Sunday, October 26, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

EDITORIAL: Jimmy crack corn

They don't know, care whether casks will fail

In TV cartoons, the kind of folks placed in charge of inspecting our commercial nuclear reactors are represented by the dullard Homer Simpson, blithely causing a nuclear accident by ramming his electric cart into vital safety equipment while eating a jelly donut.

Real life is different, of course. Scientific diligence and wisdom prevail.

Take the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station near Toledo.

Boric acid is used in the reactor cooling water at the Davis-Besse station, to help diffuse reactor heat. Boric acid is a relatively benign substance; no one would ever have expected it could, you know ... melt steel.

Yes, as early as 1996, operators at the plant knew there were boric acid deposits caking the reactor head. But acid crystals were not removed from the very top of the head in a 1996 inspection "because of the closeness of the insulation and service structure."

By 1998, boric acid crystals covered the head and had turned from white to brown, indicating rust. Boric acid crystals and ferrous oxide (rust) dust were so thick in the reactor's containment building by May of 1999 that the company installed filters on its radioactive monitoring equipment. By November 1999, workers had gone from changing the filters monthly to every other day.

By 2000, workers had to use crowbars and hot water to clean the hardened "lava-like," rusty boric acid from the reactor top. But because of the closeness of the insulation and service structure, they still did not clean the center of the head.

"Davis-Besse staff assumed the extra boric acid was due to flange leakage" (a harmless leak high above the reactor head) "and the color due to the age of the deposits on the air coolers," concluded Jack Grobe, director of reactor safety in the NRC's Midwest region.

But in fact, in the spring of 2002, workers at Davis-Besse discovered the boric acid had eaten away nearly 35 pounds of the 17-foot, six-and-a-half-inch thick, 150-ton carbon steel reactor cap. Only a 3/8-inch thick stainless steel layer impervious to boric acid had stopped the corrosion from eating all the way through. In a mere six years.

Now, the Department of Energy says Nevadans don't have to worry about any leakage of radioactive material from the planned nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, because Alloy 22 canisters will resists corrosion and keep radiation from escaping into the environment, not for six years, but for ... tens of thousands of years!

But guess what? The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, a respected monitoring group, now reports the government's repository design will cause the metal containers to corrode and leak in less than a thousand years -- a brief fraction of the dump's expected lifetime.

A letter signed by 10 scientists on the board says the Energy Department's design "will result in perforation of the waste packages, with possible release of radionuclides. ... We strongly urge you to re-examine the current repository design and operation."

The DOE's current "hot" depository design calls for placing the cannisters close enough together that the temperature inside the mountain will reach 300 degrees, supposedly boiling off water in the surrounding rock and thus preventing rust.

But the science panel responds that moist air in the tunnels are likely to interact with dust and salts to form a corrosive brine that could eat through the canisters.

The DOE isn't worried, pointing out the casks are only one "line of defense." The agency thus says it will not alter its plan to submit a Yucca Mountain construction license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by December 2004.

The "multiple line of defense" argument is interesting. If the mountain itself is adequate protection, why place the waste in casks, at all? And if the casks are adequate and the mountain unnecessary (in fact, the DOE says it will depend on the mountain's geology for less than 1 percent of the waste's safety), why not store the casks on the mall in Washington, or in downtown Dayton, Ohio?

But finally, if neither is adequate, why should we assume that both, together, will prove adequate?

What we see in the DOE's cheerful shrugging off of this panel's warnings is one more indication that "science" has little to do with the political decision to shove this dump down Nevadans' throats, solving a financial and liability dilemma against which the nuclear operators should and would have indemnified themselves before they ever built their reactors, had the federal government merely refrained from intervening in the first place.

Can the dump be stopped? If not, Nevadans should insist on one thing: Don't ever seal it up. Because these guys don't have a clue what's going to happen in there.