THE NUCLEAR-WASTE GAMBLE

...We think we have the Achilles heel of the program," claims Loux...

...Szymanski says he supports nuclear power and the geologic disposal of nuclear waste...

...DOE has such a miserable history of terrible, catastrophic mistakes over the years," says Sawyer of the latest Congressional maneuver, "that I guess they are more comfortable if they can create a situation where nobody can find out about this next mistake, if there is one...

...Many Nevadans complain their state has been singled out because of its political weakness, and they vow to defeat the site...

...There is nothing that is cast in stone," he says...

...Those in charge of the Yucca Mountain repository project have a long list of concerns...

...The Yucca Mountain site was selected, in part, because of the lack of rainfall...

...there was no stopping it," says Dravo, now vice president of the American Nuclear Energy Council...

...Transported from "cooling pools" around the country to the Nevada dump site, the high-level nuclear waste will total [ a staggering 70,000 metric tons, most of it made up of spent fuel rods, some from the by-products of nuclear-weapons production...

...And the idea of so many trucks not only coming into Nevada but also riding on interstate highways through almost every state will cause a myriad of problems...

...D.G...

...Loux is also laying plans to galvanize public support against the repository...

...The people in Beatty are pretty apathetic," says John Bass, a manager at The Burro Inn, a local hangout...

...With the cutbacks, Loux says, he can no longer fund on-site investigations that would verify the results of DOE research...

...A hundred miles northwest of the city and a thousand feet below ground, it is also dark and cool when Bob Schuch reports to work...

...If they getcha, they getcha,' says a waitress in nearby Beatty...

...Inside the casino it is dark and cool, indifferent to the searing desert sun outside...

...Current plans call for the radioactive material inside Yucca Mountain to sit hundreds of feet above the ground water...

...He has almost completed a study showing that the state could lose up to $500 million annually in revenue from tourists or retirees who may be frightened away by the waste site...

...But Congress is scheming to neutralize Nevada's opposition...

...Once used for testing nuclear weapons, the several-mile-long cavern is much the same size and shape as a subway tunnel...

...Many residents have become jaded by the contamination surrounding them and the signs at Yucca Flats warning visitors: Radiation Hazard: Touching or removing scrap objects prohibited...

...But little is known about the way water could travel over thousands of years through the type of volcanic "welded tuff" that makes up the mountain...

...And while some residents are resigned to the nuclear dump, many Nevadans regard the current situation as more than enough to make them uneasy...

...Evidence of their power can be seen today in the cra-tered, moon-like land stretching for miles in every direction from the top of Yucca Mountain...

...Once certain states got off the hook, everyone wanted to...

...As Szymanski himself puts it, "The politicians are not scientists...

...The nudear-power industry had been served a death warrant...

...When the bill finally reached the floor of Congress—the last day of the session-amendments were forbidden...

...On May 28, 1986, the DOE unilaterally canceled the search for the second, Eastern repository...

...There are only two ways they can get there: precipitation, or up from the ground," says Bob Loux, head of Nevada's State Agency for Nuclear Projects...

...But, as he acknowledges, 10,000 years is a long time...

...And after spending almost four years and $1.7 billion, the waste program still had not even collected any valid data on the geological suitabililty of any of the three sites proposed for the first repository...

...Then in 1970, on the advice of a National Academy of Sciences panel, the Department of Energy (which succeeded the Atomic Energy Commission) hastily chose a salt deposit in Lyons, Kansas, to house the first "permanent" nuclear-waste repository...

...Every 20,000 to 30,000 years, Szymanski believes, these cycles may cause a large shift in the depth of the region's aquifer, pushDumping on Nevada 'Once certain states got off the hook, everyone wanted to.' Congress has put all its nuclear eggs in one basket," says Nevada Governor Richard Bryan, "and a leaky one at that...

...Geologists call this the "unsaturated zone" of the mountain's volcanic rock because ground water does not flow through it...

...Here, though, the stakes are much higher...

...To Szymanski's chagrin, in the four years he has been internally discussing his theory DOE has never undertaken the relatively simple tests to analyze the deposits...

...This is important because rain would hasten the corrosion of the canisters designed to contain the waste for the first few hundred years...

...And unless scientists provide them with a full deck of cards, they will deal a crooked hand...

...But, he adds emphatically, if the repository does come to Yucca Mountain, the town of Dan Grossman and Seth Shulman write about science and environmental affairs from Watertown, Massachusetts...

...Gertz claims that the effects of even a sizable earthquake on the underground repository would probably be minimal...

...By late 1986, DOE had succeeded in alienating the public and politicians in every state touched by the repository search...

