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Kevin Kamps Yucca Mountain Train Wreck 25 Years Long Twenty five years is a long time. Unless you’re talking about high-level radioactive waste. Then it’s just 1/10,000 th of the 250,000 years that plutonium will remain deadly. About twenty five years ago, just a year before the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor melted down, the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) was founded in Washington, D.C. to serve as the information and networking center for citizens and environmental organizations concerned about nuclear power, radioactive waste, radiation, and sustainable energy issues. Throughout the 1970’s, groups across the U. S. had fought new reactor construction proposals, fending off the vast majority of the 1,000 nukes Richard Nixon envisioned being built by the year 2000. After the TMI meltdown, reactor orders dried up. So NIRS and the anti-nuclear power movement it serves hunkered down to fight the 131 reactors that had actually gotten built. Over 60 years since the Manhattan Project and nearly 50 years since the advent of nuclear electricity generation, we still don’t know what to do with any of the high-level radioactive waste (HLRW) that’s been generated. As longtime NIRS ally Michael Keegan at the grassroots Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Great Lakes in Michigan says, electricity is but the fleeting byproduct of nuclear reactors – the actual product is forever deadly radioactive waste. Uranium fuel rods exit reactors a million times more radioactive than when they entered, so much so that a few seconds or minutes of exposure to an unshielded rod would deliver a lethal dose of radiation. By radioactivity content, and despite its “atoms for peace” moniker, commercial nuclear reactors have generated more than 95% of the HLRW of the Nuclear Age in the U. S. – meaning the nuclear weapons complex, nuclear medicine, academic and industrial uses of radioactivity account for less than 5%. To convince hesitant utilities to go nuclear half a century ago, the Eisenhower Administration promised to take out the garbage – an unprecedented taxpayer subsidy to private industry that has proven much easier said than done. As early as 1957, the same year atomic watts began flowing through U. S. transmission lines for the first time, the federal government came down in favor of “deep geologic disposal” for long-lasting, HLRW. The thought was, once buried, the waste would stay put. Of course, at the time, the geological theory of plate tectonics was considered a wild notion. That ferment in the Earth’s crust has proven most confounding to the search for a “suitable” burial site. First the Feds looked at salt formations under Lyons, Kansas. In the early 1970’s, the Atomic Energy Commission (yep, the same AEC responsible for nuclear weapons testing in Nevada that blanketed the U. S. with radioactive fallout downwind) held a rushed press conference that the nuclear waste problem was solved, that shipments of waste from across the country would begin forthwith for disposal there. But the less-than-enthusiastic State of Kansas got busy, and its Geological Survey soon announced the Lyons site was riddled with bore holes for salt and other mineral extraction, threatening to flood the proposed atomic waste dump with highly corrosive brine that would breach the burial containers and carry the radioactivity back to the surface or nearby groundwater. The AEC skedaddled out of town. It wouldn’t be the last time. Right about the same time NIRS got launched in the late 1970’s, the “brand new” U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) began poking around other potential dump sites, including Yucca Mountain, Nevada. AEC had earned such a bad reputation since the 1940’s that a name change was in order, although DOE retained almost all of the same discredited personnel and policies as before. In the early 1980’s, the powers that be in Washington D.C., many of them very friendly with the nuclear power industry, decided to make good on that big promise made 25 years earlier. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) was passed in a hurry during the waning hours of a lame duck session of Congress just before Christmas vacation. With many Senators already departed for Christmas vacation, numerous lengthy yet unprinted amendments were rammed through with a grand total of 15 minutes of debate, despite one congressman’s observation that “there is not one senator who could tell us what is in this bill.” The Senate rushed the legislation over to the House with express instructions to either “take it or leave it”. The House took it, with one-third of its members missing the vote and the other two-thirds unfamiliar with the Senate’s amendments, in fact rubberstamping provisions into law that it had previously rejected. (1) This would not be the last time nuclear waste law was passed in midnight dumping fashion. In 1987, for example, the “Screw Nevada” bill rode into law on the coattails of an appropriations bill. Contradicting the NWPA’s