Waste site work continues

Is it science?

Or is it defiance?

It's both, say federal and state officials embroiled in a court battle over using Nevada's water for drilling operations at the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site.

On Thursday, an 8,000-gallon tanker truck churned through Midway Valley delivering water to several drill rigs, six days after the state engineer ordered the Department of Energy to stop using the water for the drilling project.

The use of the water for collecting rock samples deep in the Earth's crust defies a court-approved agreement.

Federal scientists are ignoring the order because Justice Department attorneys say it is essential to continue drilling until November to show the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the valley at the foot of Yucca Mountain is safe from floods and earthquakes.

That's where thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel is supposed to be stored temporarily, in football-field-sized buildings, before the highly radioactive waste is disposed of a short distance away in a maze of tunnels that, with the NRC's approval, will be dug inside the mountain.

In some cases, the rigs are taking core samples to confirm previous work on the site's geology, federal attorneys said in court papers last week.

State officials say all the scientific work should have ended years ago and it's not in Nevada's interest to let DOE complete the drilling project by November as federal attorneys want.

"I think it's clearly defiance and goes to show the uncleaned hands that DOE intends to take to the court," Nevada Senior Deputy Attorney General Marta Adams said Friday. "These people have a lot of nerve. They're under guise, defying the state's order and demonstrating to the court their lack of good faith."

Keith Saxe, the Justice Department's assistant natural resources chief, wouldn't comment on DOE's continued use of the water after State Engineer Tracy Taylor reinstated his cease-and-desist order on July 20.

"We speak in the courtroom with our papers," Saxe said, referring to the Justice Department's emergency motion Wednesday that asked U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt to block the state's order.

The state intends to answer the motion today or Tuesday, setting the stage for a hearing as early as this week.

Meanwhile, geologists at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, continue to collect, measure and log hundreds of soil-and-rock core samples that are being extracted from a patchwork of drill sites that mark where surface facilities are planned.

At the same time, the state engineer has been trying to get inspectors on the site to ensure compliance with Taylor's order.

The Justice Department's trial attorney, Stephen Bartell, stated in a letter Wednesday that DOE won't let them on site unless the state engineer agrees not to use the inspection for bolstering the cease-and-desist order "or related enforcement actions and threats."

Bob Conrad, a spokesman for the state engineer, said the conditions are "unacceptable to us."

"As far as we're concerned, DOE is stonewalling," he said.

After the Justice Department postponed a previously scheduled visit to the drilling project, Yucca Mountain Project officials allowed the Review-Journal to observe it in progress Thursday.

Within a couple of hours, at least two of a half dozen rock-core drills twirled from platforms on flatbed trucks. One burrowed 580 feet into the floor of Midway Valley.

The other, operated by a different subcontractor for Bechtel SAIC Co., bored a small-diameter hole to nearly 260 feet, where drillers had worked through the night to reach a bedded tuff, an ancient volcanic-rock formation.

Water used for lubricating and cooling the drill bit splashed into a metal cylinder, where it was funneled into a mud pit. A hose then recycled the brown water from the pit back to the rig.

The water is drawn from two wells near the mountain.

"He's tripping in right now and doing a core run," explained field geologist Johnny Liles as the driller punched a lever that spun the bit deeper into the hole, dubbed RF-94.

"This is what they got last night," he said showing a box holding plastic bags of sandy, alluvium samples.

A few minutes later, the bit hit solid rock and the drill crew pulled a six-foot-long sleeve from the hole. Inside was a 3-inch-diameter cylinder of bedded tuff.

A geologist and a technician washed the tube-shaped rock sample, then measured it and drew parallel red and blue lines. Stacked end-to-end, the samples provide a cross-section of soil and rock layers.

Without the data, DOE officials wouldn't be able to complete a license application for regulators to review.

Delays in collecting the data would push DOE off its self-imposed schedule for submitting the application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by June 2008.

Bob Loux, executive director of Nevada's Nuclear Projects Agency and a critic of the Yucca Mountain Project, said DOE's defiance of the order to stop drilling shows how critical the data is to the federal effort to saddle Nevada with the nation's deadliest nuclear waste.

"It's a degree of arrogance by the federal government that they don't have to abide by anybody's rules or regulations," Loux said. "They're doing whatever they want, whenever they want.

"They have set up an artificial date for the license application, and there's no direction for it. They could easily skip the date. They are basically putting the state in a dilemma by stealing the water."