In recent weeks and days, major blows have been exchanged in the battle for and against the Yucca

Mountain high-level atomic waste dump. The pace has become fast and furious.

Since Sept. 11, pro-Yucca congressmembers and governors have shamelessly pushed their

long-time agenda with a new argument: now wastes must be moved as soon as possible from reactors in the densely populated East to the desert West because of potential terrorist attacks. The Department of Energy (DOE), however, suspended all its nuclear material shipments – including waste transports – the day after the World Trade Center collapsed, and again on Oct. 7 (fearing reprisals once U.S. bombing began in Afghanistan). A highly controversial train shipment of 125 irradiated fuel assemblies – which had been scheduled to roll 2,300 miles from the failed West Valley, New York reprocessing facility to DOE’s Idaho National Lab starting Sept. 20 -- has been officially postponed till at least spring, initially due to the fear of terrorism (and now due to faulty gaskets on the two waste transport containers, which prohibit it from traveling during cold winter weather conditions!). Although DOE has since lifted its waste transport ban, its actions were a clear acknowledgement that atomic waste transports are potential terrorist targets.

DOE has admitted that the upcoming final report on its Yucca decision will not contain an analysis of terrorist threats to the site nor to the tens of thousands of train and truck transports past the homes of 50 million Americans that would be required to get the waste to Nevada. Such concerns can be dealt with later, DOE says. Nevada lawmakers have introduced a bill in Congress that would require DOE to

address terrorist threats before recommending Yucca, but its chances of becoming law are slim.

On November 1, the Las Vegas Sun broke the story that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the agency responsible for deciding whether Yucca will receive an operating license, was investigating accusations that someone within its agency had leaked still-secret licensing review plans to the law firm Winston & Strawn, which then gave the plans to its client DOE, the agency which must apply for the license. Nevada officials immediately requested a copy of the document, but were told that it had not been made public yet. Nevada compared the leaked report to a teacher handing out the answers prior to a final exam.

Despite the scandal, the very next day NRC published its long awaited Yucca licensing rule. The rule incorporated Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) radiation release standards finalized last June. Both Nevada and a coalition of environmental organizations, including NIRS/WISE, have sued EPA in federal court for its extremely weak Yucca regulation. The rule would undermine the Safe Drinking Water Act, allowing an 11-mile nuclear sacrifice zone downstream of Yucca designed to dilute radiation in a presently used drinking water supply, rather than to isolate the waste from the biosphere.

On Nov. 8, President Bush nominated Margaret Chu to direct the DOE Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, which oversees Yucca. During her previous 20 years at DOE’s Sandia Labs, Chu

helped open the first permanent repository in the US, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, for burial of plutonium-contaminated military waste. Chu reportedly was the 28^th person to be asked to fill the controversial position, meaning 27 others had declined to fill the controversial position. Despite the conflict of interest of Chu reviewing her own previous work (Sandia, under Chu’s leadership, performed critical Total System Performance Assessments already favoring the Yucca Mountain dump), the Senate Energy Committee approved her nomination in mid-December and passed it onto the full Senate for approval.

Nov. 9 marked a victory for Yucca opponents, when Nevada’s powerful Senator Harry Reid managed to slash DOE’s requested Yucca budget for the next year by $70 million. However, DOE still has $375 million to work with in 2002, more than a million dollars per day.

On Nov. 14, a major Yucca milestone was reached when DOE finalized changes to its site suitability guidelines. DOE has had guidelines on the books since 1984, but Yucca Mountain leaks water so badly and so quickly that the site could not live up to them. Thus in 1998, NIRS and over 200 environmental groups called on DOE to disqualify Yucca based on its own rules. Rather than do that,

DOE has changed the rules in the middle of the game, yet again weakening the environmental standards to fit the poor site. Although it still has not finalized its Environmental Impact Statement, and has never responded to around 15,000 previous comments (half of them concerning transportation dangers), the agency opened yet another short public comment period during a holiday season ending Dec. 14.

Immediately after DOE revised its guidelines, Nevada announced it would challenge them in federal Court. Nev. Governor Guinn said that the new guidelines, which rely entirely on the integrity of the burial containers to prevent radiation leakage because Yucca’s geology is so flawed, could be used to justify a dump on the shoreline of Lake Tahoe if DOE so chose. Victor Gilinsky, a former NRC Commissioner who is now serving as an expert witness for the State of Nevada in its imminent lawsuit against the DOE regulations, quips that the reliance on container integrity begs the question: why not just bury the wastes in the basement at DOE headquarters in Washington, D.C. rather than ship them all the way out to Yucca Mountain? The growing number of anti-Yucca court actions may delay DOE’s ambitious schedule, cases that may eventually end up in the US Supreme Court.

