Nuclear Dump Proposal Gains

A plan to create a nuclear dump to store radioactive waste in Nevada within 100 miles of Las Vegas cleared a preliminary but important hurdle Tuesday in the Senate.

By a vote of 65 to 34, the Senate agreed to open debate on the proposal, which is considered one of the most important environmental tests in the months leading up to election day.

The bitterly disputed legislation has drawn the threat of a presidential veto and it may tie the Senate in knots, with the two senators from Nevada promising to use every parliamentary maneuver at their disposal to postpone action.

Opponents were heartened by the 34 votes they mustered. In their view, the count leaves them within striking distance of the 41 votes they need to sustain a filibuster to delay action once full-fledged debate on the plan gets underway.

Similar legislation is pending in the House, where leaders are waiting to see how the Senate acts before bringing it up for debate.

Supporters, led by Sen. Frank H. Murkowski (R-Alaska), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, argued that the nuclear sludge and other highly radioactive byproducts of nuclear energy generation are nearly overflowing their storage pools at more than 100 power plants from California to Maine.

“It is a problem in Illinois. It is a problem in California. It is a problem throughout the United States,” Murkowski said.

“Nobody wants nuclear waste in their state,” he said. “But it has to go somewhere, and Nevada is the best place we have.”

But opponents fear that the site is unsafe because, they say, the region’s seismic activity rivals that of the San Francisco Bay Area. They also argue that, over time, the dump, which is supposed to be temporary, will in fact become permanent as 60,000 metric tons of radioactive garbage is dumped there after cross-country train and truck trips.

“We can do better than this,” Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) said. “We ought not be rushing to judgment.”

Pressure to find a location for the waste that is turned out by the nation’s nuclear power industry has been growing since the dawn of the nuclear age a half-century ago. About 95% of the nation’s radioactive debris is produced by nuclear power, with medical facilities, researchers and weapons producers responsible for much of the rest.

For years, individual power plants have relied on a temporary storage method of sinking heat-generating used fuel rods in storage tanks, allowing them to cool slowly. Their radioactivity remains barely diminished over decades.

Those sites, often uncomfortably close to businesses, schools and homes, are growing overly crowded.

Under the plan prepared by Murkowski’s committee, the waste would be deposited in concrete and stainless steel casks. These would be placed above ground at the deactivated nuclear weapons test site at Yucca Mountain, where hundreds of nuclear explosions were set off during the Cold War.

The solution is considered temporary, pending government studies to determine whether Yucca Mountain, or some other site, would offer the most secure, isolated storage for nuclear material. At the permanent site, the material would be buried, since it could remain dangerously radioactive for thousands of years.

Under the measure, the Department of Energy would decide by the end of 1998 whether to make the Nevada site the permanent repository. Construction could not begin on the interim facility until its suitability as a permanent site was determined.

Before his committee prepared the legislation designating Yucca Mountain as the nation’s temporary nuclear garbage heap, Murkowski suggested establishing the interim site at a federal nuclear weapons plant in South Carolina.

Last week, South Carolina Gov. David M. Beasley wrote to President Clinton expressing concern that delays in finding “a timely solution to the safe management of nuclear waste” were adding to the expense of nuclear power generation that was being reflected in individual electric bills.

But, he said, his state rejected the idea that the site should be in South Carolina.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors entered the debate in January, unanimously passing a motion expressing its opposition to pending legislation that would move spent nuclear fuel rods to Yucca Mountain and endorsing an alternative idea of setting up various regional disposal sites. If the site were established in Nevada, the supervisors said, rail and highway transportation of the waste to Yucca Mountain should avoid population centers in the county.

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Safe Storage or Time Bomb?

Scientists are trying to determine whether Yucca Mountain, a ridge of ancient volcanic rock, is a suitable place to entomb thousands of tons of high-level radioactive waste. In the plan, shown below, canisters would be placed in the mountain with several hundred feet of rock above and below.

Danger Scenarios

There are fears that ground water--pushed upward by shifts in the Earth’s crust--may reach the waste. This could force water, superheated by the radioactivity, to gush to the surface, carrying the threat of contamination with it, or cause water to seep back down and contaminate the ground water supply.