Mystery memos fuel battle between Nevada, DOE over nuclear waste

A U.S. Air Force humvee is driven past as anti-nuclear activists walk after a sunrise ceremony just outside the Nevada test site near Mercury, Nevada, 60 miles north of Las Vegas. (Reuters)

By Barnini Chakraborty
FoxNews.com

WASHINGTON – U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz plans to meet with Nevada’s governor on Tuesday to discuss an escalating dispute between the state and the federal government over where to dump hundreds of canisters of radioactive waste, FoxNews.com has learned.

Tensions have risen in recent weeks over who should be forced to keep the nuclear material. The federal government says Nevada signed off on a series of memos agreeing to take it, but Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval says those talks never happened -- and says his state shouldn’t have to shoulder the burden of burying toxic waste in its backyard.

“The state of Nevada is not aware of any signed memos between the state and DOE regarding the approval of the material in question,” Mac Bybee, the governor’s communication director, told FoxNews.com.

Both Sandoval's office and the Department of Energy confirmed that Moniz and the governor will meet on Tuesday.

Bybee says his office hasn’t located any memo from any state-level agency that has had contact with the Energy Department regarding the security, transportation or disposal of nuclear material.
That’s a problem because Moniz testified under oath during a July 30 Senate hearing to their existence.

“There were long discussions held, many memos signed on specifically this particular low-level waste movement,” Moniz told senators. “The department agreed to special activities for the disposal. The department agreed to do something unprecedented – to move this in secured transports.”

DOE spokeswoman Keri Fulton told FoxNews.com that Moniz “looks forward to having a productive conversation with Governor Sandoval tomorrow to resolve this important issue."

Sandoval, a former federal judge and state attorney general, has also accused the DOE of trying to set a dangerous precedent by exploiting a regulatory loophole to classify the waste as a low-level hazard so that it can be buried at a nuclear test location about an hour northwest of Las Vegas.

The canisters in question carry about 2.6 kilograms of uranium-233 and uranium-235 – two products that require safety escorts and can only be handled with remote-controlled cranes. The material is left over from a government research project in the 1980s called Consolidated Edison Uranium Solidification Project.

Tennessee currently has possession of all 403 welded steel containers of the bomb-making material.

The material was set to be transported from Oak Ridge National Laboratory -- the government’s only facility for handling, processing and storing weapons-grade uranium -- to Nevada earlier this year but that never happened. And if Nevada has its way, it never will.

Uranium-233 was first commissioned by the federal government when it was trying to find fuel for reactors and bombs. The government and the private sector created a man-made substitute and then went on to make 3,400 pounds of it. The government says it doesn’t need it anymore and now is left with the prickly task of finding a way to get rid of it.

Uranium-235 is an isotope made up of 0.72 percent of uranium and was attractive to the government because it could undergo induced fission – something that’s needed for making nuclear power.

Earlier this year, FoxNews.com spoke with Robert Alvarez of the Institute for Policy Studies about the serious safety and proliferation concerns around the material.

“I went over to the headquarters, talking to project managers. They all sort of gave me the ‘I don’t know’ response,” Alvarez said. “Nobody wants to deal with it.”

Sen. Harry Reid, and Rep. Dina Titus, both Democrats from Nevada, have also spoken out against the plan.

This isn’t the first fight Nevada has had over nukes.

The state and its federal elected officials have fought for more than three decades to block federal plans to ship and dump radioactive waste that’s been piling up at nuclear power plants around the country to Yucca Mountain.

Tainted water runs beneath Nevada desert

The state faces a water crisis and population boom, but radioactive waste from the Nevada Test Site has polluted aquifers.

A "typical American house" on the Nevada Test Site, one of two that survived the May 5, 1955, detonation of a 29-kiloton device named "Apple II" on Yucca Flat. (Brian Vander Brug / Los Angeles Times)

By Ralph Vartabedian
Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Yucca Flat, Nev. - A sea of ancient water tainted by the Cold War is creeping deep under the volcanic peaks, dry lake beds and pinyon pine forests covering a vast tract of Nevada.

Over 41 years, the federal government detonated 921 nuclear warheads underground at the Nevada Test Site, 75 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Each explosion deposited a toxic load of radioactivity into the ground and, in some cases, directly into aquifers.

