Problems with the Yucca Mountain Site, vol. 2, no. 1

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Table of
Contents
2001: A Nuclear Waste Odyssey
From The President
Uranium Bailout Bill
ENDAUM Gains Ground
Dumping on Tribal Land
Nevada Opposes a Repository at Yucca Mountain
WIPP: Expanding or Not?
Black Ranch Appeal Update
Shedding Light on Uranium Operations in Siberia
Book Reviews
Mine Reclamation in New Mexico
Glossary

"Federal policy…has been to assure that "waste management problems shall not be deferred to other generations," and many environmental groups have shared the same view. Geological burial - at first glance anyway - looks like an ideal way to accomplish that since, after all, it "removes" the wastes from the environment and solves the problem once and for all. But in many ways entombment does just the opposite. It deliberately poisons a portion of the natural world for an endless stretch of time and in doing so it not only leaves future generations with thousands of tons of the most dangerous rubbish imaginable on their hands but makes it as difficult as the state of our technology permits for them to deal with it. We cannot promise our children - never mind those who will follow hundreds or thousands of years hence - that they will be safe from the wastes. And so long as that is so, we are not taking the problem out of their hands so much as we are taking the solution out of their hands."

— Kai Erikson
"Out of Sight, Out of Our Minds"
The New York Times Magazine
March 6, 1994.

Problems with the Yucca Mountain Site

There are 33 known geologic faults at or in the near vicinity of the Yucca Mountain site. In the past 20 years, there have been over 600 recorded seismic events of Magnitude 2.5 or greater within 50 miles of the site, the largest of which was a Magnitude 5.6 earthquake in 1992, known as the Little Skull Mountain earthquake. It was centered about 8 miles from the site, causing damage to DOE's Yucca Mountain project office at the Nevada Test Site (NTS).

The hydrologic picture at Yucca Mountain is complex and not well understood. The hydrology of Yucca Mountain consists of a thick, dry or unsaturated zone and a saturated zone, i.e., the water table below. The site was initially selected because, in part, the actual repository location would be in the dry, unsaturated zone, well above the water table. This was thought to be an advantage over other sites as they were all located beneath the water table. [Now] DOE has determined that water moves rapidly through the dry, unsaturated zone by the discovery of an isotope of chlorine [36] at the repository horizon [800 feet below the surface] that is a residue from the above ground weapons testing program carried out in the Pacific Ocean in the 1950s. DOE had previously estimated that it would take many thousands of years for water to reach the repository horizon from the ground surface.

Water is now recognized to move very rapidly in the saturated zone and is capable of reaching the accessible environment in less than 500 years.

Because the geologic and hydrologic characteristics of the site are so poor, the DOE performance assessment model includes radionuclide dilution in the groundwater as a means of reducing potential doses to individuals in Amargosa Valley. In other words, DOE is planning to intentionally contaminate an aquifer currently used for human consumption and irrigation in order to try to meet the EPA standard. This same groundwater standard is in effect for the WIPP transuranic waste storage site in New Mexico and is the standard for drinking water throughout the country. Only at Yucca Mountain are the DOE and Congress attempting to circumvent this standard.

SIDEBAR ARTICLES

High Level Waste Transportation

Problems with the Yucca Mountain Site

Yucca Mountain: No Place for Nuclear Waste
(Western Shoshone perspective)

CONTACTS

Nevada Nuclear Waste Project Office
1802 N Carson St, # 252
Carson City, NV 89701
(775) 687-3744
www.state.nv.us/nucwaste

DOE Yucca Mountain Project Office
PO Box 30307
North Las Vegas, NV 89136-3037
(800) 225-6972
www.ymp.gov

Citizen Alert
PO Box 17173
Reno, NV 891114
(775) 827-4200
www.igc.org/citizenalert

Shundahai Network
PO Box 6360
Pahrump, NV 89041
(775) 537-6088
www.shundahai.org

Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program
215 Pennsylvania Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20003
(202) 454-5130
www.citizen.org/cmep

Nevada Commission on Nuclear Projects
Report to the Governor and Legislature December, 2000
Checking geologic fault lines at Yucca Moutain

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