And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
YUCCA MOUNTAIN IS TOO UNCERTAIN
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
After spending 15 years and $6 billion on the latest search for a final
resting place for nuclear waste, it's no surprise that Department of
Energy
officials think they should spend even more time and money trying to
prove
it should be buried at Yucca Mountain, Nev.
The DOE persists in this demented scheme even though worrisome red
flags are raised in its own interim report on the fitness of the site
to safely
contain highly radioactive nuclear wastes that will be deadly for at
least
10,000 years.
Nevertheless, the department concluded that there are "no show stoppers"
that would rule out Yucca Mountain yet. A final decision on whether to
proceed with the repository is due in 2001.
DOE scientists, in an interim viability assessment released Dec. 18, have
found problems that should have disqualified the site as a deep
repository.
It lies 100 miles north of Las Vegas and 1,000 feet above the water
table.
But the troubled repository at Yucca Mountain remains on track.
Chief among the acknowledged problems at Yucca Mountain is that water
moves through the mountain faster than expected. That raises the risks
that
radioactivity could move out of the repository. That the rock into
which the
waste canisters will be sealed is not as impermeable as once thought
should raise more alarms than it seems to have raised within the agency.
The report also concedes that the man-made waste canisters will fail long
before 200,000-plus years from now, the time when the radioactive
releases will be highest. This is an awkward conjunction of unpleasant
events, to say the least.
Moreover, the agency concedes it still does not understand what will
happen when the metal canisters interact with the rock under the
conditions
of extreme heat generated by the decaying radioactive waste.
The document is short on answers to the uncertainties that are inherent
in
constructing something capable of lasting tens of thousands of years.
Even the U.S. Geological Survey, which originally identified the site as
a
likely one for burying the waste, said the viability assessment contains
"surprisingly little" about the uncertainties of climate change.
Rainfall, now 6
inches a year, can be expected to triple in coming millennia, for
example.
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson offered this explanation to The New
York Times: "I don't think in science one can offer certainty." He argues
that since we're attempting to defeat natural ravages over millennia, we
must settle for probabilities.
Given the enormity of what's at stake here, surely we can demand more
certainty than this.
Publication Date: December 30, 1998
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