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On 29 June last year, at 3.14 am, a moderate earthquake registering
5.6 on the Richter scale occurred 13 kilometres below Little Skull Mountain.
That is about 20 kilometres southeast of the proposed burial site of at
least 25 000 tonnes of highly radioactive spent fuel and high-level waste
from the US’s 120 commercial nuclear power plants, at Yucca Mountain in
southern Nevada, 100 miles north of Las Vegas.

Opponents of the project at once claimed that the damage caused to surface
buildings in the area showed that the site is unsuitable. But the US Department
of Energy – whose research facilities sustained an estimated $1 million
of damage in the earthquake – concluded that it actually enhanced the site’s
suitability, because seismologists were able to verify computer models about
the seismological stability of the mountain and its environs they had generated
from historical data.

The DOE has chosen Yucca Mountain to be the store for spent fuel and
high-level waste with a half-life of 24 000 years. To meet the ’10 000 year
criterion’, set by the DOE, the repository must not release ‘significant’
amounts of its radioactive content into the environment during that period,
no matter what changes occur in the local climate, geology or water table.
Earthquakes obviously make it harder to meet that requirement.

Clarence Allen, a member of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board,
comments that ‘there are certainly areas in the US with lower seismic hazard
than that of south Nevada, although no area is completely devoid of seismicity’.
Earthquake studies of Yucca Mountain began over 15 years ago, and according
to DOE reports have not shown that faulting would break open the mountain
to expose radioactive waste.

Meanwhile the NWTRB’s 17-strong panel has also studied the earthquake
threat to the proposed Yucca repository and concluded that there is no evidence
to support the assertion made by opponents – including one former DOE scientist
– that the water table has, in the past, periodically risen hundreds of
metres, which it would have to do to disrupt the repository from below.

Critics remain unconvinced. Bob Loux, executive director of the state
of Nevada’s Nuclear Waste Project Office, claims that in the June earthquake
‘people in Nevada literally felt why Yucca Mountain is an unsafe site for
the disposal of radioactive waste’. Carl Johnson, a geologist and administrator
of the NWPO, says pointedly, ‘The question that now comes up is – how big
an earthquake and how close does it have to be to disqualify the site?’
Recent studies of fault lines along the west coast by seismologists conclude
that, for Nevada and California in particular, the odds of a devastating
earthquake – say, 100 times more powerful than that of last June – within
the next decade have increased significantly.

Nevada senator Richard Bryan, a former state governor, said in the Senate
that ‘the decision to locate a high-level waste dump in an area where 32
active earthquake faults traverse the region defies common sense and logic’.
Citizens in Clark County seemed to agree. A survey found that after the
earthquake 75 per cent of those polled thought the Yucca Mountain site should
be ‘immediately dropped from consideration’, and almost 71 per cent believed
that the repository would pose ‘an extreme health and safety threat to the
Las Vegas metropolitan area’.

Presently the US, like Britain, does not have a single repository for
the high-level waste from its civil and military nuclear plants. There is
the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico, which should hold
1.6 million cubic metres of waste left over from nuclear weapons production.
But that has not yet opened.

Desperately seeking space

The battle for Yucca Mountain has been raging for years, and is becoming
more urgent for the 45 power companies which operate the US’s nuclear plants,
where the thousands of tonnes of spent fuel are already stored temporarily.
The companies, and Congress, want a permanent solution. By the end of the
century, there will be 40 000 tonnes to store.

In 1991 the power companies launched a $10 million public information
campaign, which is still running on local radio and TV, to try to persuade
people living in key areas – such as Nevada – to accept nuclear waste. Meanwhile
the DOE is running a separate information programme to explain the background
to the Yucca Mountain proposal to the public.

The DOE plans to study Yucca Mountain until the end of the century.
If the site’s geological and hydrological setting cannot isolate the waste
sufficiently from the environment, ‘the DOE will tell the Congress just
that’, says Carl Gertz, the DOE’s Yucca Mountain project manager. If the
studies are favourable, the DOE will in 2001 apply to the US Nuclear Regulatory
Commission for a licence. The commission will then probably take up to four
years to review the DOE data. If it backs the DOE report, the repository
will be constructed by 2010.

Even if Yucca Mountain proves unsuitable, the DOE believes it will still
have time to investigate its second and third choices – at Hansford in Washington
State and Deaf Smith County in Texas – because the technology already exists
for medium-term storage of irradiated spent fuel in dry stores, such as
those at the Surry plant in Virginia and H B Robinson near Hartsville, South
Carolina. These can keep high-level waste for long periods, but overall
they do not meet the 10 000 year criterion. The present method, where spent
fuel is mostly kept in ponds at reactor sites, is at best only a short-term
option.

