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Thursday, January 27, 2000
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Hold Yucca report, state urges
A geologist calls for a delay on an environmental statement for a planned nuke waste dump.
By Keith Rogers
Review-Journal
Nevada's attorney general's office on Wednesday asked a presidential panel to postpone the final environmental impact statement for a Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository and delay a decision on recommending the site until a UNLV minerals study is completed in 2001.
"It is our view that the Department of Energy has no business whatsoever to inform the country and the decision-makers about environmental impacts unless this question is resolved," geologist Jerry Szymanski, a consultant to Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa, told the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board on Wednesday as it concluded a two-day meeting in Las Vegas.
"There's only one solution: postpone this report," he said. The impact statement is expected to be finished in October.
After the meeting, the board's chairman, Jared Cohon, an expert in environmental and water resource analysis and president of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, spoke privately about documents Szymanski presented at the close of the hearing's public comment session. Cohon said the board would examine them.
The documents, separate from the UNLV study, are based on data collected by Yucca Mountain Project scientists from federal agencies and government contractors.
Cohon said Tuesday the board had seen nothing that would disqualify the Yucca Mountain site. Of the new information, Cohon said: "We'll have to reserve judgment until we review the state's documents and see the results from the UNLV study."
The minerals study, which focuses on microscopic bubbles or fluids trapped in mineral crystals such as calcite and quartz, has been under way since April at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The two-year study is not expected to be completed until the spring of 2001.
That would be after the Energy Department finalizes its impact statement and issues its site recommendation report for consideration by Energy Secretary Bill Richardson. The site report is expected to be issued in November.
The UNLV scientists are trying to determine how and when the bubbles were formed and whether thermal water rose within the mountain in the past and whether it could happen again after a repository is built. The team, led by associate professor Jean Cline, has found that 44 percent of 151 samples examined have shown that fluids passed through the mountain at elevated temperatures.
This could mean that water was hot when it moved through the mountain or that the mountain's volcanic rock was hot when water contacted it. The state supports the theory that thermal water shot upward within in the mountain and that the minerals were not deposited by rainwater traveling downward from the mountain's surface as federal scientists think.
The mountain could be found unsuitable if scientists determine that water could invade the repository floor and carry nuclear contaminants into the environment.
The report from Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa, delivered to the board by Szymanski -- a former Department of Energy scientist -- said mineral samples from the mountain are all younger than 11 million years old. According to state scientists, that means the mountain was heated after it was formed.
Using data compiled by Yucca Mountain Project scientists, the state's report said the minerals' ages correspond to times when volcanoes erupted in the area.
The 11-member board of scientists appointed by the president checks the validity of the Department of Energy's work at Yucca Mountain and reports to Congress.
"What's made very clear to us by Congress is that policy issues really are not within the domain of the board," Cohon said. He added he did not know whether the issue raised by the attorney general's office is "a policy issue or a technical issue."
The mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the only site being studied to entomb the nation's high-level radioactive waste, some 77,000 tons of mostly spent fuel from commercial nuclear power reactors. The spent fuel pellets encased in metal rods are stored at reactor sites across the nation.
The state's report requests that the board correct a statement it made to Congress in 1998. That year, the board, referring to a previous National Research Council panel's finding, reported to Congress that there is not "a credible case for the assertion that there has been ongoing, intermittent hydrothermal activity at Yucca Mountain or that large earthquake-induced changes in the water table are likely."
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