Entries in Yucca Mountain (13)
Yucca corrosion data found to be suspicious
WASHINGTON -- Government scientists raised questions in recent weeks about Department of Energy experiments on how long it will take canisters containing highly radioactive nuclear waste to corrode after being placed within Yucca Mountain.
The discovery led DOE to replace the data that were part of its license application to build a repository at the Nevada site, a project official said Wednesday.
At the same time, DOE has launched a review of the challenged research, which involved the nickel-based Alloy 22 that will be the outer cover of waste-containing packages. In the experiments, Alloy 22 samples were subjected to a solution of corrosive chemicals and then weighed to determine how much they had degraded.
Technicians reviewing the results reported "documented, repeated and potentially significant excursions" from the American Society for Testing and Materials standard for handling corrosion test specimens, according to a March 5 document that surfaced this week.
The activity is taking place weeks before the department has said it plans to apply for a construction license. It fueled further criticism from Nevada critics of Yucca Mountain who charge DOE is rushing unduly to file for a license.
Russ Dyer, the chief scientist for the Yucca Mountain Project, said the suspicious corrosion data "was roped off" and is not part of the Yucca application.
Dyer said DOE initiated a corrective action to determine "what exactly happened in this experiment and the results that came out of it and the processes we used."
In the meantime, DOE is using corrosion rates resulting from a separate set of experiments that sought to determine how corrosion might develop in canister welds and other crevices of the waste package.
"What is the potential impact on total system performance, and the answer is none," Dyer said. To gain a license, DOE must show that the canisters together with other features of the repository can prevent radioactive material from leaking for periods close to a million years.
Steve Frishman, technical policy coordinator for the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, maintained DOE was "papering over" a problem. He said the state may challenge DOE on the corrosion data during license hearings.
The discovery came as scientists from Sandia National Laboratories were reviewing corrosion data. They said they uncovered a "vulnerability" in the data that were collected over five years.
The Sandia findings were contained in a March 5 Power Point presentation that became available on a Yucca Mountain public document database.
After emerging from the corrosive bath, the Alloy 22 "coupons" were cleaned of corrosion before being weighed. Sandia reported the cleaning process "may have been incomplete."
As a result, salts and other residue may have skewed the weight of the samples, raising questions about how much corrosion had taken place. A heavier piece might suggest the metal could last longer.
Sandia said there is "less than a 50 percent chance" the corrosion data were invalid. "But given the critical nature of this parameter (it) must be confirmed."
"The corrosion rate is the core of the total system performance analysis," Frishman said. "When they are talking about containers that don't fail for hundreds of thousands of year, it is possible they are off by orders of magnitude."
The corrosion experiments were conducted at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. In 2006, DOE issued a stop work order on a separate set of corrosion experiments after Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors reported the work was based on humidity gauges that were not calibrated.
Gregor Gable
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Slow Train to Yucca Mountain
NEWS: Will America's nuclear waste repository ever open, and, more important: should it?
April 28, 2008
High-level nuclear waste, the detritus of a half-century of civilian nuclear power in the United States, was supposed to have someplace to go by now. It was supposed to have a designated hole in the ground to contain it, according to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, with infrastructure to transport and store it, staff to secure and protect it. In 2008, we were not supposed to still be debating where to put the fuel rods from nuclear reactors once they could no longer fission efficiently.
But we are.
In 1987, after narrowing the sites for a geological repository for nuclear waste down to three, Congress settled on a dusty stretch of Nye County, Nevada, known as Yucca Mountain. With full faith that the repository would open in 1998 as mandated by law, the Department of Energy (DOE) forged ahead, drilling a five-mile tunnel out of the mountain and building a rail line through it. It brought in scientists from the country's top nuclear laboratories to study the rock; it began conducting tours of the site for media, legislators, and scientists; it even printed up T-shirts and coffee mugs for visitors to purchase at lunchtime.
But as the years went by, Yucca Mountain began to seem less like a grand public-works project than a colossal mistake. The latest opening date for the repository—which has cost $11 billion to date—was set for 2017, but as recently as February, the DOE's Ward Sproat, who oversees the agency's civilian nuclear waste program, admitted "a two- or three-year slip from that," in part due to a $108 million cut in the project's requested half-billion-dollar budget. As of April 2008, the Department of Energy had yet to apply for a license with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for the repository, which needs to be approved before construction can begin on the actual cubbyholes where the waste will be stored.
