Don’t ask questions when you don’t know
the answers: That’s the rule of thumb for trial lawyers who don’t
want courtroom surprises.
The Bush administration has a
different rule of thumb when it comes to the science of storing
nuclear waste: Ask as few questions as possible and ignore answers
you don’t like.
Until last January, I served as a member
of the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, exploring the
safety of a proposed national, high-level, nuclear waste storage
facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Congress created the
non-partisan 11-member board to provide technical advice about
Yucca Mountain to the secretary of Energy. Its members — all
scientists and engineers with expertise relevant to Yucca Mountain
— were appointed by the president from a list submitted by
the National Academy of Science.
The board concluded that
the present design for Yucca Mountain is deficient, and unless it
is changed, the nation’s high-level waste repository is likely to
leak. Our conclusion has been ignored.
For the Bush
administration, the development of Yucca Mountain for nuclear
storage was a foregone conclusion. The Department of Energy is
spending over a half-billion dollars on Yucca this year, almost all
of it for getting a license application in to the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission by the end of 2004. The administration wants
to begin construction as soon as possible and is committed to
burying waste by 2010.
The big reason for the rush is
that the nuclear industry is desperate for the government to take
nuclear waste off its hands.The industry sees the waste problem as
standing in the way of relicensing old reactors and building new
ones. It’s pushing the Bush administration hard, and the
administration seems all too anxious to respond. The result is a
clear case of the tail wagging the dog. Protecting the public
should come first.
Unfortunately, designing the Yucca
Mountain repository turned out to be far more complex than had been
anticipated. There’s been one surprise after another. Yucca
Mountain was selected as the site because it is located in the
desert, and it was thought the arid climate would keep the waste
dry. It turns out the mountain is wet. It was thought that the
water wouldn’t move the waste underground very quickly. Wrong
again. Water moves through the mountain so fast that in order to
meet the regulatory requirements for isolation from the biosphere,
the Department of Energy had to add better-engineered waste
containment canisters to the design.
It now turns out
that those canisters are likely to corrode. Every member of the
Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board I served on reached that
conclusion, and it was the essence of our report delivered to the
Congress and the secretary of Energy last November. The report was
ignored.
In its haste to meet deadlines, the Bush
administration has a pattern of putting politics ahead of science.
History reveals plenty of examples of how that approach can lead to
disaster. The Challenger space shuttle was lost
because its O-rings froze. NASA engineers knew of the problem, but
management wanted to keep the launch deadline. Last year, a
presidential commission concluded that the shuttle
Columbia
was lost for similar reasons:
Management put deadlines over safety.
I hope my
resignation from a review board shouting in the darkness will bring
attention to what’s going on at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Here’s my
advice: Slow down. The nuclear waste is going to have to sit for
thousands of years. We might as well take the time to make sure we
bury it safely.
I also think President Bush should
instruct the Department of Energy to build up science programs
instead of shutting them down. If the science shows that the
project can be accomplished, then by all means apply for a permit.
It is true that the science might once again bring up new problems.
There’s no way to know in advance — that’s the nature of
science.
But for now, there’s no technical reason to
rush. The urgency is entirely political. A sound repository is
probably achievable, if time is taken to get the science and
engineering right. Meanwhile, nuclear waste can be safely stored
for many decades on site in dry casks, giving us time to find a
reliable, long-term solution.
Rushing ahead with a flawed
design is a mistake. Unfortunately, it’s a mistake the Department
of Energy is rushing to make.
Paul P. Craig is
a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News (hcn.org). He is professor of engineering emeritus at the
University of California at Davis and was a member of the Nuclear
Waste Technical Review from 1996 until January
2004.
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