Marty Durlin

Online Editor

The Associated Press reports that the state of Nevada has petitioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to ban Sandia National Laboratories from working on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project.

The state claims that one of Sandia’s managers, Geoff Freeze, indicated in a memo that meeting a deadline for paperwork was more important than ensuring that the facility will keep nuclear waste safe for at least ten thousand years.

If a June 2008 deadline for the application to the Department of Energy isn’t met, “we are all out of a job,” Freeze wrote, according to a copy of the memo obtained by Nevada. He also noted “three priorities – schedule, defensibility, credibility – in that order” must be satisfied. “Any slips in schedule must be recovered by cutting scope. There is no allowance for not meeting schedule.”

In the state’s petition to the NRC, Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto retorted, “Common sense and experience teach that a plan which puts schedule ahead of defensibility and defensibility ahead of genuine scientific credibility is a recipe for disaster.”

Sandia heads the team of scientists analyzing the Yucca Mountain site, where the US government plans to bury more than 70,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste, currently stored at more than a hundred sites around the nation.

Yucca Mountain is a ridge of volcanic rock located about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The plan is to excavate tunnels 1000 feet below the surface of the mountain and 1000 feet above the water table, and bury the radioactive waste there, in sealed, corrosion-resistant metal containers.

The DOE was slated to open Yucca Mountain by 1998, but the project has now been pushed back to 2017. The cost estimate, originally $57.5 billion, is now more than $77 billion.

The Sandia Labs, hired in January 2006 to prepare a “performance assessment” of Yucca Mountain, received $123 million in the most recent fiscal year, and will receive $75 million in 2008 for its work on the project.

Among the many questions, researchers are trying to determine how much water will reach the repository over the next 10,000 years, how quickly the nuclear waste casks will corrode, and at what rate radioactivity might contaminate surrounding areas.

Other concerns include earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and meteorite impacts.

Nevada has filed seven NRC petitions regarding problems with Yucca Mountain since 2002.

Freeze’s memo is another in a string of unfortunate remarks from officials and bureaucrats about the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project. For example, there’s the EPA’s, “Our moral responsibility diminishes on a sliding scale over the course of time” and a DOE employee’s, “If they need more proof, I will be happy to make up more stuff.”