...DOE's military-waste repository in New Mexico is now known to be filling with water and may never open, and top DOE managers recently admitted that the nuclear-production facility at Savannah River, South Carolina, has been violating safety regulations for thirty years...

...At first, the Commission didn't know what to do with the waste that resulted from nuclear-weapons manufacture and civilian research...

...Yet it was political suicide for any member of Congress to let the program move forward in his or her state...

...There aren't these big public demonstrations that there are in other states about some of these issues," says Loux, but when the time comes, the opposition will become "very active and vocal, and very loud...

...Like sharks in a feeding frenzy, forty-nine states ganged up on Nevada," says Governor Richard Bryan...

...Gamblers with fancy suits and glazed faces watch intently as thousands of dollars ride on each throw of the dice...

...Under the auspices of the Department of Energy, a study by a national laboratory identified Crater Flat, immediately adjacent to Yucca Mountain, as a potential "hot rock geothermal area...

...In the barren Amargosa Desert north of Las Vegas, a discreet sign in front of a dirt road off Route 95 reads U.S...

...In the 1950s and 1960s, the autocratic Atomic Energy Commission, determined to build an empire of nuclear power at all costs, paid scant attention to the safe disposal of nuclear waste...

...Beatty has become the setting for national protests...

...And then there is the threat of earthquakes...

...The announcement angered the Western states and doomed the act...

...Ecology...

...Grant Sawyer, governor of Nevada from 1959 to 1967 and now chair of the state's High Level Nuclear Waste Commission, says it's like "sending John Glenn into orbit without figuring out how to bring him down...

...With a concerted effort and some strong voices in the Senate, Sawyer maintains, "we will ultimately beat this...

...Research for this article was supported, in part, by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism...

...High-level radioactive waste is so hazardous and long-lived that the Department of Energy says it needs to be isolated from human contact for 10,000 years—twice the length of recorded history...

...Summing up a widely held sense of betrayal, Morris Udall expressed his dismay that the Senate had "butchered" the act and "made it unworkable...

...By the mid-1970s, with no coherent disposal in sight, antinuclear activists began to pierce the atomic industry's armor...

...Even though DOE has talked about a mix of rail and truck shipments of waste, the cost and lead time necessary to get the access and build a rail spur spanning the hundred miles from Las Vegas to the dump site make transportation by rail virtually impossible, Loux says...

...The provisions of the act, however, were not to last...

...I am so insulted at being the victim of a cheap shoddy political machination that occurred in Congress," adds former Nevada Governor Grant Sawyer...

...Nor did DOE acknowledge his concerns in the department's Congressional testimony...

...It was at this point that Senator Bennett Johnston, Democrat of Louisiana, masterminded a solution, now known to Nevadans as the "Screw Nevada Bill...

...As Nevada goes, so goes our nation's nuclear waste policy...

...The suit charges that DOE must transfer or "withdraw" the land from the BLM before continuing to develop the site...

...In a single legislative stroke, opposition to the facility was cut to one third...

...To answer any concerns Beatty residents might have, the Department of Energy (DOE) opened an information office last March at the bend in the road that marks the center of town...

...Given the current level of stress measured in the fractures of the rock, Szymanski thinks such a geologic shift may be on its way at Yucca Mountain...

...As Dravo notes, the nuclear industry "was fighting for its life...

...If his view is corroborated by further evidence, he says, "serious consideration should be given to abandoning the Yucca Mountain site and declaring it as unsuitable for the purpose of permanent disposal of the high-level nuclear wastes...

...In the biggest gamble of all, the Energy Department hopes to bury the nation's high-level nuclear waste in a web of mountainous tunnels, twenty-five miles away on the edge of the Nevada Test Site...

...We're going to have to rebuild portions of the interstate system or just carry on war with every state and local government and county along the way," says Loux, adding that the issue "is going to cripple the project and maybe kill it outright...

...Similar bills later passed in five other states, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ruled that power-plant licenses should be predicated on progress in nuclear-waste disposal...

...Both Sawyer and Governor Bryan stress that the fight is far from over and that the state is not yet ready to surrender...

...The state of Nevada has estimated that even with trucks arriving every workday at ninety-minute intervals, it will take twenty-eight years just to gather all the waste to the Yucca Mountain site...

...But concerns about the site hardly end with questions of water or climate...

...Before long, Congress came up with a plan to dump the repository on Nevada—among the politically weakest states, and one with huge tracts of land already contaminated from underground nuclear weapons testing and from one of the nation's three low-level nuclear-waste dumps...

...But, he asserts, "the job has to be done right...

