Risk of Water Seepage Imperil Yucca Mountain Project

["Sandy Perle" <sandyfl@earthlink.net>]

Washington Post Tuesday, December 15, 1998; Page A03  

At Nevada Nuclear Waste Site, The Issue Is One of Liquidity 
Studies Citing Risk of Water Seepage Imperil Yucca Mountain 
Project  

It's the only man-made project designed to outlast the pyramids: a 
$20 billion monument to durable engineering built to withstand at 
least 10,000 years and even a direct hit by a nuclear bomb.  

Yet for all its sturdiness, Nevada's Yucca Mountain, the proposed 
underground repository for America's most dangerous radioactive 
waste, could be doomed by something as common as water.  

That is the predicament the Energy Department faces next week 
as it weighs how -- and whether -- to proceed with the most 
elaborate and expensive dump ever dreamed up. As early as next 
Tuesday, the agency will issue a long-awaited "viability" report on 
Yucca Mountain that reportedly will give a green light for continued 
research on the site. The five-volume report is one of the last major 
hurdles before a final decision in 2001.  

But even as the government prepares to press ahead, several new 
reports are renewing questions about Yucca Mountain's suitability 
as the national graveyard for the deadliest forms of nuclear waste. 
Two studies by different groups of scientists suggest a future risk 
from water, the chief nemesis for a repository that is designed to 
remain dry for millennia.  

In one worst-case scenario, rainwater would penetrate the 
mountain's underground vaults and storage casks and rapidly move 
radioactive material into ground water. In the other, hot water from 
deep underground would flood the repository -- an event that, in the 
opinion of a few scientists, could cause an explosion.  

"You're talking about an unimaginable catastrophe," said Jerry 
Szymanski, formerly the Energy Department's top geologist at 
Yucca Mountain and now an outspoken opponent of the Nevada 
site. "Chernobyl would be small potatoes."  

Agency scientists believe both scenarios are highly unlikely, and 
they note that some of the research was underwritten by longtime 
opponents of the dump. Still, the findings "cannot be dismissed out 
of hand," according to one Energy Department report.  

The studies are being taken seriously by newly confirmed Energy 
Secretary Bill Richardson, who made his second visit to Yucca 
Mountain last week to meet with scientists as well as Nevada 
politicians who fear future contamination of underground aquifers by 
radiation.  

"These are issues that deserve a thorough examination," 
Richardson said after his visit. "I am very intent on making my 
decision based on science, not politics."  

The mere suggestion of problems at Yucca Mountain has sent 
shudders through the agency as well as the nuclear power 
industry, which hopes to be its biggest customer. If borne out by 
further research, the water threat would be a stunning setback not 
just for the Nevada project but for the four-decade effort to find a 
permanent dump for high-level nuclear waste. Since the 1940s, 
thousands of tons of highly radioactive spent fuel from commercial 
and military nuclear reactors have been piling up at scores of 
temporary sites around the country, waste that will remain 
dangerous for at least 10,000 years.  

Yucca Mountain, an isolated, hellishly dry desert ridge 90 miles 
north of Las Vegas, was picked by Congress as the likely 
repository site in 1987 over bitter protests from the host state. 
When completed, the facility would house waste in decay-resistant 
canisters in a maze of underground bunkers hundreds of feet 
beneath the surface.  

By January of this year, the Energy Department was supposed to 
have begun accepting 30,000 cubic feet of spent commercial 
nuclear fuel from more than 100 civilian power plants. Its failure to 
do so has prompted a lawsuit by utility companies as well as 
congressional attempts to authorize an interim storage site for the 
waste near Yucca Mountain.  

But after 11 years and $2 billion worth of testing -- including 
construction of a five-mile tunnel through the mountain -- the 
agency is still two years away from deciding if Yucca Mountain can 
safely contain nuclear waste. If new evidence shows the mountain 
to be unsuitable, the search for a new dump likely would extend 
well into the next century.  

"If Yucca Mountain is taken off the list," said Theodore J. Garrish, 
vice president for nuclear waste at the Nuclear Energy Institute, a 
Washington-based trade organization, "you're looking at another 25 
to 30 years before you can find something else."  

Garrish believes the findings about possible water penetration are 
largely a recycling of old theories that already have been examined 
and discredited. "We take the view that the mountain needs to be 
safe," he said, "and so far we've seen no facts come forward that 
suggest it wouldn't be safe."  