What went wrong? Part of the problem is certainly garden-variety NIMBYism: The State of Nevada has sued several times to stop the project, saying the state has absorbed enough radiation from the nation's atomic experiments. (Yucca Mountain bumps up against the Nevada Test Site.) But another part may just be that Yucca Mountain was a really bad choice: Rock at the site, known as "tuff" and laid down by ancient volcanic explosions, proved more porous than previously claimed by the DOE, raising the possibility that water could leach into the site, erode the metal-and-concrete casks that store the waste, and transport toxic waste into the groundwater. (Nevada's largest dairy is downgradient from the mountain.) Add to that an active fault, which produced a 5.6 earthquake in 1992 and a 4.4 in 2002, and climatic uncertainty—the Nevada desert may not always be a desert—and Yucca Mountain starts to seem like a less-than-sensible place to stash your decaying plutonium for 24,100 years, which is how long it takes for plutonium to shed half its toxicity. Depleted uranium, which accounts for the bulk of the waste, stays deadly for 4.5 billion years.
The DOE insists Yucca Mountain was never supposed to be a geologic repository, and that waste-containment casks, made of high-grade titanium, steel, and concrete, will do the job instead. But the casks may not last more than a few thousand years, and even if they do, the risk of exposure to the deadly isotopes inside will peak at 300,000 years. Which gets to the heart of the problem: How do we safely stow toxic materials for a period longer than the entire history of Homo sapiens?
The truth is that no piece of ground seems to deserve this stuff. But without a solution to the waste problem, the nuclear renaissance is effectively dead: Few energy companies will invest further in a technology plagued by a deadly and intractable problem. And with two out of three current presidential candidates dedicated to halting the project, this could be Yucca Mountain's last chance to move forward.
Which is why, some believe, Sproat suddenly announced in early March that the license application was just about ready and would go to the NRC by June 30. "Sproat knows he's leaving at the end of the year because it's the end of this administration," says Steve Frishman, technical policy coordinator for the Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects. "When he came on his job, his marching orders included getting a license application filed, and that's what he's going to do." From the filing date, the NRC has three years to approve the license application, starting with a 90-day evaluation period to determine whether it's complete. If so, the commission will accept public petitions through October 2008 for the right to intervene in the process. Prehearing panels will commence a few months later, and hearings will continue through at least 2011. But the hearings are by invitation only, and the commission generally hears only from official interveners, such as local government leaders who hope to piggyback their own starved public-works projects on the Yucca construction. The rest of the public may find itself bleating at an impenetrable bureaucracy. Says Judy Treichel, executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force: "Public involvement basically means you have the right to watch."
If and when the repository opens, it will already be full. Existing commercial reactor waste, plus radioactive detritus left over from government programs, will occupy every last cubby. If long-term storage is the goal, the nuclear renaissance will require another Yucca Mountain very soon. Watch out: Your back yard may be next.
Gregor Gable
in Yucca Mountain
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There's only toxic waste at the end of the Yucca Mtn. rainbow
For the Appeal
April 20, 2008, 4:01 AM
The recent op-ed (by Chuck Muth, April 11) calling on Nevadans to embrace nuclear waste was a little like listening to someone talk about living on Mars with no mention of how you get there from planet Earth (Nevada should profit from Yucca gold mine, April 11).
In his piece, Chuck Muth conveniently glosses over the reasons Yucca Mountain is bound to fail both scientifically and because of its $80 billion price tag. He seeks to paint a utopia in which nearly all of Nevada's most pressing economic needs can be met by turning our home into an epicenter for nuclear waste disposal.
Visions of nuclear power plants dotting the Nevada landscape and pipelines to the Pacific are false promises to two of our most pressing needs - clean energy and a steady water supply. And the author fails to acknowledge the myriad of dangers his plan would create, not only for Nevada and the nation, but for global efforts to limit terrorist access to dirty bombs and nuclear weapon-making materials.
The nuclear industry and others have been selling this same tale of overnight riches for decades. They peddle these claims in an attempt to chip away at intense opposition from Nevadans to the dumping of toxic radioactive waste 90 minutes from Las Vegas - our state's largest community and most powerful economic engine. We didn't believe it in the 1980s and '90s and we still aren't buying the idea that this is a new radioactive "Comstock Lode" for the 21st century.