When testing ended in 1992, the Energy Department estimated that more than 300 million curies of radiation had been left behind, making the site one of the most radioactively contaminated places in the nation.

During the era of weapons testing, Nevada embraced its role almost like a patriotic duty. There seemed to be no better use for an empty desert. But today, as Nevada faces a water crisis and a population boom, state officials are taking a new measure of the damage.

They have successfully pressured federal officials for a fresh environmental assessment of the 1,375-square-mile test site, a step toward a potential demand for monetary compensation, replacement of the lost water or a massive cleanup.

"It is one of the largest resource losses in the country," said Thomas S. Buqo, a Nevada hydrogeologist. "Nobody thought to say, 'You are destroying a natural resource.' "

In a study for Nye County, where the nuclear test site lies, Buqo estimated that the underground tests polluted 1.6 trillion gallons of water. That is as much water as Nevada is allowed to withdraw from the Colorado River in 16 years -- enough to fill a lake 300 miles long, a mile wide and 25 feet deep.

At today's prices, that water would be worth as much as $48 billion if it had not been fouled, Buqo said.

Although the contaminated water is migrating southwest from the high ground of the test site, the Energy Department has no cleanup plans, saying it would be impossible to remove the radioactivity. Instead, its emphasis is on monitoring.

Federal scientists say the tainted water is moving so slowly -- 3 inches to 18 feet a year -- that it will not reach the nearest community, Beatty, about 22 miles away, for at least 6,000 years.

Still, Nevada officials reject the idea that a massive part of their state will be a permanent environmental sacrifice zone.

Access to more water could stoke an economic boom in the area, local officials say. More than a dozen companies want to build solar electric generation plants, but the county cannot allow the projects to go forward without more water, said Gary Hollis, a Nye County commissioner.

The problem extends beyond the contamination zone. If too much clean water is pumped out of the ground from adjacent areas, it could accelerate the movement of tainted water. When Nye County applied for permits in recent years to pump clean water near the western boundary of the test site, the state engineer denied the application based on protests by the Energy Department.

(The department did not cite environmental concerns, perhaps to avoid acknowledging the extent of the Cold War contamination. Instead, federal officials said the pumping could compromise security at the test site, which is still in use.)

"Those waters have been degraded," said Republican state Assemblyman Edwin Goedhart of Nye County, who runs a dairy with 18,000 head of livestock. "That water belongs to the people of Nevada. Even before any contamination comes off the test site, I look at this as a matter of social economic justice."

Even before the Cold War turned the landscape radioactive, the test site was a forbidding place, as empty a spot as any in the country.

Creosote and sagebrush covered much of the gravelly terrain, punctuated by soaring mountains and crusty lake beds. In the winter months, snow covered the 7,000-foot Pahute Mesa, and a few herds of wild horses roamed the high country.

In 1950, President Truman secretly selected the site for nuclear testing and withdrew the federally owned land from public use.

In early 1951, atomic blasts started lighting up the sky over Las Vegas, then a city of fewer than 50,000. Early atmospheric tests spawned heavy fallout, and some areas are still so radioactive that anybody entering must wear hazardous-material suits. Later tests were done underground, leaving hundreds of craters that resemble otherworldly scars.

Each of the underground detonations -- some as deep as 5,000 feet -- vaporized a huge chamber, leaving a cavity filled with radioactive rubble.

About a third of the tests were conducted directly in aquifers, and others were hundreds or thousands of feet above the water table. Federal scientists say contamination above the aquifers should remain suspended in the perpetually dry soil, a contention that critics say is unproven.

In the hottest zones, radioactivity in the water reaches millions of picocuries per liter. The federal standard for drinking water is 20 picocuries per liter.

Federal officials say they don't know how much water was contaminated. Whatever the amount, they say, extracting it would be prohibitively expensive, and even if the radioactive material could be separated, it would have to be put back in the ground elsewhere.

Although radiation levels in the water have declined, the longer-lived isotopes will continue to pose risks for tens of thousands of years. The Energy Department has 48 monitoring wells at the site and began drilling nine deep wells in the summer.

