NTI: Global Security Newswire

U.S. to Propose New Yucca Mountain Radiation Rule
By Joe FiorillGlobal Security Newswire
WASHINGTON — U.S. officials said yesterday that they plan this year to complete a proposal for new radiation standards at the planned Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository in Nevada (see GSN, Feb. 21).
Speaking at a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the Energy Department and Environmental Protection Agency officials defended their proposed standards for acceptable radiation levels put out by the controversial waste dump. The most recent proposal by the environmental agency, issued in August 2005, called for limiting radiation from the site to 15 millirems a year for 10,000 years and to 350 millirems a year thereafter.
The officials expressed hope that the project could soon move forward after years of controversy and delay.
“We could spend another 20 years and several more billions of dollars and arrive at the conclusion that we need to study Yucca Mountain more before we can proceed, [but] the waste is here today,” said Energy’s acting head for the project, Paul Golan of the department’s Civilian Radioactive Waste Management Office.
Yucca Mountain was designed to hold 77,000 tons of nuclear waste, a figure that lawmakers have considered increasing, since the site would reach that capacity soon after opening. Congress in 1992 first directed the Environmental Protection Agency to set radiation standards for a waste dump at the site, and the agency now says the earliest the facility could open would be 2012.
Golan said a new “clean canister” approach at Yucca Mountain is in the works that would sharply limit human exposure to spent fuel and would eliminate the need for dry-cask facilities to contain the material. He said the department hoped by “later this spring” to complete new designs for the facility based on the approach.
Environmental Protection Agency acting assistant administrator William Wehrum told senators the 10,000-year limit of 15 millirems is as stringent as any now in force in the country. He said the agency hoped to complete a new regulation incorporating the standards by year’s end.
Committee Chairman James Inhofe (R-Okla.) expressed support for at last moving forward at the site, calling Yucca “certainly the most well-studied mountain in the world.”
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), though, was less sanguine about the project, which he opposed.“The proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump I don't believe ... will ever be built,” Reid said.
He said Energy “has simply not addressed at all” the security and environmental risks of shipping spent fuel to the dump and called it “obvious that unsound science is prevailing at Yucca Mountain.”
Reid advocated striving for better waste-storage technology and, in the meantime, leaving spent fuel at the sites where it is now housed and storing it in dry casks.
“It’ll be safe there for at least 50 years, and thereafter, we’ll have some idea of what to do with it,” he said.
“It will never open,” he said of Yucca Mountain, “yet we must safely store spent nuclear fuel, so it’s time to look at other alternatives.”
Senator John Ensign (R-Nev.), with whom Reid is sponsoring a bill to mandate the on-site, dry-cask approach, added, “the Department of Energy no longer even pretends to know when Yucca might open or how much it will cost.”