mandate that multiple sites with diverse geological characteristics in the East and West be compared and contrasted as to suitability for a HLRW burial site, the new law singled out Yucca Mountain as the only site to be further studied. The dozen congress members from Washington State and the 32 from Texas – delegations that included the Speaker of the House and House Majority Leader – orchestrated the move against objections from the single congressman from Nevada. It would not be the last time that politics trumped science at Yucca Mountain. The ’87 law could just as well have been dubbed the “Screw the Indians” bill, for it created the Office of the Nuclear Waste Negotiator at the DOE. Anti-nuke Ojibwe activist Winona LaDuke hit the mark when she observed that the best minds in nuclear science, after fifty years, have finally found the solution to the nuclear waste problem: “Haul it down a dirt road and dump it on an Indian reservation.” The Negotiator, David Leroy, contacted every federally recognized tribe in the U. S., offering big bucks in exchange for the tribal councils to consider becoming the “temporary” home to the nation’s deadliest poisons, at least till a “yet-to-be-determined” (insert “Yucca” here – so much for not prejudging the site suitability studies!) permanent dump could be opened. After all, Leroy explained in the most ironic environmental racism, who better to safeguard forever deadly radioactive waste than Native Americans, recognized for their stewardship of the Earth and philosophy of watching out for the seventh generation to come? He forgot to mention that First Nations’ DNA is just as vulnerable as everyone else’s to radiation! Enter NIRS. Its Radioactive Waste Project staffer Mary Olson attended a big activist conference sponsored by Lois Gibbs, Love Canal housewife extraordinaire who took on the toxics industry and founded Citizens Clearinghouse on Hazardous Waste (now the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice). There Mary met Lance Hughes, then director of Native Americans for a Clean Environment (NACE). Hughes asked her where NIRS was on high-level waste? She answered "we don't work on it," other than fighting its generation in the first place (the best and perhaps only answer to the problem to begin with!). Hughes asked why not? Mary said "Because a lot of other groups do and we weren't asked. Since the action is on Indian reservations we are not going to get involved unless we are asked." Hughes replied "consider yourself asked." Mary got busy. In 1992 she worked with Grace Thorpe, daughter of the famous Indian athlete Jim Thorpe, and helped get Congress to zero out the funding for the infamous Negotiator. Thorpe did NIRS the honor of joining its Board of Directors. For over a decade now, NIRS has worked with the likes of NACE, Indigenous Environmental Network, Honor the Earth, and grassroots Native American traditionalists and environmentalists to beat back repeated attempts by the nuclear power industry to pick up where the Negotiator left off. Mary spent many a sleepless night working with Mescalero Apache activist Rufina Marie Laws to defeat the dump targeted at her reservation in New Mexico, a struggle with many ups and downs that lasted six long years before the dump pushers finally gave up in 1996. The waste generators then turned their sites on the tiny Skull Valley Goshutes Reservation in Utah. To the present day, NIRS has continuously supported Goshute tribal members Margene Bullcreek and Sammy Blackbear in their opposition to the proposed Private Fuel Storage (PFS) LLC “interim storage site,” a parking lot for radioactive fuel rods that could very well end up becoming permanent. The PFS struggle could come to a head in the next several months, with an imminent licensing decision expected from the U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But the nuclear establishment’s biggest target has always been Western Shoshone Indian land – Yucca Mountain, Nevada. After “Screw Nevada” in 1987, DOE put all its research eggs in the Yucca Mountain basket. What they found should have disqualified the site immediately from any further consideration. Yucca’s tuff – petrified volcanic ash from eruptions ten million years ago – has been fractured and fissured from over 600 earthquakes registering 2.5 on the Richter scale during the past 25 years alone. Yucca would thus violate the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) repository regulations established in the mid-1980’s, which limited the amount of radioactive Carbon-14 gas that could escape from buried HLRW (C-14 is deadly for tens of thousands of years and blows with the wind near and far). To keep the clearly unsuitable site afloat as a potential dump, the nuclear power industry’s lobbyists earned their high salaries by getting the Best-Congress-Money-Can-Buy to change the law yet again. Despite a 5.6 quake epicentered just ten miles from Yucca Mountain that did costly structural damage to the DOE field office there that year, in 1992 George Bush the First signed the order mandating that EPA re-write (that