Bill Wilborn, the Energy Department's water expert at the site, said the water is moving about two-thirds of a mile every 1,000 years from low-lying Yucca Flat, where 660 nuclear tests were conducted.

At the higher Pahute Mesa, where 81 of the biggest and deepest tests occurred, the water movement is more complicated. It generally flows downhill toward Beatty and the agricultural district of Amargosa Valley. On average, it is moving 1 3/4 miles every 1,000 years, but the annual pace ranges from about 1 foot to 18 feet, Wilborn said.

"The good thing is that it is not highly mobile," he said. "There are not a lot of nearby [people], and we are not pumping to accelerate the flow."

Federal scientists concede that much is unknown about the test site, whose vast size and complex geology make it a difficult place to study in detail.

Based on their calculations, government geologists acknowledge that the forward plume of radioactive water under Pahute Mesa should have already crossed the site boundary, although it has yet to be detected by monitoring wells. Some experts worry that the contamination could reach deeper aquifers that move much more quickly.

Because the contaminated water poses no immediate health threat, the Energy Department has ranked Nevada at the bottom of its priority list for cleaning up major sites in the nuclear weapons complex, and it operates far fewer wells than at most other contaminated sites.

The test site receives about $65 million a year from the department's $5.5-billion annual nuclear cleanup budget. By contrast, about $1.8 billion a year is spent on the Hanford plutonium production site in Washington state, even though soil and water contamination there is one-thousandth as severe as in Nevada.

Although Nevada has not pressed for compensation or replacement water so far, public officials say they are considering such action.

They have been emboldened by their recent success in blocking a federal plan to build a nuclear waste dump adjacent to the test site at Yucca Mountain.

"All the attention has been on Yucca Mountain. Now if the battle has been won on Yucca Mountain, then you may see some attention that will focus on cleaning up the test site," said Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.), who wrote the authoritative history of the Nevada Test Site.

The state attorney general's office recently put a temporary halt on dumping low-level radioactive waste from other states at the Nevada Test Site. Under pressure from the office, the federal government agreed this year to conduct a new environmental analysis of the site.

"Once we have the new environmental impact statement, then we will be able to talk about the federal government compensating the state," said Marta Adams, senior deputy attorney general.

Said Allen Biaggi, director of the Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources: "We have every expectation of the federal government cleaning up the Nevada Test Site. . . . It would cost a lot, but our groundwater is worth it."

Senate passes bill to close Nevada's Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site

The $34.3-billion energy measure would also allow water transfers to help California farmers suffering from severe drought conditions. Similar legislation has been approved by the House.



Associated Press
Los Angeles Times



Outside Yucca Mountain.


Washington -- The Senate on Wednesday passed a $34.3-billion energy spending bill that backs up President Obama's promise to close the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste facility in Nevada.

The bill, passed by a 85-9 vote, also covers water transfers to help farmers in California and hundreds of water projects by the Army Corps of Engineers.

The House passed a similar bill two weeks ago. Once the measures are reconciled, the bill will go to the president for his signature.

The Yucca Mountain project, 90 miles from Las Vegas, was designed to hold 77,000 tons of waste but has been strongly opposed by the Nevada delegation.

The move fulfills Obama's campaign promise to close Yucca Mountain, which was 25 years and $13.5 billion in the making. It would, however, leave the country without a long-term solution for storing highly radioactive waste from nuclear power plants.

The 1987 law requiring waste to be stored at Yucca Mountain remains on the books, however, so the project could in theory be revived. The Yucca Mountain project would still receive the $196.8 million budgeted by Obama for work on the site, although the money wouldn't be used to ship waste there.

The Senate also adopted an amendment by California Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer to allow water transfers to help California farmers suffering from severe drought conditions.

"I view this as a breakthrough in the water wars in California," Boxer said. "We were able to bring environmentalists together with the water districts."

The provision would facilitate transfer of water from the eastern portion of the San Joaquin Valley to the western part of the valley that has been particularly affected by a multiyear drought. Comparable language is in the House measure.

