Copyright 1999 Federal News Service, Inc.
Federal News Service
FEBRUARY 10, 1999, WEDNESDAY
SECTION: IN THE NEWS
LENGTH:
2610 words
HEADLINE: PREPARED STATEMENT OF
KENNY C.
GUINN
GOVERNOR OF NEVADA
BEFORE THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON
COMMERCE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND POWER
BODY:
Mr. Chairman, Members of the Subcommittee:
I appreciate the
opportunity to speak with you today on a subject that we in Nevada have been
confronting for more than 20 years, and has held our full attention as a state
since Congress acted in 1987 to single out Yucca Mountain,
Nevada, as the only site to be studied as a candidate repository site for the
nation's commercial and government- owned high-level nuclear waste.
We are
all aware of the political nature of that 1987 decision. And we are all aware
that no state would accept that decision with any less opposition than Nevada
has shown during the past nearly 12 years. In 1989, the Nevada Legislature
enacted a law making the storage of high- level nuclear waste illegal in the
State. Some 14 other states had similarly intended legislation on their books at
the time.
In a recent bi-annual poll conducted by the University of Nevada
regarding major public issues in the State, 75% of Nevada citizens were opposed
to Yucca Mountain becoming the final destination for the
nation's high-level nuclear waste. Since 1992, this number has risen by 16
percentage points in the same poll. One must wonder why Nevadans, in impressive
and increasing numbers oppose this imposition within our state.
The reasons
are many, but they settle generally into two important categories - political
fairness and equity, and safety. Nevada has no nuclear power reactors, and is
far distant from most of the nation's reactors, which are east of the
Mississippi River. The principle of regional equity that was intentionally
embedded in the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act as a fairness gesture for western
states was essentially stripped from the Act in 1987. And now we see a further
insult to fairness and equity in HR 45, which contains a provision to preempt
any state laws, including federally delegated environmental protection
authorities, that might interfere with t's purpose of storing nuclear waste in
Nevada. Fairness is also at issue in the matter of HR 45's elimination of the
Secretary of Energy's duty to determine, based on statutory criteria, the
suitability of the site for development of a repository, and Nevada's ability to
disapprove in a substantive manner before Congress, the Secretary's
recommendation that the Yucca Mountain site be developed as a
repository.
Both fairness and equity, and safety are at stake in the ongoing
stream of actions to preserve the viability of the Yucca
Mountain site through compromise of safety, suitability and licensing
standards. The site should have been disqualified from further consideration in
1992 when it was dear to all parties that it did not meet the established safety
standard for radionuclide releases from geologic repositories. Instead, Congress
instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to write new, site specific
safety standards for a Yucca Mountain repository, and directed
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to conform its licensing regulations to that
new standard.EPA has not yet acted, but the NRC has proposed a new standard for
a Yucca Mountain repository that is less
protective than that applied to the DOE's geologic repository for transuranic
wastes at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, in New Mexico. The NRC also has
ignored the Safe Drinking Water Act protection limit for radionuclides in
drinking water, even though it is known that radionuclides released from a
Yucca Mountain repository will contaminate the water supply
aquifer used by local residents and farmers. Groundwater protection is afforded
by law to all other people of the United States.
In December, 1998 former
Governor Bob Miller and I, as Nevada Governor-elect, joined in a letter to
Energy Secretary Richardson stating that the Yucca Mountain
site should be disqualified from further consideration as a repository based on
criteria established in the DOE's guidelines for repository site recommendation
that were enacted pursuant to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 and remain in
effect today. The technical basis for disqualification was cited from DOE and
other site data and analyses. Data and information presented in DOE's
subsequently released Viability Assessment serves to confirm our finding that
the site meets the guidelines' provision for disqualification due to rapid
groundwater flow that would carry released radionuclides through Yucca
Mountain and to the accessible environment. Despite clear information
to the contrary in the Viability Assessment and in later DOE documents,
Secretary Richardson responded that the disqualifying condition is not met. He
said that average groundwater travel time from the repository to the accessible
environment is greater than the required minimum 1,000 years. HR 45 would moot
this critical safety criterion by eliminating the existing site recommendation
guidelines and the required factors which are used to qualify or disqualify a
candidate repository site.