is, weaken) its regulations, doing away with any limitation on the amount of C-14 that would be allowed to escape. It wouldn’t be the last time that the rules were changed in the middle of the game, to the detriment of public health and safety. Revisionist legislation that would have sent nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain even before the site studies were complete was first introduced in 1993 by Democratic U. S. Senator Bennett Johnston from Louisiana. When the Republicans swept into control of the House and Senate in 1994 they hurried to do the industry’s bidding as well. U. S. Representative Fred Upton of southwest Michigan – heir to the Whirlpool fortune and ond of the wealthiest members of Congress whose home was only 15 miles from three nuclear reactors and their stored HLRW – introduced the legislation on the House side that would rush waste shipments to Nevada. He openly admitted that the bill had been written by the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s lobbying office in D.C. Such "honesty" was new on The Hill! As always, NIRS reached out to the grassroots in Upton’s district, and local anti-nuclear activist Kevin Kamps got to work. NIRS helped prep Kamps to lead a face-to-face citizens meeting with Upton, which unfortunately went nowhere. Kamps then upped the ante, bird-dogging Upton on the Yucca issue. He hung a banner over main street in Kalamazoo, led costumed “Mutants for Nuclear Power” to crash a campaign breakfast with the Chamber of Commerce, and made Rep. Upton’s stubborn subservience to the nuclear utilities as uncomfortable as possible for him. As NIRS geared up to oppose this legislative juggernaut (the nuclear power industry is one of the biggest players inside the Capitol Beltway, after all), its executive director Michael Mariotte coined the name of the campaign – “Mobile Chernobyl”. Chernobyl was the Soviet reactor that exploded in 1986, and this bill was about HLRW transportation being launched onto U. S. roads and rails. And what spewed out of Chernobyl was highly radioactive nuclear fuel -- the very same stuff that would be in the shipping containers bound for Nevada. What made the impact of Chernobyl so huge was the fire that ensued, lofting radioactivity into the air that then blew across Europe, falling out for hundreds and thousands of miles in different directions wherever the wind carried it and the rain fell to bring it down. Likewise, a severe HLRW transport accident involving a fire could breach a shipping container, lofting radioactive particles with the smoke into the wind to impact an extended area. NIRS later heard that the catchy moniker not only infuriated its adversaries at NEI (the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s lobby and public relations arm), but that it had made it to the top levels of government. In an exclusive meeting between Bill Clinton, Al Gore and the top Republican members of both the U. S. House and Senate to discuss legislative priorities, word came back that the congressmen had broached the rush-it-to-Nevada waste legislation. Allegedly Gore groaned in response -- "No, not Mobile Chernobyl!" Also in 1994, NIRS worked closely with the Prairie Island Coalition in Minnesota against the expansion of HLRW storage on an island in the Mississippi prone to flooding – the Mdwekanton Dakota Indian Reservation, unwilling host to twin Northern States Power (NSP) atomic reactors. “Radioactive Waste Day” saw 800 protestors from across the Midwest confront the gates of the Prairie Island nuclear plant. 50 additional events were held in locations across the U. S. and even overseas. This coordinated crescendo of resistance to radioactive racism caught the attention of the highest levels of the Clinton Administration, for Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary was the former Vice President of NSP in charge of nuclear waste storage. Tellingly, O'Leary had to reverse her earlier testimony to the U. S. Senate Energy Committee in favor of accelerating the Yucca Mountain program when her boss Bill Clinton found out what she had said. Clinton was not willing to order the cancellation of the Yucca repository program outright, but he consistently opposed accelerating waste moving to the site ahead of the conclusion of the scientific work. During his entire presidency, NIRS communicated regularly with Clinton’s Council on Environmental Quality about the widespread opposition across the U. S. to rushing Mobile Chernobyl and the Yucca dump into being. So from 1993 to 1999, the “nuclear establishment” (the industry puppeteers and its friends in government on the ends of the strings) backed off from actually holding a Senate vote on the Mobile Chernobyl bill. With a very firm promise of a veto from Clinton, each year the congressional leadership would approach a vote, but with lots of help from thousands of anti-Yucca dump grassroots calls and letters, 34 Senators would show up and oppose the cut-off of the Nevada filibuster. This ensured to Clinton that if he ever did have to veto the bill, there would be the votes to sustain