Future Dim for Nuclear Waste Repository

A little-used portal into Yucca Mountain, the proposed site for a national nuclear power waste facility that now seems unlikely to happen. The Associated Press

By MATTHEW L. WALD
New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s proposed budget cuts off most money for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project, a decision that fulfills a campaign promise and wins the president political points in Nevada — but raises new questions about what to do with radioactive waste from the nation’s nuclear power plants.

The decision could cost the federal government additional billions in payments to the utility industry, and if it holds up, it would mean that most of the $10.4 billion spent since 1983 to find a place to put nuclear waste was wasted.

A final decision to abandon the repository would leave the nation with no solution to a problem it has struggled with for half a century.

Lawyers are predicting tens of billions of dollars in damage suits from utilities that must pay to store their wastes instead of having the government bury them, with the figure rising by about a half-billion dollars for each year of additional delay.

The courts have already awarded the companies about $1 billion, because the government signed contracts obligating it to begin taking the waste in 1998, but seems unlikely to do so for years. The nuclear industry says it may demand the return of the $22 billion that it has paid to the Energy Department to establish a repository, but that the government has not yet spent.

The spent fuel that emerges from nuclear power plants has been accumulating for decades in steel-lined pools or giant steel-and-concrete casks near the reactors.

Yucca Mountain, a ridge of volcanic rock about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, has been the leading candidate site for a repository since the 1980s. But it was not selected by any scientific process of elimination; it was selected from a list in 1987 by Congress, which declared it dry and remote enough.

Scientific concerns have since emerged, including the realization that water flows through Yucca Mountain a lot faster than initially believed. That raises the prospect that the nuclear waste would leach over time, polluting the water table. The scientific merit of the site has not been established by independent judges.

Nevada has fought the project bitterly in court and in Congress. The ascension of Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, as Senate majority leader, and President Obama’s campaign promise to stop the Yucca Mountain depository and look for alternatives may finally settle the question.

In fact, the political wind is blowing so strongly against using Yucca Mountain that the nuclear industry’s trade association is not opposing Mr. Obama head-on. Instead, in response to his budget proposal, it called for creation of an independent panel to study how the government should meet its “legal and moral obligation” to take the waste. Mr. Obama himself is calling for more study.

Mr. Reid does not appear to have the votes to kill the Yucca Mountain depository entirely, because many members of Congress want to stick with the consensus they achieved two decades ago to bury the waste there. If Congress changes the law that designates Yucca Mountain as the prime candidate, said Edward F. Sproat III, who was the Energy Department official in charge of the depository project for the last two and a half years of the Bush administration, “everybody knows their state is going to be back in play.”

The site’s suitability is supposed to be established in hearings by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which must decide whether to license the repository. Now, the Obama administration is proposing to provide only enough money that project officials can answer questions from the hearings. Eliot Brenner, a commission spokesman, said the hearings would proceed.

“What happens once we say yes or no is out of our hands,” Mr. Brenner said.

Opponents of nuclear power contend that the nation’s failure to find a permanent repository for the waste is a reason to shut down nuclear reactors and forget about building more.

Abandonment of the Yucca Mountain depository would be a blow for the nuclear industry, which is hoping to begin work on new reactors for the first time in 30 years.

If the commission does not issue its decision until the next administration, that could keep Yucca Mountain viable.

Inflation Hits Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Dump

Environment News Service



A test tunnel has been built inside Yucca Mountain. (Berkeley Lab) [This looks like the hole into which the taxpayers' money is being thrown. - Guzzler Ed.]


WASHINGTON, DC (ENS) - It will cost 38 percent more to build, operate and decommission the nation's first nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada than the federal government estimated seven years ago, the U.S. Department of Energy said today in an updated life cycle cost estimate.

The highly radioactive waste is left over from nuclear power generation and national defense programs.

An increase in the amount of waste to be shipped and stored at the repository and more than $16 billion for inflation have added to the cost, says the DOE official in charge of Yucca Mountain.

"This increased cost estimate is reasonable given inflation and the expected increase in the amount of spent nuclear fuel from existing reactors with license renewals," said Ward Sproat, director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, which has jurisdiction over the repository.

The 2007 total system life cycle cost estimate includes the cost to research, construct and operate Yucca Mountain during a period of 150 years, from the beginning of the program in 1983 through closure and decommissioning in 2133.

