The following phone interview with Nevada Office for Nuclear Projects Executive Director Bob Halstead was conducted by RadWaste Monitor reporter Jeremy L. Dillon this week just prior to the visit of a Congressional delegation to Yucca Mountain.
Let’s jump into Rep. John Shimkus’ (R-Ill.) visit to Yucca Mountain first, mainly because that’s happening this week. What is your response to his visit to Nevada and his efforts to get Yucca Mountain restarted?
Well, up until last week I thought perhaps Representative Shimkus would contact us and invite us to send someone on the trip with them. And Wednesday came, and we hadn’t heard anything from them. So we checked on the availability of one of our best consulting geotechnical experts. We wrote them a letter on April 2 offering to send one of our people with them, and we just got a response from them today saying, well, sorry, we don’t have room for your person to accompany. I don’t know how much we want to make of that.
Let’s set that aside and let’s say that this is a public relations exercise. I think the last time they did it was about four years ago. What I object to is not the visit itself, but the fact that there is a tendency for pictures of delegations at the mouth of the exploratory tunnel to be used the way perhaps the media and generally the ramped-up pro-Yucca public relations pieces have used it—to try and create an impression in the mind of the public and in the mind of elected officials that there is more there than in there.
How so?
These photo ops have been used to create the idea that, and you’ve actually seen some pieces like this for example in the South Carolina newspapers, to imply that there’s a repository there waiting to take spent fuel shipments and it’s just because of Senator Reid’s influence with the Obama administration that the repository was shut down and it could be reopened immediately.
And of course, that belies the fact that there is a exploratory shaft that was used for research that cannot be used for disposal or storage of waste. Put it another way, in order to have a repository that could take 70,000 metric tons of spent fuel and high-level waste, you’d have to build at least another 40 miles to 45 miles of tunnels and drifts, and if you were to try to accommodate the whole inventory, you might have to build as much as 70 miles to 90 miles of drifts and tunnels depending on the technical assumptions you make about emplacement.
While it’s true that $14 billion to $15 billion, depending on what year dollars you value the effort, have been spent at Yucca Mountain, another $85 billion or so will have to be spent to construct and operate a repository there. DOE’s numbers suggest that you could build a repository in salt or with certain designs in shale for less than half that amount. So my objection to the public relations part of it is that it ends up being used to perpetrate an illusion that, yes, there is more there than there is and that it would be easier to get a repository up and running there than to start over.
In fact, I would make an argument that given the licensing issues and the difficulty of licensing Yucca Mountain, given the difficulty building the longest new railroad project in the United States in the last century, that you can make an equally good argument that the best thing to do is cut your losses and run. This is a bad idea from the very beginning, and we need to get on with fixing the program and looking for a volunteer site, particularly from a site where the host geology would be salt or shale. That’s my response to it.
Shimkus has said that actually going out there and seeing it in person gives a lot of Congressmen a better feeling for the project. Will seeing the site give someone a better understanding of Yucca Mountain?
The assumption that taking people to the desert and showing them a desert site that is on government-owned land, part of which they have lost their land withdrawal for and in fact they’ve even lost their right of way for a critical section of that land—The notion that this makes it easy, and of course I don’t expect them to give a discussion on the projections of variations in future appointment regimes.
The inherent problem with disposal on the unsaturated zone is that precipitation water infiltrates from the top of the mountain through the waste emplacement horizon and carries radionuclides into the underlying aquifer, which is then a concern downgradient in Amargosa Valley and all the way to Death Valley. That’s the kind of an explanation that someone like Steve Frishman [consulting geologist] would have given that might have in fact turned this into an educational experience.
You’d have to understand that what you see is not necessarily what’s important for long-term repository performance, whether it’s for the 10,000 years that would be required for other sites or the million years of performance that’s required in the EPA standard for Yucca Mountain. Again, it’s a public relations photo opportunity, when in fact it could have been an opportunity for them to understand the technical complexity of demonstrating that that site meets the NRC and EPA requirements.
Rep. Cresent Hardy (R-Nev.) just released an op-ed that calls for Nevada to enter into at least negotiations to see what’s on the table for them, to see what positives could be drawn from hosting a project like this. What’s your response to his reasoning?
I responded to Congressman Hardy’s op-ed by saying that I hope that his position that safety came first was what I understood it to be, and that safety coming first means you have to look at the safety debate as it’s framed by the NRC regulations and rules of practice. That means that we’re just at the beginning of the safety debate. The NRC safety evaluation reports are the first formal step in the beginning of that debate.
The NRC provides the basis for us to look at new information that might affect the 219 contentions already admitted in the licensing proceeding. They secondly provide new information that might be the basis for new safety contentions to be filed. Thirdly, we looked at them to see if anything that was said in the safety evaluation reports directly resolved any of the 219 admitted Nevada contentions. There are certainly about another 70 contentions submitted by other parties, and none of those contentions are resolved by what’s there.