On Nov. 15, DOE’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) released a report that may prove a powerful

tool to opponents of Yucca. OIG’s investigation revealed that from 1999 to 2001 DOE’s Yucca law

firm, Winston & Strawn, had worked on behalf of the Nuclear Energy Institute, lobbying Congress in favor of pro-Yucca legislation, at the very same time it was reviewing DOE’s license application

preparations. Winston & Strawn admitted there were no institutional barriers separating work for DOE from its lobbying on Capitol Hill to promote Yucca.

Citing the blatant conflict of interest and possible violation of regulations and laws, Senator Reid suggested that Winston & Strawn hire themselves a good defense lawyer: Nevada officials have called upon the bar associations in Washington, D.C. and Chicago, where Winston & Strawn is based, to investigate and punish the firm for its ethical meltdown. Nevada Governor Guinn has called upon DOE to identify all documents pertaining to the Yucca project that may be contaminated with Winston & Strawn’s conflict of interest. Amidst the growing scandal, Winston & Strawn resigned from its $16.5 million contract with DOE on Nov. 29^th. It’s unclear how much the resignation will delay DOE’s progress on Yucca as the agency seeks a replacement law firm.

Yucca opponents suffered a blow in mid-November when the powerful U.S. Chamber of Commerce announced a nationwide lobbying campaign to urge speedy approval of Yucca. Former Bush Sr. White House Chief of Staff and New Hampshire Governor John Sununu, as well as former U.S. Representative and Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, were hired to lead the pro-Yucca effort of the "Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth". The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, the third largest in the country, responded by quitting the national organization, as have numerous other local Nevada chapters. They’ve vowed to encourage Chambers in hundreds of cities along Yucca transport routes to do the same.

Meanwhile, Nevada has launched a million dollar, nationwide ad campaign of its own on the dangers of "Mobile Chernobyl." A recent Nevada report about a severe, high-temperature train tunnel fire that burned for five days in Baltimore this past summer calculated that had irradiated fuel been on board, clean up costs could have reached $14 billion and many thousands could have been exposed to potentially deadly doses of radiation.

Public Citizen, NIRS and other environmental groups organized a protest outside a pro-Yucca press conference at the U.S. Chamber headquarters across from the White House on Dec. 6^th. NIRS’ Paul Gunter asked Sununu if he would support DOE returning to New Hampshire to characterize sites for the second and third repositories that will be needed if high-level nuclear waste is generated for decades to come. The former Governor said no, he’d rather support an expansion of the dump capacity at Yucca. Nevada reporters jotted that statement down in their notebooks.

DOE suffered a major black eye on Nov. 30^th, when a General Accounting Office (GAO) report on Yucca was leaked to the Washington Post and the Las Vegas Review Journal. GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, was asked by Senator Reid and Rep. Shelley Berkley of Nevada to investigate bias, conflict of interest, and mismanagement within the Yucca Mountain Project. The leaked draft document cited a "failed scientific process," and urged the Bush Administration to indefinitely postpone site recommendation until scientific studies can be completed. GAO quoted an internal communication between DOE and its Yucca contractor, Bechtel-Science Applications International Corporation, which revealed that 293 scientific studies required by NRC before a license application could be submitted would take until 2006 to complete. GAO suggested that DOE wait that long – a whopping four to five years behind DOE’s current aggressive schedule – before recommending Yucca and submitting a license application to NRC. Energy Secretary Abraham immediately cried foul, charging that DOE should have gotten a chance to "correct errors" in the "fatally flawed" report before it was made public.

Despite DOE’s claim that 20 years of site characterization are now finished, the NRC, the US Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (a Presidentially-appointed science and engineering advisory panel), and experts overseas have criticized the Yucca studies. Concerns range from severe seismic activity, to how fast water flows through the mountain, to what could happen if a volcano erupts through the buried waste containers. A current article in Physics Today points to uncertainty about how the metal used for

disposal containers would react to ground water when it is combined with corrosive chemicals and

heated by the waste inside the repository. There is a growing recognition that, due to Yucca Mountain’s inability to isolate waste, DOE is relying very heavily on engineered barriers, contradicting the original concept of "permanent geologic disposal."

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham is expected to rule in favor of Yucca by early next year. President Bush, advocating the construction of new reactors in the U.S., will almost certainly give his thumbs up shortly thereafter. The Governor and Legislature of the State of Nevada have already indicated they will exercise their legal right under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to veto those decisions. The decision would then go to the Congress, where a simple majority vote in both Houses could override Nevada’s veto. That Congressional showdown could happen as early as June.

If Yucca clears all those hurdles, DOE would then submit a license application to NRC, perhaps by the end of 2002. NRC would review the application for three to four years. NRC could thus grant a construction license as early as 2006. Presently, the earliest waste shipments could arrive at Yucca in 2010. However, the law could be changed to speed that schedule up.

In fact, the GAO reported that DOE is considering building a parking lot style "interim storage" facility at Yucca in order to expedite waste shipments away from utilities that are presently suing DOE for breach of contract and seeking damages because DOE failed to begin hauling radioactive fuel rods away by January 31, 1998 – the arbitrary, unrealistic deadline Congress mandated in the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act.