Gertz stresses that no variation on the existing medium-term storage
plans would meet the 10 000 year criterion. Critics say that the billions
of dollars of public money that will be spent on investigating the site
will make it virtually impossible to conclude that Yucca is unsuitable.
The DOE disagrees. ‘If they don’t give approval, we can’t go ahead,’ says
Gertz. ‘We have already built a $5 billion nuclear power plant at Shoreham
on Long Island, New York. It is licensed but never did operate because
of local policy. So there are precedents of large nuclear projects not going
ahead despite big investments.’ As the planned investment for the research
alone in the Yucca Mountain project is about $6 billion, the comparison
is realistic. If the project goes ahead, tens of billions of dollars will
be spent.

Apart from the plan to receive and store the commercial spent fuel,
Yucca Mountain will – if approved – take the high-level waste from the military
nuclear sites across the US – at Hansford, Savannah River in South Carolina
and Idaho Falls in Idaho, as well as from the defunct civil reprocessing
plant at West Valley, New York. The plan is to vitrify this reprocessed
high-level waste on site and ship the blocks to Nevada, though this would
have to meet criteria on radiation exposure and toxicity set by the Environmental
Protection Agency.

Water is another big issue in the Yucca project. Many critics fear that
an accident could contaminate the aquifer that runs under the site and feeds
into the Colorado river basin hundreds of miles to the south. DOE studies
state that the hydrogeology of Yucca Mountain looks promising because it
is a ‘closed basin’, in which the geological strata of the mountain effectively
isolate the water table beneath it. Gertz says it is ‘relatively noncontentious’
where the water flows; the issue is whether the water table could become
contaminated, either by rising several hundred feet from under the mountain
and into the store, or through rainwater seeping down through it. DOE reports
say although possible climate change in the region is important, fossil
evidence linked to studies of local flora and fauna suggest that the climate
10 000 years ago ‘wasn’t that much different from what it is today’.

Even so, the debate about ground water has been going on since 1984.
A key figure has been a pro-nuclear dissident scientist, Jerry Szymanski,
who recently quit the DOE project team after a decade trying to persuade
it to accept his views.

Szymanski, now 49, joined the DOE in early 1983. His doubts set in soon
after his first field trip to Yucca Mountain in September 1984. His dispute
focused on two exploratory trenches. Szymanski believed his evaluation showed
the presence of the mineral travertine, a limestone which gave the rock
a cream coloured appearance; it is recognised by most geologists as being
deposited by spring water. Despite the rock’s surface dryness, Szymanski
reckoned that pressurised ejections of fluid from the water table had occurred
beneath Yucca Mountain, and could again. He took his concerns to his seniors,
but they took no action.

Geological splits

Finally, in frustration, he submitted a 322-page draft report to his
superiors in November 1987. The report was leaked to Richard Bryan, then
Nevada’s state governor, who made Szymanski’s worries public in January
1988. The DOE promptly set up a review team of 40 scientists who in July
1989 published their own 133-page report substantially rejecting Szymanski’s
criticisms and calling his evidence ‘ambiguous at best’. Szymanski replied
with his full 911-page report, with an introduction by Gerald Frazier, a
scientist who had quit the internal review panel because he believed it
to be biased. The dispute remains unresolved.

As well as causing splits among geologists, Yucca Mountain has found
few friends among local politicians or business people in Las Vegas 160
kilometres away. In the state elections last November, when every elected
post was up for grabs, only one out of 135 candidates stood in favour of
using the site as a store – although he did win his seat. The present Nevada
governor, Bob Miller, adamantly opposes the plans, and even, says Gertz,
the study of the site. The DOE has criticised the Nevada state government
for being inconsistent about safety concerns: on the one hand encouraging
space-testing programmes and weapons-analysis tests close to urban areas
like Las Vegas, but on the other steadfastly opposing the Yucca Mountain
project ‘because it was the correct political thing to do’ says Gertz. ‘The
governor was not consistent. But he doesn’t have to be, because he has other
choices to make’. However, the newly installed Clinton-Gore team is not
expected to stop the Yucca Mountain investigation.

Meanwhile, Gertz claims the Las Vegas casino owners have been on Yucca
Mountain and the Nevada Test Site, but in December 1991, the owner of the
huge Circus Circus casino promised more than $100 000 to the opposition
campaign. Yucca Mountain may prove one gamble too many, even for Nevada.

Where then will all the waste go? Presently much of the waste intended
for Yucca is being held in interim storage at the Idaho Falls nuclear store,
run by the DOE. Gertz says ‘there’s a lot of desert space there to store
the thousands of drums of waste’. But Cecil Andrus, the governor of Idaho,
has expressed some reservations about waste being stockpiled there, as has
Carroll Campbell, the governor of South Carolina, the site of the Barnwell
and Savannah River nuclear complex.

