yucca "fact of the week"

[Norman Cohen <ncohen12@comcast.net>]

>From your favorite anti-nuke group, Public Citizen:



Hugh Jackson wrote:



> DOE'S "DON'T-ASK, DON'T-KNOW" YUCCA MOUNTAIN ANALYSIS

> (AND THE NRC'S WILLINGNESS TO ACCEPT IT)

>

> The Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste, established to provide independent technical advice to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has repeatedly blasted the Deperatment of Energy's Yucca Mountain work--even within the framework of the NRC's industry-friendly "risk-informed" regulatory philosophy. In a January17  letter to the NRC chief Richard Meserve, (http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/acnw/letters/2002/1310178.html)

> advisory committee chairman George Hornberger reiterated his committee's concerns:

>

> "The identification of the important contributors to risk, together with an assessment of the origins and magnitudes of the uncertainties of critical risk measures, can only be achieved using a "realistic" performance assessment. Such an analysis provides a reference point for arguments about defense-in-depth, conservative assumptions, and quantification of safety margins. Without such transparency in the safety assessment, the question, "How safe is the repository?" is unanswerable. The underlying question of "what is the risk?" must be answered if the concept of conservatism in regulatory decisionmaking is to have a scientific basis. It is in this context that we criticized the (DOE methodology) -- the spirit of calculating the real risk was not evident."

>

> The NRC has largely ignored the advisory committee's concerns--the NRC's draft plan for reviewing a DOE license application allows the DOE to use the same assumption-based methodolgies that Hornberger's committee criticized. As the NRC explains in its plan, instead of hard evidence, a reliance on assumptions "can be used to decrease the need to collect additional information."

>

> P.S. Here's the link to that Science magazine article wherein two pro nuclear scientists proclaim that politics has overtaken science in the Yucca Mountain process.

> http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/296/5568/659?ijkey=I.9ghdYzIPpGI&keytype=ref&siteid=sci



--

Coalition for Peace and Justice and the UNPLUG Salem Campaign; 321 Barr Ave., Linwood, NJ 08221; 609-601-8583 or 609-601-8537;  ncohen12@comcast.net  UNPLUG SALEM WEBSITE:  http://www.unplugsalem.org/  COALITION FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE WEBSITE:  http://www.coalitionforpeaceandjustice.org   The Coalition for Peace and Justice is a chapter of Peace Action.

"First they ignore you; Then they laugh at you; Then they fight you; Then you win. (Gandhi) "Why walk when you can fly?"  (Mary Chapin Carpenter)





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