[ RadSafe ] Article: Was Yucca (Mountain) data falsified?

[Bruce Bugg]

Full article at:
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,600119181,00.html <http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,600119181,00.html> 
 
Was Yucca data falsified?
Allegations could boost plans for Utah waste site
By Joe Bauman
Deseret Morning News
Another roadblock went up Wednesday in front of the planned Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository in Nevada, with claims 
that federal scientific studies were falsified.
The allegations - about the possibility of water seeping into the repository - seem likely to cause further delays and 
other problems at Yucca Mountain, where the nation's spent nuclear fuel rods were to be permanently stored, theoretically 
by 2010.
Even as Yucca Mountain continues to be scrutinized, the permitting process has been accelerating for a "temporary" storage 
facility for the same high-level radioactive waste in Utah's Skull Valley. The latest developments could impact Utah a 
couple of ways:
* They could make the proposed Private Fuel Storage plant in Tooele County more desirable to the federal government as a 
site for storing the highly radioactive waste from nuclear power plants. If Yucca Mountain's problems prove 
insurmountable, that could increase the odds that PFS is not only built, but it might become a permanent storage area, 
opponents fear.
* Or, a Utah official said Wednesday, the setback could convince the federal government to keep the nuclear waste at the 
power plants where it is being generated, as has been proposed by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.
"I think that Skull Valley has always been an emergency Plan B" - a fall-back facility, said activist Chip Ward, a Utah 
author who has been worried about the PFS plant for years. "It was emergency Plan B for nuclear utilities, and now it may 
be emergency Plan B for the NRC," the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which may soon approve the PFS proposal. "That's very 
disturbing," he said.
He called for Utah's U.S. senators to stop supporting the move to store waste at Yucca Mountain. That bandwagon, Ward 
said, has four flat tires.
 
 
 
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Capt. Bruce Bugg
Special Projects Coordinator
Law Enforcement Division
Georgia Department of Motor Vehicle Safety
P.O. Box 80447
Conyers, GA  30013-8047
Phone: 678.413.8825
Fax: 678.413.8832
e-mail: obbugg at dmvs.ga.gov <mailto:obbugg at dmvs.ga.gov> 
 
"Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are." -- Bertolt Brecht (Author, poet, dramatist, 1898-1956)