...People around here have learned to live with nuclear testing and nuclear waste," says Robert Lowes, editor and publisher of the local weekly Gateway Gazette...

...In fact, Szymanski's report leaked out only after the December 1987 Congressional vote which singled out Yucca Mountain for the repository...

...Area residents are resigned...

...Congress, which had passively acquiesced in DOE's blunders, was forced to take action before the 1988 elections...

...The risks are great that some time during this period the waste will leak into the water table or escape into the atmosphere...

...We don't even have a grocery store here," he says...

...According to nuclear lore, a number of Congressional seats, including that of Senator Slade Gorton, Republican of Washington, were lost in 1986 over the waste issue...

...We will ultimately beat this.' concern is that of transportation...

...The Department of Energy was instructed to complete a repository in the West by 1998 and to find a spot for one to be built later in the East...

...They were brought before Justice of the Peace Bill Sullivan in Beatty's small courthouse, which greets the visitor with a glass display-case filled to overflowing with confiscated marijuana paraphernalia from days gone by...

...ing the water up by hundreds of meters...

...In the context of recent revelations about radiation leaks at DOE facilities around the country, the risks of a leak occurring at Yucca Mountain are even more harrowing...

...Like others in Nevada, however, he is optimistic that the state can still successfully oppose the site...

...According to Szymanski's theory, which reached the public only after it was leaked to the Nevada governor's office, the region is in the midst of a cyclical state of geologic activity which causes the volcanic rock to contract and expand over time...

...Some experts who have studied the site believe that a volcano at nearby Lathrop Wells might have erupted as recently as 20,000 years ago...

...As field manager at G Tunnel, he is responsible for making sure the volcanic rock at the site will provide the waste with a stable and contained resting place...

...that's more tunnel space than the subway systems of Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Atlanta, and Cleveland combined...

...The catch is that Federal precedent requires the consent of the state legislature before a land withdrawal can take place-not a likely prospect in a state where almost 80 per cent of the public opposes the repository...

...On the floor, many worried that the decision to select a single site would prove shortsighted...

...High on this list is the question of water...

...Coming from a gaming town, to me those don't sound like good odds...

...This rock's about the toughest there is," says Schuch...

...Many of Beatty's inhabitants have worked at one time or another at the Nevada nuclear test site or the low-level nuclear-waste facility...

...The space used to serve as a hotel office, a restaurant, and a video arcade...

...Johnston's proposal replaced the requirement that DOE characterize three sites with a directive to characterize only one...

...It is just the latest episode in the nuclear industry's decades-long failure to find a technological solution to the problem of nuclear waste...

...We think DOE deliberately misled Congress," says Loux...

...Beatty is ill-equipped to cope with its impact...

...We can kill it by not approving the land transfer, which is a constitutional right, not one that Congress can play with...

...Climatologists worry that major changes in the weather could increase the influx of water through the unsaturated zone and even raise the water table...

...Szymanski, who helped the industry find sites for nuclear power plants for fifteen years prior to joining DOE, believes the Energy Department may have ignored a key aspect of the area's geology...

...Within a year, however, the program was in a shambles...

...But, as volatile as his theory has been, the issue that seems to galvanize the most public 'I don't like to be abused and kicked around,' says a former Nevada governor...

...Mined shafts like Schuch's G Tunnel will honeycomb an area of more than 1,500 acres to contain the radioactive material...

...Nevada's opening shot was fired on March 25, when State Attorney General Brian McKay filed suit against DOE in the Las Vegas Federal district court...

...The NUCLEAR-WASTE Gamble NEVADANS DON'T LIKE THE ODDS BY DAN GROSSMAN AND SETH SHULMAN Beyond the din of the slot machines, the stakes are high at the crap tables at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, even in the middle of the day...

...After all, 10,000 years ago the Ice Age was just ending and huge, melting glacial sheets of ice and snow which stretched across the continent may even have covered Yucca Mountain itself...

...It decided to put nuclear waste in large steel tanks, many of which quickly developed leaks...

...Johnston, chair of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and longtime nuclear-power proponent, was a natural for the role, having only recently been identified in the press as one of just two U.S...

...I don't like to be abused and kicked around...

...periodic side tunnels veer off the main shaft blocked by grim signs warning of nuclear contamination...

...The odds on the gamble are extremely steep...

...Frank Clements, office manager at the state-sponsored Nuclear Waste Task Force in Las Vegas, puts it this way: "DOE maintains 127 sites, and 126 sites leak...

...Schuch, an engineer from Sandia National Laboratory, conducts experiments for the Department of Energy in "G Tunnel" at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site...

...But Sullivan himself is apprehensive about what the waste repository will do to the town...