But environmental groups, some of whom are fundamentally 
opposed to the idea of an underground repository, say enough 
evidence has now emerged to warrant pulling the plug on Yucca 
Mountain.  

"Yucca Mountain is a sieve," said Mary Olson, a nuclear waste 
specialist with the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, an 
environmental watchdog group. "If they're going to bury the waste, 
they picked a hell of a bad site."  

To environmentalists, the most damning evidence is a report 
published late last year that documented surprisingly rapid 
movement of ground water through the mountain. In testing rocks 
and soil from the repository level, 800 feet below the surface, 
Energy and Interior department scientists found traces of chlorine-
36, an isotope created by nuclear tests in the Nevada desert in the 
1950s. Rainwater seeping through faults and cracks had carried 
the chemical through 800 feet of rock in less than 50 years, much 
faster than scientists had expected.  

Even though the repository's concrete and steel will eventually 
corrode, experts had believed that Yucca Mountain's dense 
volcanic rock would isolate any radiation leaks for thousands of 
years. But if contaminated water could travel much more rapidly 
through the ground, it also could threaten aquifers used for 
irrigating crops or watering cattle.  

"We now know water can move from the waste level to wells in less 
than 1,000 years," said Olson. "This violates the Energy 
Department's own guidelines."  

More recent studies raised different kinds of concerns. A report in 
March by the California Institute of Technology found new evidence 
of geological instability in the region, including relatively rapid 
shifting of the Earth's crust near the mountain. The movement 
raises the probability of future earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.  

And last week, a Russian geologist claimed that hot water from 
deep underground had flooded the mountain at least once in the 
geologically recent past. Yuri V. Dublyansky, of the Siberian 
branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said flooding could 
happen again, with potentially calamitous results.  

"We can be reasonably sure that Yucca Mountain was at some 
point in the past saturated with water. The crucial question is 
when," said Dublyansky, who obtained rock samples from inside 
the mountain while working for Nevada state officials who hope to 
defeat the project. "Any decision on whether Yucca Mountain 
should be a repository for nuclear waste should be preceded by a 
resolution of that question."  

The evidence of past flooding comes from crystals of calcite and 
other minerals that were formed when the mountain was already 
old, said Dublyansky, now a research fellow for the Maryland-
based Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. 
Microscopic bubbles inside the rocks, known as "fluid inclusions," 
prove that the crystals were formed in the presence of hot water -- 
which could only have come from underground thermal springs, 
Dublyansky said.  

At his request, the findings were reviewed by independent 
scientists from Austria, Great Britain and Nevada -- all of whom 
backed his basic conclusions. But U.S. government scientists 
ridiculed Dublyansky's research as unscholarly. "We are 
disturbed," said Joe Whelan of the U.S. Geological Survey in a 
written critique, "by Dr. Dublyansky's shrewd and nonscientific 
arguments that seem to be crafted for readers unfamiliar with the 
specific Yucca Mountain geologic relations."  

Szymanski, the former Energy Department geologist, also had 
argued that a thermal upwelling had occurred at Yucca Mountain 
and sees the new evidence as vindication. He thinks a combination 
of water and the red-hot temperatures of the nuclear waste casks 
could spark an explosion that could spew lethal doses of radiation 
into the atmosphere.  

"This is direct evidence," Szymanski said. "And if anybody doubts 
the results, they can go back and measure them again. They're 
very easy to verify."  

To settle the debate, Richardson last week said he has agreed to 
allow parallel tests to be conducted by scientists from the 
government and the University of Nevada, and he pledged to press 
for federal funding to allow Nevada to conduct independent 
research. "I am committed to ensuring that the issues that have 
been raised about Yucca Mountain are being adequately 
addressed," he said.  

Richardson's assurances were welcomed by Nevada's elected 
officials, some of whom have been fighting the dump for more than 
a decade. But one veteran, Democratic Sen. Richard H. Bryan, 
said the state would insist on more than promises. "This is an 
issue that involves the public health and safety of every Nevadan," 
Bryan said. "On that, there can be no compromise." 

Sandy Perle
E-Mail: sandyfl@earthlink.net 
Personal Website: http://www.geocities.com/capecanaveral/1205

"The object of opening the mind, as of opening 
the mouth, is to close it again on something solid"
              - G. K. Chesterton -
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