Nevadans know a bad bet when we see one and that is the reason we remain overwhelmingly opposed to Yucca Mountain. Remember, there is no pot of gold at the end of the Yucca Mountain rainbow and no magic wand to wave over toxic radioactive waste that will simply make the dangers disappear.
The reason for Nevada's well- founded opposition to Yucca Mountain is that the proposed repository is designed to fail. Volcanoes and earthquakes have rocked the area around Yucca Mountain in the past and there is every reason to believe these threats will strike again. At the same time, canisters placed inside the mountain will rapidly corrode, allowing radioactive waste to escape and contaminate drinking water supplies for families living near the proposed dump site.
The fact also remains that you cannot reprocess much of the waste the nuclear industry and its allies like President Bush and U.S. Senator John McCain are desperate to ship our way. Defense waste from the U.S. military and the oldest spent nuclear fuel from commercial power plants cannot be reprocessed, leaving Yucca Mountain as the only place on the books slated to store these toxic remnants.
Waste buried in Yucca Mountain will not even hit peak danger levels for 300,000 years, the prime reason a federal court struck down Bush administration radiation standards for failing to protect against deadly releases far into the future.
Appeal readers should also recognize that reprocessing waste does not eliminate the need for a repository under any scenario, leaving Nevada as a prime target today and in the future for efforts to ship waste to Yucca Mountain on a "temporary" basis only to see this fool's gold stay forever.
Such a reprocessing scheme will, however, create dangerous new materials that could be used to build a nuclear weapon. This very real proliferation threat is why reprocessing regimes, such as the one promised by the author as our new road to riches, remain illegal under U.S. law.
In the aftermath of 9/11, Americans remember what this author has clearly forgotten - that terrorists are actively looking for the materials to build a dirty bomb. The thousands of waste shipments required under the Bush-McCain Yucca Mountain plan would each be a potential target for a terrorist strike or accident waiting to happen. A major incident resulting in the release of nuclear waste on our roads or railways will threaten lives and leave communities facing millions in clean-up costs and years of contamination. Decades of these "mobile Chernobyls" will endanger the lives of Nevadans and 50 million other Americans living along designated transportation routes.
Most importantly, there is simply no reason to move this nuclear waste to Nevada. Experts on all sides of the waste issue agree that we can safely store spent fuel in hardened canisters at nuclear power plant sites for the next 100 years. This solution, which is already being used at existing power plants nationwide, avoids the risk of waste shipments and buys our nation the time needed to rethink our failed strategy for dealing with this issue.
Finally, as a member of our Congressional delegation, I can assure Nevadans that we speak with one voice when it comes to expressing our continued opposition to being targeted as the nation's only high-level nuclear waste dump. This opposition also extends to the state and local level, where elected officials from Carson City to Las Vegas and across the Silver State have added their voices to this fight. These public servants continue to speak out because the families they represent have made it abundantly clear that they do not want to see Nevada buried in nuclear waste.
• Congresswoman Shelley Berkley of Las Vegas is in her fifth term as a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Gregor Gable
in Yucca Mountain
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Nevada told to take Yucca Mountain money
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
State official counters no such federal funding exists
Ty Cobb told a gathering of Reno business and political leaders that some money from a $27.1 billion national fund to construct the repository could be given to the state.
"The money is there," said Cobb, a former Army colonel, National Security Council and CIA operative. "The monetary benefits are there and warrant a reappraisal of the state stance."
But Bob Loux, director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, responded that no money is available for Nevada. He said the latest estimates are that the repository, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, will cost more than $100 billion if it is ever built, and taxpayers will end up paying for half of that.
He said one-third of the workers at the site have been laid off and Congress has limited funds. He said both Democratic presidential candidates want to scrap the project.
Loux said the state could have claimed $10 million a year for accepting the dump, but that offer expired long ago.
He said every poll for decades has shown overwhelming citizen opposition to the repository. Loux has voiced the state viewpoint against the dump for every governor since 1984.
While Nevada state government revenues have fallen short of projections by $565 million because of a weakened economy, Gibbons remains opposed to the repository, Loux said in an interview last week.
Before the presentation, University of Nevada, Reno professor John Scire and Cobb released a position paper asking the state to "undertake a neutral, unbiased assessment" of the repository.