...Instead, it announced that it had chosen three Western sites to undergo a detailed survey, called "characterization...

...Eleven miles down the road is Beatty, Nevada, population 1,500, the nearest town to Yucca Mountain...

...Szymanski's concerns have sent tremors of their own throughout the program...

...The area is near Death Valley, the driest place in North America, and receives an average of only six inches of rain per year...

...the Air Force and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) own more than half...

...This finding suggests that deposits of magma, or molten rock, still lurk beneath the area's surface, threatening possible volcanic eruption in the future...

...Millions of years ago, the geology of the region was formed by violent volcanic eruptions...

...But here the walls are craggy and rough-hewn...

...Ultimately, water reaching the waste could cause it to seep into the underground water table—an aquifer which feeds into Death Valley...

...They are concerned about the possibility of seismic events, but only in the next hundred years while the above-ground facility would be operational...

...But he and others at DOE have acknowledged that an earthquake could be devastating to the above-ground handling facility where the waste will be delivered and repackaged...

...Yucca Mountain sits between two prominent faults, one of which is clearly visible from the slope's summit...

...DOE staff scientist Jerry Szymanski has additional concerns...

...However, in the conference committee, where differences between the two houses of Congress are hashed out, House members insisted that the bill at least should be honest and name Nevada outright...

...Bob Loux says that every other issue "pales in comparison...

...Carl Gertz, director of the nuclear-waste program for the Department of Energy, says that even with the new evidence from Lathrop Wells, the chances of volcanic activity occurring right at the repository site are "extremely slim...

...Congress had lost confidence in the program," remarked Andrea Dravo, who once served on the staff of the act's chief architect, Representative Morris Udall, Democrat of Arizona...

...I have the strong feeling that if Jerry's report had been made available to Congress, their action in December would not have occurred...

...One of the key clues that led to Szy-manski's theory is the existence of mineral deposits—what Szymanski calls "footprints of the past"—on and just under the surface of the area, indicating that water had been there at one time...

...Senators known to have received more than $100,000 from the nuclear industry in campaign contributions and other honoraria...

...It called for a detailed technical and political process to locate and build a repository on each side of the Mississippi...

...Finally, in 1982, more than a quarter of a century after the advent of commercial nuclear power but still without a disposal plan, Congress stepped in, crafting the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, designed in part to rescue nuclear power...

...This concern has been heightened by recent reports of mismanagement and safety violations at DOE facilities around the nation...

...While the bill did not actually name Yucca Mountain, few in Congress doubted that the language was designed to leave DOE no choice but to pick Nevada...

...If this site proves unsound, we will be left without a nuclear-waste-disposal program of any kind," said Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts...

...and S.S...

...Nearby oil and gas exploration and salt mining, it was discovered, had undermined the integrity of the formation, raising the specter of uncontrolled leaks of corrosive brine...

...In June, under the leadership of Louisiana Senator Bennett Johnston, Congress passed a bill that cuts back the state's funds—provided for in the original Act—to monitor and participate in the siting process...

...Millions of gallons of radioactive waste were simply dumped into trenches or onto the desert soil of Hanford, Washington...

...Reflecting a widely expressed sense of resignation, one Beatty waitress said of the waste repository, "If they getcha, they getcha...

...It's up to Bob Schuch to prevent such leakage...

...California's legislature passed a law requiring that a nuclear-waste-disposal technology be demonstrated before any new reactors could be built...

...If they say Yucca Mountain is the answer," says Sullivan, "I'm all for it...

...The large fenced facility is not an organic cactus farm but a low-level nuclear-waste facility—one of only three operating in the nation...

...If DOE's minuscule rainfall figures are correct, the deposits suggest that the water may have risen from underground...

...Last spring, almost 2,000 demonstrators were arrested at the test site...

...A careful political compromise, the act was hailed as an even-handed effort to confront the situation...

...Although the Federal Government owns the land at Yucca Mountain, DOE does not control it all...

...If there were some sort of disaster, I don't know anything about what I'd be supposed to do as the fire chief...

...Nonetheless, the news of relatively recent volcanic activity is being taken seriously and can hardly be comforting to proponents of the site...

...The ribbon-cutting ceremony attracted a crowd of 150, but most of the people came "to see the change in the office," says Laurel Hick-inbotham, who runs it...

...Ultimately, DOE must control the entire site, but in the meantime the department has requested a right of way from the Bureau to conduct its surveys...

...How did Yucca Mountain, Nevada, come to be the only spot considered for the nuclear dump...

...The industry needed the program to maintain the pretense that a waste solution would exist some day...

...For instance, geologists are studying volcanic activity in the area...