With DOE's recent understanding that there are
fast pathways for groundwater movement through Yucca Mountain,
it revised its repository performance assessment code for use in the Viability
Assessment and revised its safety strategy for a Yucca Mountain
repository. The original notion of a geologic repository was that the natural
features of the site, its geology and hydrology, would serve a significant role
in assuring long-term isolation of the waste, and that engineered barriers would
be employed to enhance the site's waste isolation capabilities. Now, the
Yucca Mountain safety strategy relies nearly entirely on the
predicted long lifetime of the metal waste containers in the repository, and
then as the containers fail the released waste is intended to be diluted in the
groundwater as it travels to locations where it can be pumped for human
consumption and use. New information, presented last month to the U.S. Nuclear
Waste Technical Review Board by DOE, indicates that the Yucca
Mountain site's natural barriers to waste release only account for a
fraction of a percent of the predicted repository performance, and the
engineered waste container is the primary functional barrier. As the containers
fall, mainly due to corrosion, increasing amounts of radionuclides will be
released to the groundwater, and the predicted average peak dose to humans will
be approximately 250 times the limit set by the Safe Drinking Water Act.
The
Yucca Mountain site, according to all current data will not
function as a geologic repository. Instead, if developed, it would be an
underground engineered repository until the engineered barriers fail. With
failure, the resulting doses would be totally unacceptable, for health and
safety reasons, if they were intended to be imposed on the public today. HR 45's
provision for a maximum dose standard of 100 millirems per year to an average
individual in the vicinity of the site represents a standard 25 times greater
than the dose limit of the Safe Drinking Water Act. This too, in our view, is an
unacceptable risk to the public coming from just one component of the nuclear
fuel cycle. This is an especially important consideration in view of new
information about plutonium and tritium migration at unexpectedly long distances
from underground nuclear weapons test locations at the Nevada Test Site. Some of
these contaminants, once they exit the Test Site boundary will add to the
radionuclide concentration in the same aquifer affected by releases from a
Yucca Mountain repository, further increasing the predicted
doses to the public.
Broad ranges of uncertainty plague the calculated
performance assessment for a Yucca Mountain repository. The
Viability Assessment indicates that the uncertainty associated with the waste
package lifetime projections is a factor of about 1,000 fold, and the
uncertainty in the total performance assessment is on the order of a factor of
100,000 to 1 million.
DOE's primary effort is to reduce uncertainty in
the engineered system, since it does not believe it can further significantly
reduce uncertainty in the performance predictions of the natural system. DOE
continues to express the results of the performance calculations as mean values,
without elaborating on the associated range of uncertainty, which means that a
predicted dose of 1 millirem to an individual per year could actually represent
an expected range of dose spanning from .001 millirems to 1,000 millirems. The
lower portion of the range might be an acceptable dose, while the upper range
doses certainly are not acceptable. It does not appear that the uncertainties
associated with the Yucca Mountain repository performance
calculations will be reduced significantly at the time the Secretary's
suitability determination and site recommendation is scheduled to be made. This
casts serious doubt on the use of the Viability Assessment to support any
decision to continue site characterization and expenditures of the Nuclear Waste
Fund on the Yucca Mountain site.
Seismicity and earthquake
impacts have been generally relegated by DOE to be design issues for a
Yucca Mountain repository, including the surface facility
during the operations phase. At issue is the credibility and feasibility of
designs for both underground and surface facilities to withstand safely a
possible Magnitude 7 earthquake in the vicinity of the site, and the strong
ground shaking predicted to occur sometime in the next 10,000 years by the
Viability Assessment technical bases information reports. As you may have heard,
a swarm of earthquake activity has occurred during the past month on the Nevada
Test Site, with the largest registering Magnitude 4.7, and eight events greater
than Magnitude 3.0 in a four day period. These earthquakes have occurred on the
eastern end of the Rock Valley Fault, one of the most active faults on the Test
Site. Swarms of earthquakes on the western end of this fault, near Yucca
Mountain are commonplace. I have attached recent press accounts of
these earthquakes to my statement.
During the period 1976 to 1996, within a
fitly mile radius of Yucca Mountain there have been over 620
recorded earthquakes with a magnitude greater than 2.5. The largest of these,
with a magnitude of 5.6, occurred on June 29, 1992 at Little Skull Mountain, a
few miles from the Yucca Mountain site. This
earthquake, on a fault near the Rock Valley Fault, caused damage to the DOE's
Yucca Mountain Field Operations Center at the Test Site.