So we’ve seen the formal beginning of the safety debate. Now we have to see the groundwater impact supplement to the Department of Energy’s environmental impact statement, which the NRC staff found to be deficient in six specific areas. Then we have to see if the NRC, if the commissioners themselves, will actually vote to lift the suspension on the adjudicatory portion of the licensing proceedings. So all of those things lead into what would probably be a four year, at least, highly contested regulatory proceeding which the NRC recently said in their question-and-answer session before Senator Alexander’s Appropriations Subcommittee, they said the NRC needed $330 million to carry out their role in the proceeding. DOE has previously said that they needed $1.66 billion and as long as 10 years for all the activities associated with licensing.
So the premise of Representative Hardy’s op-ed piece is we have to look at safety first, and then after we look at safety, perhaps we could open this discussion of economic benefits. My response to that is the safety debate has just begun, it’s going to take several years, our legal team thinks at least four years to resolve, and we don’t think it’s appropriate to discuss anything else until we resolve those safety questions.
Frankly, right now we’re convinced that the site itself is unsafe, issue number one. Issue number two, the license application contains a repository design, and that repository design does not fix what’s wrong with the site, either for its performance over hundreds of thousands of years or the performance of the surface facilities in the pre-closure period, that is the first 50 years to 100 years of surface operations and up to 300 years waiting to see if the waste has to be retrieved. Thirdly, the license application doesn’t resolve the transportation safety issues some of which are cross-country national issues, some of which are impacts on Las Vegas, some of which are the feasibility impacts of building a 300 mile-long railroad that might cost $3 billion, take 10 years to construct.
So what you’re saying is, it’s premature to begin this discussion?
Premature to even talk about it.
The NRC said in its safety evaluation report that DOE’s repository design meets its regulatory requirements for a majority of its requirements. But from what I just heard from you, you disagreed with that. Could you expand on that, and where you’re seeing specific areas that are deficient in the NRC’s safety evaluation report?
This is a rather large amorphous question, and first, let’s talk about the safety evaluation report, and particularly Volume 3 on post-closure separate from the NRC licensing proceeding.
The people who say that Volume 3 includes that the repository is safe are not quoting Volume 3. They’re not quoting the very careful explanation of the safety evaluation reports that is in the NRC’s own press release about it. In fact the word "safe" only occurs once in the text of Volume 3, and it has nothing to do with Yucca Mountain and appears twice in the titles and the bibliography.
What Volume 3 says is that if the repository is constructed the way that DOE says it will be, and there are questions about that. If DOE’s calculations about groundwater are correct, but we know that there deficiencies in DOE’s groundwater analysis because that’s why the NRC required a supplemental EIS; if DOE’s[total system performance assessment] calculations are correct; if the fuel places where we spot-checked their calculations are correct; if there are no unanticipated events; and if there are no human errors of significance, either in the design or construction or analysis of the repository, then we conclude that the amount of radionuclides that will escape from the repository into groundwater are at such levels and such travel times that the maximum reasonably exposed individual consuming 2 liters of water per day over an extended period of time will not receive a radiation dose in excess of the EPA regulations, which for the first 10,000 years are an additional 15 millirem per year and then thereafter up to a million years are 100 millirem.
Now, there are a lot of conditionals in that, and that’s exactly what the safety debate is in the witness depositions. We will dispose all the NRC people who worked on Volume 3 and all the rest of the safety evaluation report as witnesses. We will explore their assumptions and the pros and cons of their conclusions. So, the people who say that this is a definitive finding of safety are giving their own interpretation, which is not what the NRC staff says in Volume 3, and it’s not what the NRC is officially saying in their press releases.
It’s an interpretation. It’s obviously useful to the pro-Yucca forces to put this interpretation on it. But it’s not technically or legally correct.
It sounds like you are pretty confident in Nevada’s argument against Yucca. Would you like to see the adjudication process opened to get your argument up and running?
Our assumption from the very beginning is that we would have a chance to fully adjudicate our contentions and demonstrate that across the board in the transportation area getting waste to Yucca Mountain; in the pre-closure safety area that is the receipt and handling of fuel at Yucca Mountain and the first 50 years to 300 years of operation; and then of course in the post-closure period up to a million years, that our safety and environmental concerns are valid.
If we can win those, the concern I have had has not been about the scientific and legal basis for our contentions. Frankly my concern is whether we would have the resources we need. This is a very expensive process and so the only thing I have really been concerned about going into this is the area of resources.
So far for the preliminary phase we’ve gotten a positive response in our initial budget request to the state legislature which began with a request for funds last year, which we’re operating on now. Given the overall scope of this, we made a modest request. It totals about $4.4 million between what’s been requested for expert witnesses by our agency and the money requested to support the legal team by the attorney general.
We’ve gotten full support from the governor’s office and the attorney general’s office. We still have a couple of months to go on the budget process here, but so far everything that I’ve heard suggests that we will have sufficient funds for the first part of this. Now, if it goes to a full legally mandated licensing proceeding, we will need considerably more funds. That’s an issue we’ll have to work out down the road if that happens. But, I am confident in the scientific basis of our challenges and I’m confident in the legal strategies and our legal team that’s been developed.
