State official refutes Yucca Mountain claims

By Robert Loux

Your article about Churchill County High School students' reactions to the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository following a tour of the site sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy ("Local students impressed by safety of nuclear repository after site visit" in the Lahontan Valley News, April 5, 2007) demonstrates just how much misinformation is disseminated during these DOE public relation tours.

It is important to recognize that the tours of Yucca Mountain operated by DOE are part of the federal government's larger effort to promote the proposed repository project. They are not "unbiased," as the students apparently were led to believe. The entire tour program is run out of DOE's Office of Public Affairs, the public relations arm of the Yucca project. The office maintains a whole staff of people who run the tours and who are trained to present information in such a way as to make Yucca Mountain appear safe and suitable. Nothing, however, could be farther from the truth.

I am sure none of the students on the trip to Yucca heard anything about the fundamental problems with using this site for disposal of deadly radioactive waste, such as:

The fact that the Yucca site is so fractured and porous that, according to DOE's own assessments, the geology of the site contributes virtually nothing to waste isolation. In a desperate effort to "fix" this fatal problem, DOE has come up with a system of manmade barriers relying on waste disposal canisters that must remain intact for between 10,000 and 1 million years! Almost no one in the scientific community believes this is remotely possible, yet DOE continues to assert that this "Rube Goldberg" fix somehow make Yucca a safe and suitable site.

Because the site is so porous and so fractured, water moves very rapidly though the subsurface. These fast water pathways mean that once waste is out of the manmade containers, it moves very quickly to the aquifer below and into the environment.

The groundwater at Yucca Mountain is highly corrosive, and even though the proposed repository would be above the water table, there is a great deal of it (the so-called unsaturated zone is actually 80 percent or more saturated). State of Nevada experts have shown that DOE's waste disposal containers - the ones that need to last for up to 1 million years - will begin to corrode very rapidly (within tens and hundreds of years) when exposed to water with the chemical composition of that found underground at Yucca.

Yucca Mountain is located in what the U.S. Geological Survey calls a major earthquake zone, and scientists are still trying to understand the risk of new volcanic activity at and near the site. All in all, it would be hard to find a place that is less suited for disposing of deadly radioactive material that must be isolated from people and the environment for hundreds of thousands of years.

Another thing I'm sure the students weren't told during their public relations visit is that Yucca Mountain was singled out in 1987 as the only site to be studied for a repository on purely political grounds, not because it was the best site or even one that had been shown to be safe and suitable.

It is an unfortunate fact of life that DOE and Yucca Mountain supporters in the commercial nuclear industry will say and do almost anything to try to keep this fatally flawed and potential dangerous project alive. It's even more unfortunate that this includes misinforming and misleading Nevada students whose enthusiasm for science and learning deserves better.

Robert R. Loux is the executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.