An Independent View

Yucca's engineering unsound

The following is excerpted from Science magazine. It was released April 26 and was written by Rodney Ewing and Allison Macfarlane, two scientists who are considered to be friendly to the nuclear power industry.

The Secretary of Energy, in his recommendation to the president, maintained that "sound science" supports the (Yucca) decision.

However, during the past eight months three government agencies have reviewed the suitability of a Yucca Mountain repository and have issued a series of revealing reports. In September of last year, the Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a report that, among other points, concluded that the total system performance assessment in support of the site recommendation "relies on modeling assumptions that mask a realistic assessment of risk" and that "computations and analyses are assumption-based, not evidence-supported."

Last December, the General Accounting Office concluded that, "DOE will not be able to submit an acceptable application to NRC within the express statutory time frames for several years because it will take that long to resolve many technical issues."

This past January, the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board expressed "limited confidence in current performance estimates" and found the technical basis for the repository performance estimates to be "weak to moderate."

In the face of the scientific uncertainties about the site, there is a surprising sense of urgency to move forward with a positive decision on Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste repository. In the coming months, utilities that own nuclear power plants and states that have spent nuclear fuel stored at the reactors will press hard for action to approve the Yucca Mountain site, their concern heightened by fears of terrorist attacks on the storage facilities. Some have argued that the future of nuclear power is at risk in the absence of a positive decision.

The present sense of urgency is driven not by an understanding of the properties of the Yucca Mountain site, but rather by larger-scale policy decisions concerning nuclear power and national security. Decades of effort costing billions of dollars, and, in fact, our entire site-specific regulatory framework are now at risk if we do not accept Yucca Mountain as a repository.

The present decision to make Yucca Mountain a repository for high-level nuclear waste is a political decision ...

In our view, the disposal of high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain is based on an unsound engineering strategy and poor use of present understanding of the properties of spent nuclear fuel.

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