his veto. In 2000, a memorable election year (and then some) if ever there was one, the industry decided it was time to press the issue and the Senate and the House both passed the industry's wish list for sending waste to Yucca Mountain immediately. Clinton responded to the measure with the “most personal veto” of his presidency, as promised. Unbeknownst to Clinton and his people, synchronicity struck as he penned his signature on the veto at about 6:25 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on April 25 th, 2000: it was thus about 1:25 a.m. April 26 th Chernobyl, Ukraine time, the 14 th anniversary of the explosion perhaps to the exact minute (the explosion occurred at 1:23 a.m.). Paul Gunter, longtime NIRS Reactor Watchdog Project director and founder of the Clamshell Alliance that opposed the Seabrook nuclear plant in New Hampshire in the 1970’s and 1980’s, related that synchronicity struck so often during their organizing that they had a name for it, “Clam Magic”. The Senate sustained the veto, blocking the Republican-led congressional effort to weaken Yucca environmental regulations yet further. NIRS had helped lead the seven year long battle that culminated in this tremendous grassroots environmental victory: the veto-sustaining margin that blocked the “Mobile Chernobyl” bill from becoming law. Only 34 Senate votes were needed, but at the last second a 35th vote came in. It was Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, a passionate pro-nuclear advocate for rushing to open the dump. Why did he vote to sustain Clinton’s veto? Lott, a master of parliamentary chicanery if ever there was one, did so in order to “reserve the right to bring the matter back for reconsideration” at any future time. The tremendous, hard-won grassroots victory sustaining Clinton’s veto was still in jeopardy, for now the rules had yet again been twisted so there would be the constant threat for the rest of the legislative session that it would brought back for another vote, perhaps on a day when an anti-Yucca member of the Senate was sick or at a funeral. As Mary Olson walked out of the Capitol after seven long years of leading the national grassroots opposition to the Mobile Chernobyl bill and witnessing the latest pro-dump trickery, she spotted Republican Senator Murkowski of Alaska -- then Chair of the Senate Energy Committee and Yucca’s biggest booster, not to mention biggest recipient of nuclear industry campaign largesse -- speaking under one of the porticos to a circle of reporters aiming cameras and microphones at him in his impeccable blue suit. Mary took four steps out of her way, parted the circle facing him, leaned into Murkowski’s face and said very loudly and clearly, "You dirty dogs!" She turned on her heel and descended the Capitol steps as Murkowksi was left speechless, jaw gaping, reporters gasping and asking "Who was that?" as if the Lone Ranger had just righted another wrong and galloped off. Speaking of galloping off to right wrongs, Olson had started another NIRS tradition back in 1996 when she jumped aboard a mock nuclear waste “cask tour” sponsored by the anti-nuke and anti-dump Nevada grassroots groups Shundahai Network (founded by Western Shoshone spiritual leader Corbin Harney) and Citizen Alert. Hauling a full-scale replica of a HLRW shipping container, Olson traveled the highways and byways of the Midwest warning all who’d listen that “The atomic trains are coming! The atomic trucks are coming!” in true Paul Revere style. There was a CB radio along for the ride. Olson’s “handle,” of course, was “Mobile Chernobyl.” She’d put out a few teaser facts to get a dialogue going. One conversation had about eight or ten truckers chiming in to talk about nuclear waste hauling when a new voice joined the party. He said "what do you think I am hauling right now?" I was amazed. All the other truckers who had been chatting instantly responded, telling him that risking his health was not worth it. It might seem like good money now, but in ten years he would be on his own if he gets cancer. Olson could hardly get a word in edgewise. Olson was really sad when the tour ended, feeling she could have happily spent her life facilitating trucker "talk radio." But Olson handed the mock cask baton to new NIRS staffer Kevin Kamps in 1999. Kamps, who’d grown tired of beating his head against the wall of nuclear utility hegemony in Michigan, thought he’d try it in the belly of the beast for awhile. He’s been in D.C. since. He brought with him a mock nuke waste cask on wheels he’d built in Kalamazoo, which had been used to chase Congressman Upton around the district. Kamps’ first national cask tour in 2000 took him from the Cook nuclear plant in southwest Michigan through a dozen states, along routes actually targeted by DOE, all the way to Yucca. He spoke to hundreds (and was kind of hard to miss for many thousands of “fellow travelers” along the way, hauling a 20 foot long giant metallic dumbbell), warning them what was coming unless they got active and stopped it in its tracks. Kamps conducted several cross country “Radioactive