The new cost estimate of $79.3 billion, when updated to 2007 dollars, comes to $96.2 billion, a 38 percent increase from the last published estimate in 2001 of $57.5 billion.

The total cost of building and operating the repository is divided between utility ratepayers and taxpayers, with ratepayers estimated to pay a little more than 80 percent, or $77.3 billion.

The DOE is not proposing a change in the fee paid by nuclear utilities for the disposal of commercial spent nuclear fuel at this time.

Approximately $13.5 billion has been spent on the Yucca Mountain repository from 1983 to the present.

"We have marked significant project milestones this year and look forward to that progress continuing and nuclear waste currently sitting at 121 temporary locations around the country being safely stored at Yucca Mountain," said Sproat.

In 2002, Yucca Mountain was approved by the Congress and President George W. Bush as the site for the nation's first permanent spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste geologic repository.

Yucca Mountain is located 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada on the Nevada Nuclear Test Site in Nye County. The waste is now held at sites in 39 states and the government plans to ship it in mostly by rail, with some truck shipments. DOE plans to build a railroad through Nevada to Yucca Mountain to transport the waste.

The new cost estimate reflects a 30 percent increase in the amount of commercial spent nuclear fuel to be disposed of in the repository, from a 2000 estimate of 83,800 metric tons heavy metal to a 2007 estimate of 109,300 metric tons heavy metal.

This increased amount would extend the transportation period by 16 years and the emplacement period by 25 years.

The increased amount of spent nuclear fuel is a result of existing and anticipated license renewals at operating nuclear power plants throughout the United States, said Sproat.

Other factors contributing to the higher cost estimate include increases in raw material costs and a refinement of the repository design.

The DOE on June 3 filed an application for construction authorization for Yucca Mountain with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The State of Nevada, through the Attorney General's office, has filed a petition to reject the application because it is "unauthorized and substantially incomplete."

The NRC now has until September 1, 2008 to determine whether to accept the Energy Department's application for further review.

Opponents of Yucca Mountain, including the entire Nevada congressional delegation, doubt the safety of transporting the high-level nuclear waste to Nevada through counties that are home to more than 106 million people.

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada says the DOE's plan is so flawed that Yucca Mountain will never be built. He says the waste should be stored in casks where it is now located.

Reid and fellow Nevada Senator John Ensign, a Republican, both feature a petition to stop Yucca Mountain on their websites. Ensign says, "Yucca Mountain is dead, and it is time to move forward in a new direction with on-site waste storage."

On Reid's website he points out that 45 states could host nuclear waste routes, "Yet there will be absolutely no public process to review these routes - not by the NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission], not by the DOE, and not even by the U.S. Department of Transportation. This is a massive and dangerous shipping campaign, but the NRC refuses to scrutinize it when considering DOE's application to build the dump."

Reid says, "DOE does not even have complete plans to transport nuclear waste or to build the dump at Yucca Mountain, which is in an earthquake-prone environment."

"Even worse, the Environmental Protection Agency has not decided what levels of radiation can be "safely leaked" from the dump. EPA has proposed a dangerously lenient radiation standard that completely disregards the health and safety of future generations. But, with less than half the designs for the dump complete, it is preposterous to think that NRC is in a position to decide that a nuclear waste dump could meet EPA's terrible proposed radiation standard," says Reid.

Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons, a former Nevada congressman, said in June, "There are too many problems with this project to list, whether it's the potential for groundwater contamination, the fed's inability to safely transport high-level nuclear waste or the federal government's profound encroachment on state's rights. We must continue the fight against this ill-conceived project."

The City of Las Vegas has adopted a formal resolution opposing the Yucca Mountain Project, and Mayor Oscar Goodman told a DOE public hearing in 2003 that he personally would lie down in the roadway to stop trucks carrying the waste.

But Sproat says the cost of dealing with the nation's highly radioactive waste will only increase the longer Yucca Mountain is delayed.

"The Department estimates that U.S. taxpayers' potential liability to contract holders who have paid into the Nuclear Waste Fund will increase from approximately $7.0 billion to approximately $11 billion if the opening of the repository is delayed from 2017 to 2020," Sproat told U.S. House of Representatives in April.

