Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Yucca guidelines at least several months away

EPA might propose new radiation protections early next year, panel told

WASHINGTON -- The Environmental Protection Agency might propose new radiation standards for Yucca Mountain early next year, prolonging uncertainties that could build sentiment in Congress to revisit alternatives to burying nuclear waste in Nevada, a science panel was told Monday.

EPA executive Jeffrey Holmstead said it will be at least several months before the agency develops new radiation standards for the repository after a federal appeals court threw out a set of protections in a July 9 ruling.

Holmstead, the agency's assistant administrator for air and radiation, said EPA will be challenged by the task, which involves projections of radiation dangers to Nevadans from decaying nuclear waste for periods that could reach hundreds of thousands of years.

"We're dealing with time periods different from anything else we've done at EPA," Holmstead said. "Going beyond that is a challenge."

Holmstead commented at a meeting organized by the Board of Radioactive Waste Management, part of the National Academy of Sciences. The board assembled experts to review the July ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

A three-judge panel invalidated an EPA regulation requiring DOE to prove radiation protections at the repository site, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, for a 10,000 year-period. The judges ruled EPA failed to take into account the recommendations of a 1995 Academy of Sciences study that concluded repository radiation doses may not peak for thousands of years longer.

The ruling has thrown the Yucca program into jeopardy. The Department of Energy now is reconsidering whether it can meet a December deadline to submit a repository license application, a spokesman confirmed.

"We're reviewing where things stand," DOE spokesman Joe Davis said. "We're looking at the total picture of the entire program with respect to the court rulings, congressional action and interaction with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission."

Deputy Secretary Kyle McSlarrow, DOE's No. 2 leader, last week told an energy newsletter, The Exchange Monitor, that the federal court ruling and an NRC board ruling against DOE's certification of an online document database for Yucca Mountain is causing the evaluation.

"I have to be realistic. It's going to affect the application process," McSlarrow told the trade publication. "I am not prepared to write off any goals and objectives right now. But I'm now an optimist with a dose of realism. We have a whole lot of unanswered questions."

Energy Department officials have said repeatedly they intend to have a license application submitted by the end of this year.

But when asked Monday in Las Vegas if that goal is still intact, DOE's civilian radioactive waste management director, Margaret Chu, said, "I can't say" if it is likely or unlikely if the agency will submit an application before 2005.

"We are preparing one and reviewing it, and it's important that we submit a high quality one," Chu said during a break in a meeting of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board.

Because the massive collection of documents in the licensing support network must be certified six months before the NRC can docket a license application, it appears inevitable that DOE can't meet its self-imposed deadline in December.

In Washington, Sam Fowler, a senior U.S. Senate adviser on nuclear waste, told members of the science academy Monday there is "some sympathy in some corners in Congress" for lawmakers to pass a bill that would help the Yucca project by overruling the court and keeping the 10,000-year radiation standard intact.

But, Fowler said, that might not work politically.

"There may be an appearance to the lay public that Congress was now trying to dumb the standards down to where Yucca Mountain can pass the test," said Fowler, who was once an aide to then-Sen. J. Bennett Johnston, D-La., who promoted the 1987 legislation singling out the Yucca site for study.