- Nuclear Waste Policy Act requires:
- “geologic considerations … shall be primary criteria for the selection of sites.” (§ 112)
- Siting Guidelines “shall specify factors that qualify or disqualify any site,” including “hydrology” and “geophysics.” (§ 112)
- DOE’s new site suitability rules (November 2001) reject both requirements.
- DOE claims it changed its rules “to rely on a combination of advanced storage containers and natural geologic barriers to satisfy new, rigorous environmental standards.” (Wash Post, 2/6/02)
- This “combination” is completely illusory. In 1999, DOE informed the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board that the storage containers and natural geology make up the following contributions to waste containment at Yucca Mountain:
- Yucca Mountain Geology: 0.008%
- Yucca Mountain Overburden: 0.09%
- Spent Fuel Cladding: 0.3 %
- Man-Made Waste Package: 99.7%
- This was the last time DOE has ever released its breakdown of the individual capabilities of the various barriers at Yucca Mountain, despite the repeated urgings of numerous scientific bodies.
- The Yucca Mountain site is now in fact irrelevant to DOE’s repository design. The repository is not a “mountain,” but a man-made package. That is why DOE and others say there are no show-stoppers at Yucca Mountain, because the site has no role whatsoever in DOE’s performance assessment.
- The thin cladding surrounding the spent-fuel pellets provides 25 times more isolation than Yucca Mountain geology.
