NuclearSitePermanentDebated

By JOE GROSSMAN, UPI Science News

May 30 (UPI) -- After 20 years of study, the Department of Energy is close to making a decision about what to do with the highly radioactive nuclear reactor waste stored at a hundred sites across the country. But the possible answer, a potential underground storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, remains a matter of intense debate.

The DOE has poured $7 billion into closely studying the Yucca Mountain volcanic rock formation it clearly hopes will become home to 78,000 tons (70,000 metric tons) of very dangerous material. Meanwhile, entire state agencies in Nevada have sprung up to analyze everything that could be wrong about the site.

While the original mission of the DOE was to find a storage location that could contain highly radioactive waste even if containers holding plutonium and uranium failed, the guidelines have shifted to now permit containers within the proposed rock tunnels to do all the work. Radioactivity standards for gas and water escaping from the site have also been lowered.
In the last few weeks, attention has shifted to the 11,000 containers that will hold the waste. Designed to be made out of an inner sheath of stainless steel and an outer jacket of a nickel-chromium-molybdenum alloy, they have been subjected to tests by the state of Nevada and found wanting.

Robert Loux, director of Nevada's Nuclear Waste Project Office told United Press International that after 30 days at high heat and subjected to water from Yucca Mountain, a sample of the container crumbled.
But Abe Van Luik, a senior policy advisor for the DOE, told UPI that those tests on the metal were carried out under totally unrealistic conditions of extremely high acidity. "In this particular environment, I think it will still be shiny at 10,000 years," Van Luik said.

The containers, each costing about $350,000, will vary in length from 11.5 to 20 feet (3.5 to 6.1 meters) and in width from about 4 to 7 feet (1.3 to 2.1 meters) and will weigh from 46,000 to 157,000 pounds (21,000 kg to 71,000 kg).
Almost all the debate about the site itself has come to focus on water. There is essentially no debate that water flows through the prosed storage facility, called a geological repository.

The questions have come to center on how the water will affect the containers and how quickly the water will reach an aquifer nearby that is used by dairy and pistachio farms and a small community. The state of Nevada, which plans to sue if any DOE decision favoring the site is made, says that water could reach the aquifer in as little as 200 years. The DOE says it is more likely to be a thousand years, and therefore meets the required standard.

But that's all irrelevant, according to DOE's Van Luik, because the containers are not going to fail and thereby allow water to carry radioactive waste into the environment. Just to make sure that the containers do not corrode, the DOE plans to install titanium shields above each container to deflect any possible water away from the large storage cylinders. The titanum shields add between $4 billion and $12 billion to the project, depending on whom you ask.

Van Luik admitted that the study had produced some surprises. "The original vision of the site was extremely naive. We saw more water coming through than we anticipated, but not in amounts, that if we just beefed up the waste package(containers), would lead to any kind of threat to public safety . . . We don't see any waste packages failing at all until after 10,000 years. That's what gives us confidence that basically the system provides the safety that the regulations require," he added.

The titanium drip shields would not fail for at least 9000 years and additional failures would take tens of thousands of years, according to the DOE. Although the waste containers begin to failure after about 10 thousand years, the failure rate is very slow, Van Luik said.

One unique problem is the length of time that the facility must perform its containment function to be effective. Plutonium, for example, loses about half its radioactivity every 25,000 years. This means that in 200,000 years, the material will still be dangerous.

Both sides in the argument charge that the entire business is run by politics and not by science. "We changed the rules and avoided the two issues that they felt sure they could get us on. It's an adversarial relationship. To me it's not science, its politics," Van Luik said. The other side makes the claim even more loudly.

Steve Frishman, a geologist for Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects told UPI, "The problem in this country is that we've proven ourselves politically immature and just literally incapable for looking for a site without politics controlling the search."
The politics are not likely to diminish. The Bush administration is intent on increasing nuclear power's share of electricity generation. The idea is not likely to sell if there is no permanent place to store the waste from reactors. Frishman said that granite would be far superior to the volcanic rock at Yucca Mountain, and that geologically appropriate locations were relatively abundant.

"There are geological settings that are far superior to be looked at. If you were starting from scratch, knowing what we know about Yucca Mountain, it would not even be an issue. You would just walk away from it," he added.

Frishman says the goal of the original storage concept has been ignored. "The one thing we know about the site is that it doesn't represent the concept of geologic disposal. The site itself is not capable of containing the waste. So the repository design depends on the very long life of 11,000 containers that would be placed inside of Yucca Mountain. If you didn't have the metal container, waste would show up in the groundwater beneath the farms that are about 12 miles away in as little as a few hundred years. . . . What it comes down to what do you believe about that metal container."

Yucca Mountain's containment capability is just one aspect of centralizing the storage of nuclear waste, an approach that at least a dozen countries are starting to examinet.

The other major problem mentioned by opponents is the necessity of transporting waste from 42 other states across thousands of miles of highways. Accidents are inevitable, opponents say, while proponents argue that not only are the transportation methods and casks safe, they are being made safer.

The casks are subjected to drop tests, trial by fire and immersion. But opponents claim that the drop test isn't high enough, the fire isn't hot enough and ask what will happen when a shoulder-held rocket launcher blasts a high-explosive projectile at a load of nuclear fuel.

It makes the legally required calculation about how likely a meteor is to hit the facility and what are the chances of a volcano coming up from under the ground to vaporize the repository and its contents (each less than one chance in 10 million) seem almost irrelevant.