It’s not too late! The deadline for public comments is Monday, February 28, 2000. Get your comments in now! Let the DOE know that the DEIS is unacceptable and should be completely rewritten.
Quality and Quantity — numbers count in DOE’s eyes too, so let’s flood them in these last few days with yet more comments than the many hundreds already received. Once you’ve finished your own, rope in others to send in comments too: your family, friends, neighbors out walking their dog, etc.! Even if they’re short and sweet, every comment counts. This is a tremendous opportunity to tell the DOE and the nuclear industry “Yucca Mountain and Mobile Chernobyl — NO WAY!!!”.
Send your comments to:
Wendy Dixon, EIS Project Manager Yucca Mountain Site Characterization Office Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management US Department of Energy PO Box 30307, Mail Stop 010 North Las Vegas, Nevada 89036-0307
or submit them electronically at www.ymp.gov — go under “Environmental Impact Statement” or “Draft EIS” and choose “Comment on EIS”.
You can also fax your comments in to DOE at 1-800-967-0739. Be sure to include the words “Yucca Mountain Draft EIS” at the very top of your fax.
Below are some key points to choose from in making your comments:
YUCCA MOUNTAIN WILL FAIL TO ISOLATE WASTE
1. DOE’s own data shows that the Yucca Mountain site will fail to contain nuclear waste – radioactive gases will be released and radioactive waste will be washed into the ground water a short time after the first containers fail.
2. Containers do fail – “only” about 70 dry storage casks are in use at reactors currently, and there is already 1 “juvenile failure” – a cask with a faulty weld – in less than 20 years. Repository casks will be made of different material, but the manufacturing will be subject to the same problems…there will be more than 10 thousand repository casks…and so likely hundreds of early cask failures.
3. DOE and Congress have both changed the rules of the game repeatedly instead of disqualifying this site as their own regulations would call for.
4. Over 200 local, state, national and international environmental / public interest organizations petitioned the DOE to disqualify the site under existing repository Site Suitability Guidelines: under current Guidelines, if water moves through Yucca Mountain in less than 1,000 years, the site should be disqualified; scientific evidence shows that rain water has penetrated deep into Yucca Mountain to repository depth in less than 50 years!
5. DOE is in the process of attempting to change these Guidelines, even while they are taking public comment on an Environmental Impact statement that should be based on them.
6. DOE denied the petition to disqualify, not because they could prove the 200 groups were wrong, but because they want to study the site more in order to try to prove us wrong…in the mean time the site violates a disqualifying condition for nuclear waste repositories – that requires that water move very slowly in the ground. DOE’s data shows that water travels very quickly through the Yucca Mt. rock. 7. Since the Yucca Mountain site is not fit to isolate nuclear waste, DOE has come to rely on engineered barriers for containment… contradicting the legislative mandate for the program which !QS!ed geologic isolation… if DOE is going to rely on engineered structures, the whole process must be started over to examine appropriate siting and design for engineered isolation.
8. Instead of holding public hearings on Yucca Mountain, DOE should be holding public meetings on how to start over on a high-level nuclear waste program.
9. The proposed Yucca Mountain repository is located on sacred WESTERN SHOSHONE INDIAN NATION land, thus violating the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley signed by the United States government — an unsettled land dispute which DOE ignores.
TRANSPorT OF IRRADIATED NUCLEAR FUEL
Incredibly, DOE has attempted to downplay the importance of transportation in this environmental impact statement process. Only 5 public hearings were originally scheduled outside of Nevada/Death Valley, CA, even though many hundreds of cities in 43 States are located along projected transport routes. Through citizen pressure, with the help of Members of Congress, 5 more hearings along transport routes were wrested from a stubborn DOE. Despite this, many hundreds of communities still do not know they live on Mobile Chernobyl routes.
1. Specific concerns and information about the routes near you might include: proximity to schools, hospitals, water and food storage, other vital resources, and also history of problems on these routes is very appropriate to bring out. For projected routes and schools and hospitals nearest you see www.citizen.org and !QS! “Critical Mass Energy Project” to visit the ATOMIC ATLAS.
2. Concerns about environmental protection, environmental justice (the poor and people of color often live along railways and highways), safety, about liability, emergency response preparedness (or lack thereof), disaster management, worker safety, incidental radiation exposure, loss of property value along atomic waste transport routes – in other words, HOW WILL 30 YEARS OF NUCLEAR WASTE SHIPMENTS THROUGH YOUR COMMUNITY IMPACT YOU? 3. Nationally, this is the largest nuclear waste shipping campaign in history, affecting 43 states, hundreds of towns and cities and moving more high-level waste each year than the last 30 years combined. DOE says 50 million people live within ½ mile of the projected routes.
4. DOE’s Environmental Impact Statement assumes specific routes, but these were kept secret until January 21, 2000 – less than three weeks before the public comment period’s original deadline. View DOE’s shipping route maps on their web site (http://www.ymp.gov/timeline/eis/routes/routemaps.htm), and demand DOE specifically address how this will affect your community. In addition, some cities, such as Phoenix and Albuquerque, all of a sudden were shown on these new maps to be on DOE Mobile Chernobyl routes — a shock and surprise to residents there, who now have next to no time to comment, or even find out, about DOE plans. Because DOE kept the maps secret till very late in the game, the public comment deadline should either be significantly extended (for another 180 days), or else started over again.
5. In their early analysis of a hypothetical severe shipping accident, DOE averages the health damage suffered by those impacted across the whole US population, then declaring there would be “no significant impact”. Make it clear this is not acceptable, and is indeed scandalous.
6. Point out that DOE’s “No Action Alternative” – that either Yucca Mountain goes forward, or else the wastes will be abandoned to leak into the environment at reactor sites — is entirely unrealistic and is being used as a scare tactic.
Thank you.
For MorE INForMATION, CONTACT KEVIN KAMPS AT NUCLEAR INFO. & RESOURCE SERVICE, PH. 301-270-6477 or kevin@igc.org