thus far failed to do.
How can Secretary Abraham do other than suspend site recommendation activities until a new law firm can be found to recreate years worth of work by the law firm of Winston and Strawn that is tainted by blatantly unethical conflict of interest, as it lobbied on behalf of the pro-Yucca Nuclear Energy Institute while simultaneously preparing DOE’s license application to NRC? Is Secretary Abraham identifying all the documents that are tainted by Winston and Strawn’s conflict of interest? How can the public participate any longer with any confidence until this tainted work is re-done?
DOE has time and again precluded meaningful public participation in the Yucca Mountain decision-making process. NIRS, as well as hundreds of grassroots environmental and public interest organizations, as well as thousands of concerned citizens, has participated in good faith in every step of the DOE’s public comment periods and public participation process. Yet, our concerns have fallen on deaf ears. Our comments have been disregarded entirely, as the DOE steamroller speeds towards a Yucca site recommendation despite the geological unsuitability and unanswered questions about the dangers of high-level radioactive waste transportation.
The public simply cannot have any faith in such a fatally flawed and woefully incomplete process. The Yucca Mountain Project should be terminated once and for all, and DOE redirected to seeking real answers to our country’s nuclear waste dilemma.
DOE would do well to learn from the lessons of Germany. The German government has attempted to open a permanent high-level atomic waste dump at Gorleben, against the will of the local population and those who live along the transport routes across the country. In 1997, 20,000 protestors blocked the roads and rails. The German government deployed 30,000 police. The police state tactics – including water cannons, clubbings, attack dogs, and cavalry — have not gone unnoticed by large numbers of German citizens and other observers around the world. Many hundreds of protestors were arrested and injured. The German government paid $100 million to transport just six containers of waste into Gorleben. Such large-scale protests have been repeated in Germany in 1998, twice in 2001, and promise to continue into the future. Similar protests can be expected in the United States if DOE attempts to force the Yucca dump down Nevada’s throat against its will. Such blockades and protests can be expected all along the truck and train routes of the tens of thousands of waste shipments targeted to roll through 45 States.
Sincerely,
Kevin Kamps
Nuclear Waste Specialist
Nuclear Information & Resource Service
6930 Carroll Avenue, #340
Takoma Park, MD 20912