‘In the end,’ Gertz concludes, ‘if Yucca Mountain proves the best site,
then the nation ought to pursue that. The US is a nation of 50 states. What
is right for the nation as a whole may not always be agreed to by individual
states, but the DOE was mandated to carry out a national responsibility’

David Lowry is a visiting research fellow at the Open University’s Energy
and Environmental Research Unit. He is co-author, with Andrew Blowers, of
The International Politics of Nuclear Waste, Macmillan Press, 1991.

* * *

1: The heat of the moment

The precise definitions of high, intermediate and low-level waste vary
from country to country, but there is wide agreement about what is needed
in terms of shielding and storage.

Low-level waste from nuclear power and reprocessing plants is slightly
radioactive and does not require significantly bulky shielding in its transport,
operation or disposal. It does not generate heat from nuclear reactions.
In Britain, the National Radiological Protection Board defines it as waste
with a radioactivity of between 400 and 4 million becquerels per kilogram
(for substances emitting alpha particles), and 400 and 12 million becquerels
per kilogram (for substances which are beta or gamma emitters).

Intermediate-level waste is more radioactive, and needs shielding in
its transport, operation and disposal. The casing of spent fuel rods from
a nuclear reactor, for example, count as intermediate-level waste. The amount
of shielding depends on the level of radioactivity. Such waste may generate
some heat from nuclear reactions, though the amount is small – up to 5 watts
per cubic metre – so that only passive cooling is required.

High-level waste arises from reprocessing spent fuel (which is not itself
classed as ‘waste’, although it is also highly radioactive, because a substantial
proportion of the fuel is unused). This generates its own heat – typically
10 kilowatts per cubic metre, and so often requires active cooling.

The half-lives of the contents are often thousands of years, and special
arrangements must be made to store them safely so that the environment is
not contaminated.

* * *

2: Waste not, want not

Efforts by NIREX, the British nuclear industry radioactive waste executive,
to find a disposal site for low-level waste produced in British nuclear
reactors and by reprocessing at Sellafield in Cumbria may run into fresh
problems because of the build-up of low-level waste from all British Nuclear
Fuels’ foreign reprocessing contracts and problems with BNFL’s new and as
yet uncommissioned thermal oxide reprocessing plant, or Thorp.

NIREX has been trying to find a suitable site for low-level and intermediate-level
waste since 1983. Attempts to locate sites in southeast England and Billingham,
on Teeside, failed in the mid-1980s following strong local objections and
technical unsuitability of the chosen sites.

Political pressures has forced NIREX to retreat to two nuclear ‘oasis’
communities – Dounreay in Scotland (site of the prototype fast breeder reactor
project) and Sellafield, both sites of reprocessing plants. Sellafield is
currently first choice on technical grounds, and test-bore drilling at the
site, two miles away from BNFL and near the village of Gosforth, are under
way despite objections by some local residents.

Environmental Resources, a London-based consultancy retained by Cumbria
County Council, has produced a report criticising both NIREX’s planned timetable
and the geological suitability of the Gosforth site. The government-appointed
Radioactive Waste Management Advisory committee has released figures predicting
that by 2000 BNFL will have 264 000 cubic metres of low-level waste, 126
000 cubic metres of intermediate-level waste and 1320 cubic metres of high-level
waste in store. These figures will double if wastes generated during decommissioning
of old reactors and at Sellafield are added.

The committee is conducting a wide-ranging survey to advise the government
of the key radioactive waste issues that will arise over the next 20 years.
One major problem will be what to do with the 350 tonnes of high-level waste
held at Sellafield in tanks, some of them up to 40 years old. BNFL plans
to vitrify the waste, using a technology developed in France.

Returning radioactive waste from foreign spent fuel reprocessed at Sellafield
presents a problem. Government policy since 1976 has been to repatriate
the total radioactivity imported. BNFL plans to do this by sending back
the plutonium and high-level waste recovered and substituting the equivalent
becquerel content of high-level waste for the low and intermediate level
wastes that arise as intermediaries in reprocessing. This policy may ease
Britain’s high-level waste disposal problem – exacerbated by the government’s
decision in 1981 to postpone the search for a store, as it was felt it would
not be needed for another 50 years – but worsen that of low and intermediate-level
wastes.

BNFL currently has nearly 1500 tonnes of imported spent fuel with no
obligation to return the waste. Another 3200 tonnes are stockpiled with
send-back obligations, are due to be reprocessed in Thorp.

If the government refuses to give Thorp an operating licence following
its extensive review begun last November, BNFL will have to work out what
to do with not only its existing wastes, but all 3800 tonnes of unwanted
spent fuel too.