Fourth in an occasional series
RADIOACTIVE TOMB
Scientists say nation's nuclear waste will be safe inside Yucca Mountain, but Nevadans fear a disaster
By Steve Schmidt
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
December 9, 2001
YUCCA MOUNTAIN, Nev. -- An underground train packed with scientists snakes into the belly of this mountain.
There's no sunlight. There's no water. There's little sound.
Just the ricketa-ricketa-ricketa of the mining train, winding through what could become one of the great engineering feats -- or follies -- of our time.
After decades of searching, government scientists believe they've finally found a prime spot to entomb deadly nuclear waste.
Here, deep in the Nevada outback.
Under a proposal heading to President Bush's desk, the nation's nuclear leftovers would be buried in Yucca Mountain and left there perhaps 100,000 years.
Many Nevadans hate the idea. They fear an environmental disaster. They feel picked on by a government that subjected their land to A-bomb tests a half century ago.
And they believe hauling the high-level waste to Nevada would tempt terrorists.
But project backers say spent fuel continues to pile up at government facilities and commercial reactors nationwide, including the San Onofre nuclear power plant.
Abe Van Luik, a senior adviser with the U.S. Department of Energy, says keeping the highly radioactive waste near major cities poses greater danger.
"Sept. 11 underscores for me the idiocy of having this stuff next to our big urban areas."
• • •
Passing through exploratory tunnels by train, scientists and engineers are rooting around Yucca's rocky innards.
The grassy, 5,000-foot-high ridge has been cut, carved, soaked, heated, mapped, excavated, ventilated, measured, monitored, blasted and measured again.
"We know more about Yucca Mountain than any other similar property in the world," says Patrick Rowe, a senior engineer who has spent 20 years on the project.
U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham is expected this winter to recommend to Bush and Congress that Yucca become the nation's first deep geologic nuclear repository.
Projected cost: $35 billion.
The desert mountain is on federal land, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Some 70,000 tons of lethal waste would be hauled in by truck and train, encased in titanium and rock and sealed up for generations, like a pharaoh's tomb.
U.S. Energy Department researchers believe the site is safe, saying they have the spreadsheets and computer models to prove it.
On the contrary, critics say.
The chief concerns:
Volcanoes and earthquakes: Yucca is a layer cake of ash and rubble, created by a string of nearby volcanic eruptions between 385,000 and 1 million years ago.
U.S. government scientists and others peg the chances of another eruption within the next 100,000 years as extremely remote.
Even if a blast occurs nearby, it would have only a 1-in-70-million chance of affecting Yucca's interior, they estimate.
Still, no one seems to be taking the issue lightly. To protect against an eruption or an earthquake, the waste would be entombed away from any known faults.
The last significant earthquake in the region occurred nearly a decade ago, 12 miles away.
That's another reason to be careful, says the federal government. That's another reason to oppose the dump, say others.
Water: Critics say it's absurd to think the waste could be kept watertight for 100,000 years. Or even 1,000.
And once the highly radioactive material leaked into the groundwater water, it could poison the soil and the small farming community of Amargosa Valley downstream.
"You just can't make the site safe," says Steve Frishman, a nuclear waste expert with the state of Nevada.
An international panel of scientists recently said it fears that water could seep through natural and man-made barriers at Yucca.
But federal scientists say the waste would be buried hundreds of feet above the water table. The mountain gets 6 inches of rain a year, about the same as Palm Springs.
Even if another global Ice Age struck -- as some predict -- annual rainfall at Yucca would climb to about 12 inches. Not enough to trigger disaster, they say.
The waste would be encased in 60 miles of parallel tunnels reinforced with steel.
Transportation: This is perhaps the project's weakest link, some argue.
The highly radioactive waste would be trucked from California and 34 other states in 55-ton, stainless steel casks. Some would be shipped to Yucca by train. Moving it all to the mountain would take about 25 years.
Critics argue that the moving casks would invite terrorism. Cracked open, the containers would not explode, but the waste could release radiation into the air and water.
"Every mayor, every citizen along our highways has to be very concerned," says Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman. "Transporting this crap out here poses a terrible potential danger."
If Yucca goes forward, Las Vegas-area officials vow to ban the casks from southern Nevada, forcing the waste to pass through more rural areas to reach the site.
Other nervous communities may do the same.
Engineers with the U.S. Department of Energy believe the casks are safe, saying they are built to withstand fire, punctures, drops and other severe accidents.
The casks would be under armed guard when passing through major cities. Since Sept. 11, there's been talk of keeping guards on the entire ride.
Yucca senior adviser Van Luik says the trip will be worth the effort.
Spent fuel assemblies continue to collect at commercial reactors, research facilities and government installations, including the San Onofre nuclear power plant north of Oceanside.
General Atomics stores a small amount of high-level waste at one of its facilities in San Diego. To guard against radiation leakage, the waste is stored in metal casks or in steel-lined pools.
San Onofre's pools are in concrete buildings.
Since the terrorist attacks, security has been tightened at San Onofre and other nuclear facilities. There are more guards, more patrols, more ID checks.
Van Luik and other experts, however, remain uneasy about safety at reactors and other U.S. installations, especially those near major cities.
Besides, the pools at San Onofre and other sites were meant for temporary storage.
Science professors from Grossmont College in El Cajon recently toured
Yucca. Many were impressed.
"In terms of the science of the project, there weren't any glitches we could see," says geographer Mike Matherly.
But investigators with the U.S. General Accounting Office want Bush to postpone a decision on the dump, saying there are too many unresolved technical issues.
The battle over Yucca, however, is about more than science.
It's about old lies and grudges.
• • •
Rural Westerners have rarely fancied the feds. In Nevada, suspicion of Washington, D.C., runs Hoover Dam deep.
It angers many Nevadans that federal agencies control 86 percent of their land.
It upsets ranchers that federal courts often dictate how they do their work.
It haunts old-timers and others that the government tested A-bombs in
Nevada a half century ago and downplayed the effects of the fallout.
"There's a history of lies," says Mayor Goodman.
So in the 1980s, when Congress pinpointed Yucca as a possible nuclear dump, few were surprised. Even today, the 1987 legislation is widely known among fans and critics of the project as the "Screw Nevada Bill."
The government wants the dump to last 100,000 years, long enough for the waste to lose its radioactive punch.
It would be within the remote confines of the Nevada Test Site, a longtime base for nuclear-related projects. Yucca's tunnels were carved out a few years ago.
Most of the $35 billion project cost would be paid from taxes levied on the nuclear power industry. Weapons-related plutonium waste is buried near Carlsbad, N.M.
Nevada's governor opposes Yucca. Nevada's two U.S. senators oppose it, promising to kill it in Congress. Other critics threaten lawsuits.
Robert List, a former Nevada governor living in Las Vegas, believes many are overreacting.
Figuring Yucca will get the go-ahead, List wants to broker a deal between the state and the federal government to get the safest project possible.
"We need to be prepared," he says.
Some Nevadans call List a traitor, noting that he's now a lobbyist with the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group.
Says Mayor Goodman: "Shame, shame, shame on him."
But the bad-mouthing ignores the big questions tied to nuclear waste: Now that we've created the deadly byproduct, where do we hide it? Is Yucca our best hope?
One hundred thousand years in the belly of a mountain sounds just short of forever. Who will be around to say if we pulled it off?
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