Roads and Rails” tours leading up to the big Yucca showdown with the Bush Administration and Congress in 2002. Lake Barrett , acting director of the Yucca Mountain Project, wanted to size Kamps up, so invited him to DOE headquarters in Sept. 1999, one of Kamps’ first days on the job. Kamps barely knew his way around town, and was already running late, when by some small miracle he found a parking space right in front of DOE. But just as he opened his car door, a D.C. police officer ordered him to shut it! It turned out President Clinton’s motorcade was approaching. So Kamps got to sit in his car for awhile till Clinton passed by, just ten feet away, reviewing notes in the backseat of the presidential limousine. Kamps took it as another “Clam Magic” moment knowing that Clinton was firmly committed to vetoing short cuts on science at Yucca, so decided not to be intimidated by DOE’s home court advantage at this meeting. Sure enough, Kamps faced off against Barrett and 8 of his staff persons around a conference table. DOE had recently announced it would hold a dozen hearings, almost all of them in Nevada, about its Yucca Mountain Draft Environmental Impact Statement. Kamps had determined that additional hearings would be secured by this meeting with Barrett. He started by demanding a hearing in Chicago. Barrett refused. DOE could have met its legal obligations by holding a single hearing, Barrett argued, so refused to schedule any more. How could Chicago not have a hearing, Kamps persisted, when tens of thousands of HLRW trucks and trains would roll through Chicago bound for Nevada. Kamps listed other locations that likewise deserved hearings, such as Lincoln, Nebraska. After the meeting, Kamps contacted grassroots allies in those places who activated their communities to demand hearings. In the end, DOE buckled to the pressure, significantly extending its public comment period and holding hearings in Chicago, Lincoln, and several other locations it had adamantly refused before. In the end, 15,000 grassroots public comments were generated in opposition to the Yucca dump and Mobile Chernobyl. While at Yucca in 2000, Kamps took his first tour of the “Exploratory Studies Facility,” a five mile long “U” shaped tunnel into Yucca that the nuclear establishment hopes will serve someday as the driveway down which to deliver the HLRW into the mountain. He was completely unprepared for the fact that the tunnel inside Yucca would be wet, with stains showing streaks of water had run down the walls and puddles had formed on the floors! Kamps later attended a U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) technical meeting about Yucca at which a scientist announced that if waste were buried under Yucca with no ventilation, the humidity within the tunnels would be near 100%. Doesn’t 100% humidity generate rainfall?! No wonder DOE’s proposing titanium drip shields over the waste – a billion dollar metallic “umbrella” in hopes of preventing waste burial container corrosion and massive radiation leakage! In addition, the contents of a crystalline rock formation within Yucca suggested to DOE scientist Jerry Szymanski that hot water might have flooded the area proposed for the dump in the past, and thus could do so again. Such a hot water flood could quickly corrode the waste burial containers and cause a catastrophic radiation release. DOE moved to quickly “discredit” its own scientist, but the later discovery that there is an active magma pocket below the site lent credence to Szymanski’s “radical” idea. We are already collectively in hot water because of radioactive waste – but putting IT literally in hot water is a very bad idea! In 2000, NIRS officially merged with its sister group World Information Service on Energy (WISE) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. WISE was founded the same year as NIRS, and together formed an effective grassroots counter to the globalization of the nuclear power industry. NIRS and WISE, for example, could share lessons with each other that the grassroots anti-nuclear movement had learned not only from battling Yucca, but proposed HLRW dumps around the world. Once George W. Bush took office, Kamps began chasing him around the country with the mock cask. Kamps couldn’t miss Bush’s unexpectedly announced appearance in Kalamazoo in March, 2001, and drove all night from Washington, D.C. to tail Bush’s entourage across west Michigan, at one point idling on the roadside so Bush couldn’t help but see the cask as the presidential motorcade sped by. Kamps crashed Bush’s commencement speech at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana later that spring. NIRS had co-sponsored, along with Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, a major regional conference at Notre Dame in 1997 to warn Hoosiers that their state, despite having no reactors within its borders, was targeted to become the “Radioactive Crossroads of America” under the Yucca Mountain plan. NIRS’ mock nuke waste cask also circled the Xcel (formerly NSP) Energy Arena in St. Paul, Minnesota on May 16, 2001 as Bush unveiled