They argued that a new appraisal would find that waste can be safely transported by armed guards to the Nevada site. Waste stored in Yucca Mountain would be far more secure from terrorists than continuing to store it at 73 nuclear power plants around the country, they concluded.
Cobb, who is the father of Assemblyman Ty Cobb, R-Reno, even said that an earthquake along the lines of the one that struck Wells last week would not penetrate the waste in casks buried beneath Yucca Mountain.
And he said Illinois has drawn $3 billion and Pennsylvania $2 billion out of the nuclear waste fund.
"And Nevada? The state government hasn't drawn a red cent? The rationale is that should Nevada begin to negotiate for a slice of this funding, it would compromise its 'No Repository Here' stance," he said.
Loux said Cobb was mistaken and had actually cited what Illinois and Pennsylvania ratepayers paid into the waste fund.
"No state has ever drawn money out of the waste fund," Loux said.
But in an interview after the meeting, Cobb even said the power generating states "want to pay us."
Loux questioned whether a Yucca Mountain repository ever could be safe. He said the Energy Department has been called "incompetent" by the Congressional Government Accounting Office.
All 127 nuclear facilities constructed by the DOE have leaked, and cleanup costs the government $500 million a year, he said.
But Scire called Loux's comments "propaganda" and contended DOE inherited facilities in which sloppy work was conducted by the Department of Defense.
Despite joining Cobb in preparing the position statement, Scire said he did not care whether the repository is ever completed.
He said the waste can remain for now outside nuclear plants and eventually be reprocessed.
Gregor Gable
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Nuke industry seeks storage sites
WASHINGTON -- With uncertainties swirling around the proposed Nevada radioactive waste site, the nuclear industry has mounted a campaign to court communities that might be willing to host interim storage of its used fuel.
Officials with the Nuclear Energy Institute are meeting with governors, state legislators and other elected leaders, including those in states where nuclear waste has remained for years at decommissioned power plants, NEI executive Marshall Cohen said Friday.
Talks are moving forward with two or three communities, and more sites are expected to show interest, said Cohen, NEI senior director for state and local government affairs.
Cohen did not identify the communities during a presentation but said some were among the 11 sites that at one time volunteered to host a nuclear waste reprocessing plant for the government. Those were in New Mexico, Washington, Idaho, Illinois, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio and South Carolina.
In the next month or so, he said, NEI will guide local leaders on a nuclear plant tour focused on showing them how utilities are keeping spent fuel stored on above-ground pads and in steel and concrete casks, similar to how an interim storage site would be configured.
"We are going to take them to interim storage, to walk around it, touch it, taste it, talk to the people who run it," Cohen said.
After that, "if they still want to talk and get serious, then we can start looking at putting things on the table."
Cohen spoke at a conference of the Energy Communities Alliance, local governments that interact with Department of Energy laboratories and former weapons plants.
The NEI campaign underscores the industry's determination to show progress on removing spent fuel from reactor sites, an issue that could slow the proclaimed "renaissance" of new nuclear power plant construction.
It also reflects the industry's shift on the much-delayed Yucca Mountain Project. Where once burial in the proposed Nevada repository was held up as the solution for thousands of tons of spent fuel piling up in reinforced containers outside reactors, now NEI advocates a broader policy that also includes advancing nuclear fuel processing and interim storage.
"What we are willing to do is put an entire industry behind the effort," Cohen said of locating volunteers to hold onto nuclear waste until it can be moved to Yucca Mountain or to a reprocessing plant.
If NEI can recruit one or more volunteer sites, "it can be very, very helpful in the long run for the utilities to be able to answer the inevitable question, 'What about the waste?'" Cohen said.
"We can say short term we have a path to interim storage and long term we are going to have other things happen in the country," he said.
Energy Department leaders have discouraged talk of interim nuclear waste storage, where potential hosts are expected to run into legal, technical and political challenges like those that confronted the consortium that tried to establish a storage site on the Goshute Indian reservation in Utah.
Ward Sproat, director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, has testified to Congress that by the time a temporary storage site is located, built and opened for business, Yucca Mountain would be close to finished.
"They are much better judges of the timetable than us, but we think it makes sense to move on this," Cohen said in response on Friday.
Contact Stephens Washington Bureau Chief Steve Tetreault at stetreault@stephensmedia.com or (202) 783-1760.
Gregor Gable
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