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Nuclear Waste: Yucca Mountain Plan Has Uncertainties, Panel Says In a report issued Friday, a U.S. government oversight panel of scientists said the plan to build a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is laden with uncertainties (see GSN, Jan. 17). Even after researchers have studied Yucca Mountain for 13 years, there are sill “gaps in data and basic understanding” of how geology, hydrology and the containers that will hold the waste will behave over the 10,000 years that the waste will be radioactive, said a report issued by the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. The board said it had “limited confidence” in the U.S. Energy Department’s claims as to how well the Yucca Mountain repository will perform as a storage site. The report added that the Energy Department should examine ways to make their estimates “more realistic.” It is unknown if the waste storage containers will perform as well as predicted by project engineers or if estimates made as to how fast the waste will move through the rock of the mountain into the groundwater are reliable, the board members said. They added that the main complication is attempting to predict how something will perform far into the future. No Evidence for Automatic Elimination Despite their criticisms, board members did not find any one flaw “that would automatically eliminate” Yucca Mountain as a suitable site. “Eliminating all uncertainty associated with [future] performance would never be possible at any repository,” the board said (Associated Press, Jan. 26). Nevada Residents Weigh In On Plan Nevada residents near Yucca Mountain are opposed to the idea of building a nuclear waste storage site there, the Austin American-Statesman reported yesterday. “This is not a solution at all,” said Ed Goedhart, a rancher in the Amargosa Valley near the mountain. “It’s a bigger problem.” Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said he would arrest anyone attempting to drive nuclear waste through the city. Kaitlin Backlund, executive director of Citizen Alert, a Nevada environmental group, said, “You’re basically building a manmade trash can and sticking it into the mountain. One of the biggest threats is a release into the ground water.” “Water is our biggest concern,” said Patrick Rowe, an engineer on the Yucca Mountain site who has been studying how the mountain’s geology and hydrology would affect waste storage. Only about seven inches of rain per year fall on Yucca Mountain, and of that only about a millimeter penetrates the rock down to the repository, Rowe said. He added that even if water could carry waste away from the mountain, the local watershed stops before it reaches any residential water supplies (Bob Keefe, Austin American-Statesman, Jan. 27).
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