his pro-nuclear energy policy inside. As Bush finished his speech, he turned to the two Cabinet officials he brought along for just this moment – EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman and Energy Secretary Spence Abraham – and said because we need new nuclear reactors, we need a national repository for the waste, and he was looking to them to expedite its opening. Bush didn’t dare mention Yucca by name, for he’d promised Nevadans the previous year during the campaign that he’d base his decision about Yucca on “sound science,” not politics. Whitman responded with haste. Just a couple weeks later, she released the EPA’s Yucca radiation regulations that had been in the works for nine long years. One measure would place no limit on contaminant levels in groundwater until 11 miles downstream of Yucca, creating a sacrifice area in which it was hoped the radioactivity would disperse to legal concentrations, an unprecedented undermining of the Safe Drinking Water Act that EPA is supposed to enforce! Another measure would end regulations 10,000 years after waste burial, despite the fact that it would remain deadly for millions of years, and DOE’s own studies showed that “peak doses” to the public downstream would occur 250,000 to 350,000 years into the future. NIRS and a broad coalition of national, regional and local environmental organizations – which had met with EPA officials for years opposing such dangerous proposals -- sued EPA right away, but this didn’t slow down the Bush Administration’s drive to approve Yucca despite the unfinished studies and its election year 2000 campaign promises to the contrary. In June 2001, Bush deployed his Cabinet to promote his pro-nuke, pro-Yucca dump energy plans that had been hammered out by Dick Cheney in still-controversial, secretive, closed door meetings with energy corporation lobbyists and executives. Energy Secretary Spence Abraham, who himself had previously voted in favor of the dump every chance he had as a U. S. Senator from Michigan before being defeated in the 2000 election, was sent to the Chicago area. Kamps followed, cask in tow, in hot pursuit. But Abraham’s “Energy Town Hall Meeting” was held not in downtown Chicago, but 30 miles away behind the barbed wire and guard posts of DOE’s Argonne National Lab. Despite parking his cask outside and having the requisite tickets to get in, Kamps was blocked from entering by armed Argonne security. He later learned that a right wing activist from Citizens for a Sound Economy had “ratted” him out to the Argonne authorities, who then ordered its security officers to block his entrance. As Kamps spoke with an Argonne security agent and showed him the three tickets he held for himself and two companions to enter the “town hall meeting,” a second security guard suddenly ripped the tickets from his hand (Kamps has held onto the stub he managed to clutch onto as a memento). The guard with the quick grab (who had an unsettling resemblance to “Dirty Harry,” by the way) then told Kamps that if he didn’t leave immediately, the county sheriff’s deputies who had just arrived would arrest him and his companions for trespassing. Kamps chose to avoid jail that day, but was unable to address his former Senator Spence Abraham, and unable to voice opposition to Yucca and Mobile Chernobyl. Little did the Bush Administration know, however, that one of Kamps’ companions who had just been summarily kicked out was a freelance reporter. Her story on the Bush Administration’s “Energy Town Hall Meeting” and its “democracy by invitation only” ran in the weekly Chicago Reader! Perhaps because he’d been so insulated from the public, Abraham put the pedal to the metal on Yucca and Mobile Chernobyl later that year. In Dec. 2001, Abraham did away with 17 year old DOE site suitability guidelines which required Yucca be disqualified from any further consideration if rainfall moved through the site and back into the environment in less than 1,000 years, a safety test DOE’s own studies as early as 1997 clearly showed that Yucca failed. Abraham must also have ignored DOE’s files on the subject, for NIRS, along with Public Citizen, had spearheaded a petition in 1998 signed by over 200 environmental organizations that called upon DOE to disqualify Yucca based upon its own guidelines and Yucca’s fast flow rate for infiltrating water. At the time, DOE had responded to NIRS that it simply needed more time to finish studying the site. Apparently, by late 2001, DOE had no more time for scientific studies, finished or not. Just after Abraham’s rash doing-away-with of troublesome but long established regulations, the U. S. General Accounting Office (the investigative arm of Congress) reported that 293 key scientific studies remained incomplete at Yucca, and concluded any site recommendation decisions should be postponed indefinitely. Despite this, on Jan. 10, 2002 Abraham notified Nevada Gov. Guinn that Yucca was suitable for a dump. On Jan. 24, the U. S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, a presidentially-appointed panel of scientists and engineers that