The Fight at the End of the Tunnel

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 15, 1999 | by Sean Paige

Nuclear waste has to go somewhere, and some scientists and government officials believe Nevada's desolate Yucca Mountain could be the best place. Others aren't so sure,

You can see for what seems like forever from the top of Nevada's Yucca Mountain: west, to where California's high Sierras loom over the magnificent desolation of Death Valley; east, as far as most eyes are permitted to peer into the secrets of the Nevada Test Site; and south, nearly to the glittering canyons of gaudy Las Vegas, 100 miles away.

But what's far more difficult to fathom is what is occurring hundreds of feet below this craggy outcrop, where the mountain is being honeycombed with tunnels that one day may entomb as much as 70,000 metric tons of the nation's most dangerous nuclear wastes the -- poisonous, radioactive by-products of the atomic age, which today are waiting at the civilian and government sites where they are monthly, daily, hourly being generated.

Here these wastes will rest, hopefully in peace, for at least 10,000 years, according to planners, when their dangers to whatever civilization evolves from our own will be null if not void.

Mixing equal parts laboratory and political science, Congress and the Department of Energy, or DOE, have spent 20 years and nearly $6 billion during the life of the project winnowing the nuclear-disposal options to the catacombs being bored into the rock below, arguing that the mountain's geologic features, arid environs and physical remoteness make it infinitely preferable to any current alternative, which includes sticking Uncle Sam's head in the sand. But others, including the host state, aren't convinced, arguing that Yucca Mountain makes a lousy burial place for nuclear waste and was chosen less for its scientific merits than its political viability.

Most burrowing inside the mountain had slowed during a recent visit from Insight, as the political, regulatory and scientific processes attempt to catch up to the tunneling machines that have been at work here. The five-mile-long main tunnel forms a horseshoe sloping 1,400 feet below the surface while staying about 1,000 feet above the water table. A dozen or so niches or testing alcoves branch off from the main tunnel, the site of ongoing experiments. Dozens of smaller, parallel tunnels called drifts eventually will branch off the central artery, holding 10,000 steel-and-nickel-alloy canisters of spent fuels and other nuclear by-products that will be stashed inside by rail-riding robots.

"I believe the country has to do this, and I think the country can do this" says the man behind the wheel of the speeding sport-utility vehicle, which fishtails and careens on the edge of control as he digs around on the driverside floor for a graph or chart. To engineer and Insight tour guide Michael Voegele, one of the leading advisers for Science Applications International Corp., or SAIC, the prime contractor at Yucca Mountain, the project not only offers a practical solution to a major problem. It also is the engineering challenge of a lifetime -- to build something that still will serve an important purpose in 10,000, maybe even 100,000, years.

"There is not a doubt in any of our minds that the technology to deal with this waste will develop," says Voegele, "and that there's no way the country can afford to have this stuff sitting out there, as it is today, at 100 different temporary sites around the country."

Hurtling across the dusty expanses of the site, facts, figures and geology lessons at the ready, Voegele emits the contagious confidence of the true believer. But if the desolate local topography doesn't inspire confidence -- dotted as it is by evocative locales such as Death Valley, the Funeral Mountains, Little Skull Mountain, Silent Canyon, Jackass Flats, the elusive Ghost Dance Fault -- critics of the project, led by the state of Nevada itself, can be harsher still.

"We believe it is an unsafe and unsuitable site and cannot be made safe and suitable by the Department of Energy," says Robert Loux, executive director of Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects. "After spending 20 years out there, DOE has found a way to make Yucca Mountain work, but that's going to mean changing a lot of the original parameters."

From the start, the process has been driven by politics rather than sound science, according to Loux. "The site was chosen for political reasons," he says. "There's been this continuing effort to move the goalposts to make sure the Yucca Mountain ball goes through. There's not any concern by the federal government about the health and safety of Nevadans; DOE's mission now is to make the site work rather than to find the right site."

The agency ignores any scientific data that might raise red flags, according to Loux, including evidence of hydrothermal invasions of the mountain from below, the possible intrusion of groundwater from above and ample evidence of seismic and volcanic activity in the area.

There certainly is more than a grain of truth to what Loux says about the politics of nuclear-waste disposal. When DOE years ago began exploring the possibility of entombing waste in salt caverns beneath Kansas, the idea died because of local opposition. And when the waste-storage benefits of granite came under consideration, then-senator George Mitchell of Maine succeeded in killing off the research program before its wandering eyes fell on the Northeast. "There are a lot of representatives from states that had granite in them," says a frustrated researcher who worked on the aborted granite project.