Independent researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Harvard
University recently reported that their investigations in the Yucca
Mountain region indicate tectonic strain and earth crustal deformation
is more than ten times greater than previously assessed by the Yucca
Mountain Project. This could lead to more frequent and larger
earthquakes than previously predicted for the Yucca Mountain
area, and a greater probability of recurrence of volcanic activity that could
impact the repository site. Further research is being carried out by these
scientists and the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology under a cooperative
agreement with DOE.
It is noteworthy that, under current Nuclear Regulatory
Commission regulations regarding earthquake potential, a nuclear power reactor
would not be licensable at the Yucca Mountain site, and an
Interim Storage Facility as proposed by HR 45 would be subject to the same
safety regulations. The apparent proposed location of the Interim Storage
Facility on the Test Site lies between the Yucca Mountain site
and the location of the 1992 earthquake and the Rock Valley Fault.
Aside
from earthquake safety concerns associated with the Interim Storage Facility
proposed by HR 45, operation of the facility would begin transportation of
high-level nuclear waste from the nation's nuclear power reactors and DOE
defense facility locations to Nevada, based on the apparent assumption that the
Yucca Mountain repository site will be found suitable and
receive a license for development and operation of a repository. Not only does
this assumption incorrectly prejudge the technical suitability of the site, as
discussed above, but it encourages approval to begin development of an unsafe
repository. If the repository is not approved or developed, the waste would have
to be moved again to some future disposal location, thus increasing
transportation risks to the public. As it is, transportation of the thousands of
shipments of waste to Nevada over a thirty year period will impact 43 states,
and more than 50 million Americans within a one half mile of the highway and
rail routes.
Transportation risks are exacerbated by the evolving threat
from terrorist action or sabotage. Spent fuel and high-level nuclear waste
trucks and trains will make for new and potentially attractive targets,
especially in the many urban areas through which they must pass on route to a
Nevada facility.
The cost of this legislation poses another major problem.
An independent cost assessment, released in February 1998, was conducted by a
team of experts with oversight by a major national accounting firm. The report
estimates the total cost of the repository and interim storage system envisioned
by HR 45, using procedures similar to those employed by DOE in its Total System
Life Cycle Cost evaluations, and concludes that the total cost for development,
operation, and closure to be $53.9 billion in 1996 dollars. The Nuclear Waste
Fund, at maximum, will generate only about half of the necessary funds. It is
unacceptable that the American taxpayer should have to bear the burden of paying
billions of dollars for this misguided and risky program that was originally
intended to be one of full cost recovery.The development and operation of
interim storage and repository facilities in Nevada and the transportation of
spent fuel and highly radioactive materials to such facilities will also result
in significant socioeconomic impacts. These impacts will be felt most acutely by
Nevada's tourism-based economy, but they will also affect cities and communities
all across the country should there be accidents or incidents involving nuclear
waste shipments, as there almost certainly will given the magnitude and duration
of the shipping campaign.
In Nevada, the impacts from disruptions of the
tourism economy due to real or perceived risks from repository or interim
storage-related activities could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars
depending on the nature of the precipitating event, its location (i.e., within
the Las Vegas metropolitan area), the intensity of media attention given to it,
and other variables.
Similar economic disruptions are dearly possible in any
of the hundreds of major metropolitan areas through which waste shipments will
pass and in rural areas that are especially vulnerable to radiation-driven
impacts (i.e., such as agricultural or ranching areas that could be either
contaminated or stigmatized as a result of an accident or incident).
HR 45
is an unacceptable bill for Nevadans because it promotes unprecedented health
and safety risks to current and future Nevadans - at levels no other citizens of
the nation are expected or required to endure. HR 45 is an unacceptable bill for
the nation because it imposes unnecessary radiation risks from normal
transportation operations and accidents on a significant portion of the
population.I urge rejection of HR 45 in the interest of protecting the health
and safety of Nevadans and all Americans.
Thank you for the opportunity to
present my views and those of my fellow Nevadans to this Subcommittee on a
matter of critical importance to my state and the nation.
END
LOAD-DATE: February 11, 1999