Press briefing for (against) Yucca Mtn

["Ted Rockwell" <tedrock@starpower.net>]

Friends:



I was an invitee for the press-only briefing on Yucca Mtn by the Nevada

contingent.  It was a small group (20-30 press people) briefed by six

lawyers on the six pending lawsuits on Yucca Mtn, held at the National Press

Club today, December 18.  It went from noon to 2PM and was tied into a

national web broadcast.



I will skip over the expected stuff and the details, but I have a press

packet on those if anyone wants more particulars.  I was surprised by

several points made and not made, which I'll mention below.  I did get a

chance to question the presenters, as did the other reporters present.



The whole slant was primarily a legal one, not technical.  They made a

strong case that DOE, NRC and EPA have failed to meet specific legal

requirements.  I'm not qualified or informed on that aspect sufficiently to

argue that, and I haven't heard the other side.



I made the point early on that the radiation levels under consideration were

below natural background and below levels rountinely given millions of

American medical patients each year.  I said these levels did not cause any

harm.  Matt Wald (NYTimes) said "We don't know that" and I replied that

anyone who read the case-control studies done by Nobel laureate Rosalyn

Yalow and other such studies knew it.  There was a lot of such banter, and I

won't repot it all here.  Lawyer Joe Egan claimed the dose at peak (after

the containers fail) is 600 times EPA limit, measured at the compliance

boundary.  That doesn't make sense to me, but I couldn't pin it down in this

setting.  (That was the only technical point I couldn't pin down.) He also

passed out a map of the "gerrymandered" compliance boundary, instead of the

"usual 5 km circle.",



Skipping to the bottom line, I conclude that their argument is NOT that

Yucca Mtn is unacceptable because radwaste is uniquely hazardous.  They

claim is it unacceptable because the site itself is almost uniquely porous.

They don't like to state it so bluntly, but I explored it in private

discussion with Gilinsky afterward (he seems to be their key technical

source, although they claim to have a hot technical team back home).  I

asked why he felt radwaste required such extraordinary precautions, and he

said they would require the same thing for arsenic, selenium, mercury, etc.

I said, "But we don't!"  He said that "all other repositories in the world"

have good geological isolation, but "YM is a sieve."  "If YM site were like

WIPP, we would have no technical argument."  (They still have several LEGAL

arguments.)  That was a new one to me.



Their argument, distilled, goes like this:  DOE said that radwaste should be

geologically isolated.  NAS, Congress and the President agreed.  The TRB,

appointed by President, said unanimmously "no container material can stand

up for 10,000 years.  You have to count on the geology." So DOE started down

that road, but (according to these guys) had already decided YM was it.

When they found YM site did not meet that criterion, they scrapped it, and

the other sites they were looking at, and set up new ground rules:  make the

containment do the job.  These guys claim the old rules are still legally in

effect and that DOE illegally changed them.  They kept repeating that "all

other respositories in the world count on geological isolation.  But YM

can't do that."  DOE expected to show that ground water would take 1000

years to reach the containers, but they found it was less than 200, maybe as

low as 50 years.  Roger Staehle, "world's top corrosion expert" is going to

demonstrate to court that containers will corrode through in < 3yr.  "They'd

corrode slower on the surface or immersed in the water table.  Inside the

hot, humid mountain is the worst possible environment for them."



This above situation couples with the following points (says Gilinsky):

There is no national security reason to move the waste.  Nuclear power can

go along w/o YM.  There are better alternatives.



The courts have shot down DOE on their last two major pleas:

	DOE liable for costs of missing 1998 deadline

	DOE does not have right to spend millions on outside lawyers on this.

As a consequence, DOE is paralyzed, legally.  No outside lawyers for past 2

yr.

So these guys are confident they will win some, if not all, six cases.



The whole story of alleged illegal steps by DOE sound bad, but that's only

their side.



Enough for now.



Ted Rockwell



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