"The calculation of potential costs to taxpayers is a complex matter that depends on a number of variables that change year to year, however, on average the liability will increase $500 million annually," he said.

The Nuclear Waste Fund was set up by Congress to fund the project and the utilities that hold nuclear power plant licenses have paid billions of dollars into the fund to cover their share of the disposal of commercial spent nuclear fuel.

Sproat says these fees may be adjusted if it is not "adequate" or "more than adequate" to meet projected obligations.

Although a change in fee is not proposed at this time, these assessments cannot be maintained unless there is consistent and sufficient annual funding for the construction and operation of the repository.

The Bush administration has twice submitted legislation to Congress to ensure such funding, but with each federal budget the amount allotted to Yucca Mountain shrinks while costs inflate.

Yucca Mountain safety plan is 'doomed,' nuclear company says

In an earthquake, casks of radioactive waste could bounce and roll in a 'chaotic melee,' Holtec International says of the Energy Department proposal

By Ralph Vartabedian
Los Angeles Times

The Energy Department's safety plan for handling containers of radioactive waste before they are buried at the proposed Yucca Mountain dump has become a "fool's errand," according to a major nuclear equipment supplier.

Under current plans, the casks of nuclear waste material awaiting burial at Yucca Mountain could be sent into a "chaotic melee of bouncing and rolling juggernauts" in an earthquake, according to Holtec International, one of the nation's largest manufacturers of nuclear waste storage systems.

The blistering critique of safety standards is in a newsletter that Holtec sent last week to its customers and suppliers, warning that the project has become a "doomed undertaking." Holtec supplies storage casks to power plants around the country.

Nevada officials say the harsh comments deepen their concerns about the site of the repository.

"It shows a lack of attention to safety," Robert Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, said Thursday.

An Energy Department spokesman said he had not seen Holtec's critique and had no immediate response. The agency applied Tuesday for a license to build the facility, calling for 70,000 metric tons of waste eventually to be sent by truck and rail to the mountain.

Once the waste arrived, it would have to cool down -- for years in some cases -- before being placed in deep tunnels. Joy Russell, Holtec's sales and marketing manager, said the Energy Department wanted the material to cool down in casks without adequate seismic anchors or other restraints.

In May, the government rejected a proposal from Holtec for a temporary underground storage system that the company says would maintain safety in the event of earthquakes and airplane crashes. It instead chose two lower bidders who proposed unanchored systems, Russell said.

The company intends to develop the below-ground storage system at its own cost.

The government expects Yucca Mountain to experience earthquakes that produce ground movement comparable to a magnitude 6.5. In such a quake, "pigs will fly before the cask[s] will stay put," the newsletter said.

U.S. seeks the go-ahead for Nevada nuclear dump

Nevada officials say they remain committed to blocking the long-planned waste site at Yucca Mountain


JOE CAVARETTA, Associated Press
The Bush administration moved a step closer to building a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada on Tuesday.

By Ralph Vartabedian, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times

The federal government applied for a license Tuesday to build a long-planned dump for the nation's radioactive waste in Nevada, but state officials vowed a renewed effort to block it, saying Washington has "lost track of reality."

After a quarter-century of scientific dispute and legal wrangling, the Energy Department officially launched what could be one of the most complex and costly engineering efforts in history. The Yucca Mountain repository, located 16 miles from the California border, would eventually store 70,000 metric tons of waste that has been accumulating since the first reactors went online.

And the amount of waste will grow at an increasing rate in future decades: In the last year, utilities have launched a nuclear power renaissance, announcing plans for 15 new commercial reactors.

The application "will further encourage the expansion of nuclear power in the United States, which is absolutely critical to our energy security, to our environment and to our national security," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said Tuesday.

The license application, which is 8,600 pages long, was filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has up to four years to act. If everything goes unfettered, Bodman said, Yucca Mountain could be open for business by 2020 at a cost of about $70 billion.

Although the impetus for a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain may be greater than ever, the legal and political hurdles for the project are vast.

