Nuclear Dump Will Leak, Scientists Say

As the Bush administration prepares its push to win congressional approval for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste burial site, scientists agree on one key conclusion: Yucca Mountain will leak. The question is how long it will take.

Rising one mile from the desert floor, the mountain looks as plain and parched as much of the rest of southern Nevada’s ranges.

Despite the arid appearance there is water here, and even the scientists who have designed the repository concede that the mountain’s vulnerability to moisture will allow radioactive material to eventually leak into the environment.

Time is the key. Highly radioactive nuclear waste remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. Half of the plutonium stored in the mountain, for example, will still be radioactive 380 million years from now. Just one-millionth of an ounce of plutonium is enough to virtually assure cancer in someone who comes in contact with it.

As Congress considers whether to override Nevada’s opposition to housing nuclear waste here, opponents of the waste site argue that the Bush administration is pushing through a flawed solution that will create radioactivity risks for thousands of years.

Government officials say they have designed a burial site that will be free of leaks for at least 10,000 years. Critics, armed with a raft of scientific studies, say that can’t be guaranteed. They point to two other nuclear sites that officials once had said would be leak-free for hundreds or thousands of years: the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory near Pocatello and the Hanford Site in eastern Washington. Both are leaking already, and radioactive material could make its way into groundwater in just 10 years, according to a report by the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences.

Even if a 10,000-year leak-free promise could be guaranteed, critics of Yucca Mountain say society has a responsibility to civilizations far in the future not to expose them to lethal waste that we generate.

But the alternative to putting nuclear waste here is to leave it accumulating in 131 different places in 39 states, much closer to people and potentially vulnerable to terrorist attack, the Department of Energy warns.

The waste piled up around the country comes from nuclear aircraft carriers and electrical plants, bomb factories and university labs. Over time, it will emit thousands of times more radioactivity than was released at Chernobyl and millions of times more than the Hiroshima bomb.

Right now, says the government, 2 out of 3 Americans live within 75 miles of a storage site.

“There is no more [storage] space, there are deteriorating storage conditions, and you have the challenge that so much of it is located near population centers and waterways,” said Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham. “No one believes you can bring in David Copperfield, wave a wand and it all goes away.”

“We’ve tried to take into account as many uncertainties of the future as can be assessed,” Abraham said. “I am convinced that the site is scientifically suitable--in a word, safe.”

Yucca Mountain is not a done deal yet, but converting this forlorn peak into the world’s first high-level nuclear waste dump is closer to happening than ever.

President Bush has chosen the site, but Nevada challenged that decision. Congress is considering whether to overturn Nevada’s veto, and opponents of the dump acknowledge they probably do not have the votes to stop it. (A House vote might occur as early as today.) If the Yucca Mountain plan survives Congress, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will consider issuing a license, and the dump could open by 2012.

Experts long ago recognized the need for deep, geological disposal of radioactive waste, yet it is unknown whether any system can be devised that could keep highly radioactive waste isolated for such an immensely long period.

“We nuclear people have made a Faustian bargain with society,” said Alvin Weinberg, former director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where plutonium was tested for one of the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. “We offer an inexhaustible and nonpolluting source of energy, but we require a level of detail and discipline that we’re unaccustomed to in handling the waste.

“Nobody really knows if we can do this. Trying to project what’s going to happen in thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, is quite ridiculous,” Weinberg said.

Today, Yucca Mountain is an island in a desert. It is surrounded by the Nevada Test Site, where the government once tested nuclear bombs. The closest neighbors are a handful of alfalfa growers in the Amargosa Valley, 11 miles from Yucca Mountain, and the working girls at the Cherry Patch No. 2 brothel by a gas station that peddles T-shirts with pictures of extraterrestrials.

“If you can’t put it here, then where can you put it?” asked Michael D. Voegele, chief scientist for Bechtel-SAIC Co., the Energy Department’s contractor for building the repository at Yucca Mountain.

But who can say what will be here millions of years from now when plutonium and other deadly wastes still pack a wallop? Will it still be a desert? Glaciers advanced and receded across the planet a dozen times in the last 2 million years. An inland sea called Lake Bonneville covered much of Nevada and Utah 12,000 years ago, when humans first arrived.

“These technologies are forcing us to address the issue of how they will affect future generations. This is not an issue we’ve faced on this scale before,” said Lester R. Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute. “We’re doing things with consequences we don’t understand.”

Government engineers and scientists have been studying Yucca Mountain for more than 20 years--twice as long as it took to plan and complete the moon landing--at a cost of $7 billion. During that time, government officials have changed their arguments about Yucca Mountain’s safety.

Problems began to emerge years ago when tunnels bored deep into the rock revealed conditions inside were wetter, and the geology more complex, than initially thought. Those discoveries are at the center of the controversy today.

Originally, the volcanic ash where the waste would be entombed was believed to be so tightly compressed that rainfall could not penetrate. Secretary Abraham said in February that rainfall would take 1,000 years to make the 800-foot journey through rock to the disposal zone and longer still before radioactivity could be carried to groundwater. He does not believe leaks are a significant concern.

Yet inside the mountain, government studies have found that the rock is laced with fissures, some that move water the way capillaries carry blood, some that flow like a garden hose. About 12.3 million gallons of water flow through the 2,500-acre disposal area per year, government studies show.

Traces of chlorine 36, which is produced only by nuclear bombs, were recently discovered inside Yucca Mountain. Since the last nuclear bombs were detonated above ground at the Nevada Test Site in 1962, the finding indicates rainfall can carry radioactive material deep into the rock in as little as 40 years.

Once the presence of water was established, the government changed plans. The plans now call for double-layer disposal containers of stainless steel and a nickel-based material called Alloy 22 to keep the waste isolated.

The canisters will be covered with titanium “drip shields” to keep waste dry. Canisters could be packed close together too, so heat would boil water and drive away steam.

But engineers do not know know how to build a container that outlasts radioactive waste.

Materials like Alloy 22 haven’t been around long enough for experts to be able to assess how they will perform over centuries.

Given all of the uncertainties, some of the nation’s leading experts say President Bush’s decision to proceed with Yucca Mountain is premature.

“There are a lot of issues that remain unresolved that could affect the safety of humans and the environment,” said Allison Macfarlane, a geologist and the director of the Yucca Mountain project at MIT. “We should not be in a rush.”

Carnegie Mellon University President Jared L. Cohon said he is concerned about the integrity of disposal canisters and how water moves inside the mountain. Cohon chairs the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an 11-member panel of independent experts appointed by Congress to review the Energy Department’s work at Yucca Mountain.

That panel concluded in January that the government’s technical case for Yucca Mountain is “weak to moderate.”

Said Cohon: “What is very important is that, in assessing the suitability of the site, decision makers and the public must understand what the uncertainty is. The uncertainty is substantial.”