Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Yucca e-mails used to make case

Web site will present messages in chronology format, highlighting doubts

WASHINGTON -- On Oct. 2, 1997, top Yucca Mountain managers in Las Vegas gathered to make a presentation to Lake Barrett, then acting director the nuclear repository project.

Performance assessments were indicating that the only way to show low radiation doses from the deep-mountain nuclear waste site was to factor in drip shields, corrosion-resistant canisters and other man-made safety protections, according to one account of the meeting.

"Consequently, we should give attention to engineered barriers," project employee Larry Rickertsen said in notes he e-mailed the next day.

But others disagreed.

A few days earlier, earth scientist Bob Levich wrote in an e-mail: "We CANNOT and CAN NEVER rely completely (or even mostly) on engineering barriers for protection of public health and safety in a geologic repository system. If we try to do so, this program is dead! Just build concrete pads on Jackass Flats and shove the waste inside concrete bunkers."

The contrasting e-mail messages provide snapshots of the debate that took place during the mid- to late 1990s as the Energy Department wrestled with safety designs to bury 77,000 tons of highly radioactive spent fuel at the site, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

But repository opponents said the e-mails also shed new light on long-held criticism. They have said that DOE struggled to reshape the project, "changing the rules" to incorporate man-made features after discovering that mountain rock alone would not contain decaying waste for tens of thousands of years.

"The e-mails give an inside picture of the project that is quite different from the one that DOE presented in public," said Victor Gilinsky, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who now works for the state in opposing the repository.

"While the project senior staff maintained a confident public face about the suitability of Yucca Mountain, they were in fact shaken by these discoveries," he said.

Nevada officials said they hope the criticism will be given new life when they unveil a Web site today that highlights more than 100 internal DOE e-mails in a chronology format. The e-mails, selected by the state, focus on uncertainties that scientists and managers expressed in writing about Yucca Mountain at key points.

The state Web site incorporates e-mails that are at the center of ongoing federal investigations into whether some quality assurance documents for hydrology research were falsified.

"Its first purpose is to continue to cast doubt on the ability of the site to meet any health and safety standards in the future, and to get a sense of the debate that took place on the project," said Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.

"It primarily is more for public purposes to continue the view that the project is in turmoil and screwed up and not going forward," Loux said.

Energy Department spokesman Allen Benson said it was misleading to try to draw conclusions about the complex Yucca program from a sampling of e-mails.

"Number one, we don't represent or outline our safety case in e-mails," Benson said. "Our safety case is going to be outlined in a license application and in all of the supporting documents that have been peer-reviewed."

Benson said the messages "mean we have an open debate in this program about the best way to operate. If it means changing designs, we will do that in a scientific process, not in e-mails."

Nevada leaders argued unsuccessfully in a federal lawsuit that DOE's "abandoning" of Yucca geology should disqualify the site. A U.S. Court of Appeals panel ruled in July the issue was moot because Congress passed 2002 legislation ratifying the site and President Bush signed it into law.

Attorneys for the state say they are laying groundwork to focus new attention on the argument during repository license hearings that would be held before the NRC.

Loux said the state might call e-mail authors as witnesses during the hearings, challenging them to explain their views, as a strategy to cast doubt on DOE efforts.