A sharp cut in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's budget has left it short of resources, Chairman Dale E. Klein said. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is years behind schedule in issuing a health standard for radioactive leakage from the dump. A previous standard was ruled illegal by a federal appeals court.

The issues that remain undecided could set off a frenetic pace of legal and regulatory scrambling in the closing days of the Bush administration.

Nevada officials said the administration was rushing forward with an incomplete application out of the belief that it would be more difficult to stop once it was in motion.

"They are just trying to get this on the plate while they still have a pal in the White House," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said in an interview. "All they want to do is get it out of their hands and give it to the next administration."

The dump has become one of the biggest geographic disputes in modern U.S. history, pitting Nevada against a nuclear power industry centered in the East. California's two senators, as well as others in the West, have supported Nevada's opposition to the dump.

Edward "Ward" Sproat, director of the Energy Department's office of civilian radioactive waste, disputed the idea of a geographic divide, saying the dump would relieve 39 states of stored nuclear waste.

"I don't see it as an East versus West issue," Sproat said. "I see it as a national issue."

The design of the dump will provide for safe storage of the waste and represents 20 years of work by the nation's leading scientists, engineers and technical experts, including eight of the national laboratories and the U.S. Geological Survey, Bodman said.

The Energy Department has long argued against critics who want to leave the waste in place until technology improves. It would be irresponsible to not deal with the problem, the department has said.

The delays in building the dump have complicated the problem. Sproat said the Energy Department would have to ask Congress to expand the capacity of the Yucca Mountain site because all of its 70,000 metric tons of capacity will be reached in the next 24 months.

The nation has been trying to resolve the issue since the late 1970s. In 1982, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. In his first term, President Bush, with congressional approval, selected Yucca Mountain as the designated site for what is mostly spent fuel from commercial reactors but also military nuclear waste.

Since then, Nevada has waged an effective legal, political and technical fight against it, drawing on the state's growing fiscal and political clout.

"The whole legal and regulatory process is corrupt," said Marta Adams, senior deputy attorney general in Nevada. "It would be very hard for Nevada to get a fair shake."

Only last year, Nevada blocked a federal effort to get access to 8 million gallons of state water to drill test holes at the site.

Nevada officials have a carefully laid out a plan to stop the project, said Robert Loux, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects. He said the state would immediately file to have the Energy Department's application thrown out, and if that fails, lodge more than 600 separate disputes or "contentions."

The notion that the dump would be safe is implausible, said Victor Galinsky, a former NRC commissioner and now a Nevada consultant.

The plan hinges on the use of titanium and palladium drip shields to protect waste canisters buried underground from water flowing through Yucca Mountain's porous rock. The Energy Department plans to install about 11,000 drip shields, each weighing five tons, using robots 100 to 300 years in the future when the repository would be sealed.

"It is pie in the sky," Galinsky said. "These people have lost track of reality."

Plutonium transit uproar

Crash of truck with radioactive waste in desert stirs concerns

Andrew Silva, Staff Writer
San Bernardino Sun

Baking soda, bunk beds, fire extinguishers - and a drum with plutonium-238.

The truck that crashed Tuesday near Needles with a load of radioactive waste was a plain old commercial truck carrying plain old products.

When emergency workers checked the truck's manifest they were surprised that radioactive material was being shipped with ordinary goods.

"This, in and of itself, is very alarming," said San Bernardino County Fire Marshal Peter Brierty, who also directs his agency's hazardous materials unit.

Government and industry officials say shipping radioactive materials by commercial carriers is a perfectly safe, perfectly routine practice.

The containers, the routes and the shipping companies are all heavily regulated, and there has never been an accident that resulted in a release of radiation, they said.

The radiation emitted by the truck's amount of plutonium-238 is trillions of times more than is allowed in drinking water, Brierty said.

The four grams of plutonium involved in the crash would be roughly the volume of a pencil eraser. But that amount kicks out more than 60 curies, a measure of radioactivity.

In contrast, the drinking water standard is 15 picocuries per liter, or 15 trillionths of one curie

"That's quite a lot of plutonium," said Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute of Energy and Environmental Research. "If nothing spilled, it's not a big issue & . I think it's appalling they had flammable materials on this truck."

