Vol. 3, No. 24
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October 15, 2006
Nevada's Online State News Journal
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Continued Chaos At Yucca Mountain -
New / Old Rail Project Discussed
Accountability, Quality Assurance,
Licensing All In Continued Turmoil
Within the last month the Department of Energy (DOE) Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository boss has gone before the agency that will be responsible for licensing the project and said the entire project suffers a quality problem. Speaking to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), Ward Sproat discussed many of the problems that have been discussed in the press and before congressional committees for years. There is no quality assurance program at Yucca Mountain. Sproat is the first manager of the operation to actually speak plainly about the problems that have plagued the operation for more than 20-years.
Report after report from DOE's inspector general, from the federal Government Accountability Office, and from congressional committees have berated the project. Government workers have been accused of offering fraudulent quality assurance reports and discussing them in e-mails with each other, DOE has changed plans for transportation so many times no one at this time is in a position to tell you what the current plan is, and Sproat himself confessed that many of the managers have a culture of indifference about many aspects of the project, in particular about quality assurance.
Almost to prove his point DOE has issued a new/old plan for rail transportation within the State of Nevada. There is one plan to build a 319-mile rail line from Caliente to Yucca Mountain, but that might be on hold. When DOE announces new plans for this or that they rarely indicate what might happen to existing or old plans. The rail plan now being discussed would operate on existing Union Pacific rails across the state and then dive south from Hawthorne to Yucca. This plan was originally touted in the 1990s but shelved when the Walker River Indians wouldn't allow nuclear waste to come through their reservation even on existing rails.
DOE indicates that the Walker River Paiute tribe is no longer against the project. Union Pacific has two sets of rails across northern Nevada; one runs through Reno, Sparks, and all the other towns across the state. The other, a northern route enters the state west of Gerlach and crosses Washoe, Pershing, and Humboldt Counties missing most towns, and joining the southern route in Winnemucca. From the southern route, a spur line runs south from Fallon to Hawthorne through the Walker River Paiute Reservation.
An exiting roadbed, the rails were lifted years ago, runs from Hawthorne through Mina, Luning, Coaldale Junction, west of Tonopah and Goldfield, comes near to Beatty, and will end at Yucca Mountain. This route has been on the burner, off the burner, on the burner again for more than ten years, and it appears that it is now back on the burner. The route of this option would bring high-level nuclear waste through every community in northern Nevada from the eastern border to the western border.
From a pure transportation plan, this one is superior to the Caliente plan, and DOE would save considerable amounts of money developing the plan. On the Caliente plan there is no existing roadbed and still no environmental impact study completed. Communities along the Caliente plan favor it for economic reasons such as employment, transportation, and housing.
However, with previous DOE lapses in quality assurance and related safety factors, the new/old route would put hundreds of thousands of northern Nevadans at risk if a rail or cask failure released high-level nuclear energy into the atmosphere. The waste being discussed is the most dangerous material known today. Studies done 20-years ago don't take into effect the changes in potential problems that exist with transportation of the waste today. One major problem is the potential for terrorist attacks on the casks as they move through populated areas.
Tests done on the casks did not include mortar attacks and it is well documented today that suicide killers don't care about themselves, only the damage, terror, and fear they can create. A shoulder fired mortar missile, even if it doesn't rupture the cask itself would surely derail the train and bring immediate chaos to a community, large or small. If the cask should rupture, areas of 40-square miles or more could be contaminated.
It's these kinds of fears that DOE doesn't take into consideration when they issue new plan after new plan, and even the Nuclear energy industry itself is beginning to understand. In congress recently the president of the Nuclear Energy Institute said he felt there was no valid reason, health, safety, or technical that would preclude the waste from being stored on-site at the nuclear power plants. Admiral Frank Bowman said some of the waste is kept in deepwater pools and some is stored in casks above ground at the plants.
Sproat, the DOE boss at Yucca Mountain maintains that there will a license application made to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by June 2008. Even the Nevada Nuclear Projects Office is applauding the fact that Sproat has come clean and is discussing the major problems that exist with Yucca. Bob Loux, Executive Director however feels the problems are so complicated and convoluted that they may not be fixable, in the short or the long term.
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