NRC panel dismisses several state challenges
A federal licensing panel shot down most of Nevada's legal challenges to the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in a ruling Tuesday that means the hearing probably will continue to weigh safety issues with the project.
Bruce Breslow, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects and the state's lead Yucca Mountain opponent, noted one victory for the state.
"The judges made special note of Nevada's scientific claim that erosion could cause the surface of Yucca Mountain to completely erode during the first 10,000 years of the project, leaving waste unprotected by the mountain's geology in the future," he said in a statement late Tuesday.
The Environmental Protection Agency "requires that nuclear waste must be kept away from the public and environmental exposure for a million years," he said.
The 37-page ruling by a three-judge panel of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board considered 10 legal issues raised by attorneys for the state.
Nevada objects to the government's plan for entombing 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste in the mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, saying to do so would endanger the public and the environment.
The panel, known as the Construction Authorization Board, sided with the Department of Energy and the NRC staff but allowed Nevada to challenge the facts of the safety issues during an extended licensing hearing.
The hearing process remains alive though the DOE, under direction from the Obama administration, has asked the board to withdraw its license application. The board has denied that request, and the NRC might be deadlocked on deciding whether to overturn the board's decision.
Nevada's legal team tried to shorten the four-year licensing hearing, arguing the project is illegal because the DOE's application is incomplete and did not include models that show what would happen to potentially deadly nuclear materials if safety barriers failed.
Safety of the materials would depend on covering waste containers with 11,500 titanium drip shields to prevent corrosion. But the DOE does not plan to install them until about a century after highly radioactive spent fuel assemblies from commercial power reactors and used fuel from defense operations are put in a maze of tunnels in the mountain.
In one challenge, Nevada's legal team asserted that the DOE is required to evaluate a failure to install the drip shields, but the board ruled there is no requirement to analyze such a complete failure.
In another challenge, Nevada attorneys contended that the DOE is required to include a final, detailed design for the repository and surface facilities in its license application.
The board agreed with DOE and the NRC staff that a final design is not required, only that it be "as complete as possible in light of information that is reasonably available."
But the board noted that the DOE must update its application with additional design information obtained during construction.
"We see no indication that the commission intended a blanket requirement for complete 'final design' information at the initial construction authorization stage," according to the ruling from the board, led by Thomas S. Moore.
Contact reporter Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308.