The truck, pulling two trailers, crashed into a guardrail on eastbound Interstate 40, rupturing the tractor's fuel tank and causing the rear trailer to overturn and split open. The driver was unhurt.

Part of the freeway was shut down for 18 hours.

The heavily shielded, 500-pound, 55-gallon drum with the plutonium was in the front of the damaged trailer, California Highway Patrol Officer Michael Callahan said. The entire cargo had to be unloaded to get at the drum.

The drum was undamaged, and there was no leakage of radiation.

"What the hell is that doing in that truck?" said Robert Halstead, an expert in the transportation of nuclear waste.

He's been working with the state of Nevada in battling the proposal to build a repository for highly radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain, northwest of Las Vegas.

If the Yucca Mountain repository is built, it will hold extremely radioactive waste from nuclear power plants. Much of the waste on its way there will have to come through San Bernardino County.

Even in the unlikely event that the containment drum in Tuesday's crash had been breached, it would be almost impossible for that bit of plutonium to pose a major threat, government officials said.

"There is no way the material can be spread because it's encapsulated," said Kevin Roark, a spokesman for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the shipment was headed.

The plutonium in this case was a "sealed source," meaning the material was blended in a solid mix that would make it difficult or nearly impossible to be broken up, he said.

The material was on its way from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash. The lab is near Hanford on the Columbia River, a key facility in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and now the scene of one of the world's largest environmental cleanups.

Plutonium-238 is only a health threat if it's inhaled, and to a lesser degree if it's ingested.

But a microscopic speck floating inside the body could lead to cancer.

That's why some groups were up in arms over NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn. The spacecraft, launched in 1997, uses plutonium-238 as a heat source.

They worried that in case of a disaster, the plutonium could be widely dispersed in the atmosphere, leading to untold future cancers.

NASA countered that the small containers, each about the size of bullet, were designed to remain intact no matter what happened.

Plutonium-238 emits alpha particles, the least energetic form of radiation, unable to pass through even a sheet of paper.

A person could stand next to a chunk of plutonium-238 with virtually no risk unless a fine particle was floating in the air and he or she inhaled it.

Plutonium-238 until a few years ago was even used to power cardiac pacemakers.

"People have an irrational fear of radiation," Los Alamos' Roark said. "As long as it's in an approved container, it's OK to use regular shipping."

The shipping containers and trucking companies must meet strict standards imposed by the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The containers must be impervious to high-velocity collisions and intense fires.

After arriving at Los Alamos, the material will eventually be shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, a half-mile-deep waste storage facility near Carlsbad, N.M.

Once on its way to WIPP, the plutonium is handled very differently.

Special trucks are monitored with Global Positioning System satellites and carry only radioactive waste destined for disposal, unlike the commercial truck that crashed.

"I think people should be worried this stuff is being handled so cavalierly," said Don Hancock of the Southwest Research and Information Center in New Mexico, which has followed WIPP for 30 years. "If it were going to WIPP, they couldn't have shipped it the way they were shipping it."

For example, no tandem trailers would be allowed, he said.

Once emergency officials at the scene of Tuesday's crash looked at the truck's manifest and realized there was plutonium aboard, the U.S. Department of Energy was notified.

A four-person team from the National Nuclear Security Administration based at the Nevada Test Site, where scores of nuclear bombs were detonated, arrived at the crash site within hours.

Fire Marshal Brierty praised the quick response and professionalism of the team.

All fire stations and CHP officers who work in the commercial division are equipped with radiation detectors.

"I'd rather be next to (a truck carrying radioactive waste) than a propane truck," said CHP Officer Matt Dietz, who's based in San Bernardino.

He's done numerous escorts of radioactive shipments and is trained to respond to accidents involving radiation.

"More radioactive material is going down the road than you realize," he said. "I trust the way these things are packaged more than other stuff. The biggest thing is public perception."

Another expert who's worked on transport issues for 30 years had a fair amount of confidence in the shipping containers but worried more about terrorism.

"I'm floored that they're actually moving this stuff around without a little more security," said Marvin Resnikoff, a physicist with Radioactive Waste Management Associates, based in New York. "You could do tremendous havoc. You could spread this stuff around."