oversees Yucca, reported that “the technical basis for the DOE’s repository performance estimates is weak to moderate.” Despite such warnings, Abraham recommended the dump on Feb. 14. Abraham was busy that day, not only giving his official thumb’s up to Yucca, but also announcing DOE’s “Nuclear Power 2010” program to subsidize the first new reactor construction in the U. S. in decades by providing hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money towards research and development, licensing support, as well as outright grants to nuclear utilities. That very same day, DOE even conducted a “sub-critical” plutonium nuclear weapons test explosion on Western Shoshone land at the Nevada Test Site, icing on the cake for perhaps the most pro-nuclear Valentine’s Day in U. S. history! George W. Bush expressed his love for the industry that had showered his campaign with lavish contributions in 2000 by speed-reading the three foot thick, 70 pound document Abraham had handed him in less than 24 hours. Bush disregarded 15 years of scientific studies showing major flaws with Yucca’s geology, as well as 15,000 public comments in opposition, and rubberstamped the dump the very next day. So much for “sound science, not politics” shaping Bush’s decision about Yucca Mountain! The State of Nevada quickly vetoed Bush’s dump approval, but the U. S. House quickly overrode it, as lobbyists from NEI swarmed the Capitol steps as House members ascended to vote. On July 9 th, the U. S. Senate voted 60 to 39 to override Nevada, despite Nevada’s, NIRS’, and the national grassroots environmental movement’s best efforts to the contrary. NIRS later obtained an NEI self-evaluation of its success in overriding Nevada’s veto. In it, NEI asked rhetorically “What is the secret to our success?” The answer was simply a giant dollar sign. Gargantuan campaign contributions, national advertising campaigns, and an army of lobbyists on Capitol Hill had done the trick. Yucca dump opponents sought relief from the federal courts, but had to wait till January 2004 to present oral arguments. In addition to Nevada, the coalition of environmental organizations that sued EPA over its woefully inadequate Yucca regulations includes Citizen Action Coalition of Indiana, Citizen Alert of Nevada, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Nevada Desert Experience, Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force, NIRS/WISE, and Public Citizen. NRDC attorney Geoff Fettus argued the environmental coalition case before the court. The wait was well worth it. On July 9, 2004 – the second anniversary of the Senate override of Nevada’s veto -- the U. S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit dealt a huge blow to the dump pushers. Although the three-judge panel ruled against 11 of the 12 legal challenges the State of Nevada and environmental groups argued before it in January, the one case dump opponents did win is a potential show stopper, perhaps marking the beginning of the end for DOE’s Yucca Mountain Project (YMP). The court ruled that EPA’s radiation release regulations for Yucca violate the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. Specifically, EPA’s termination of public health protections 10,000 years after wastes would be buried at Yucca violate the NWPA’s explicit requirement that EPA regulations be “based upon and consistent with” National Academy of Sciences (NAS) recommendations. Using unusually blunt language, the court stated “Only in a world where ‘based upon’ means ‘in disregard of’ and ‘consistent with’ means ‘inconsistent with’ could EPA's adoption of a 10,000-year compliance period be considered a permissible construction” of the Energy Policy Act of 1992, the relevant amendment to the NWPA.(2) In fact, NAS advised that regulations be enforced till the time of peak dose from radiation to people downstream of the dump, projected to be hundreds of thousands of years after wastes would be buried at Yucca.(3) Nevada dump opponents hailed the ruling as a “stake through the heart” of the YMP, declaring the dump “effectively dead” because the site’s earthquake-fractured geology cannot meet the more stringent standard required by NAS and the court (see articles at www.reviewjournal.com/news/yuccamtn/ beginning on July 10, 2004). DOE, on the other hand, assured the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that the court ruling would not even slow down the YMP, that the license application would still be submitted by the end of 2004, and that the dump would open by 2010.(4) NRC, however, is “scrambling” to determine if it can even accept the license application from DOE given the court ruling. NRC Commissioner Ed McGaffigan admitted that once the legal questions are answered, the dump would still require ten years to grant an operating license – violating DOE’s self-imposed 2010 deadline by at least several years.(5) Through a change in the law, Congress could overrule the court, re-establishing EPA’s rejected 10,000-year standard. Also, an NEI appeal to the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals or even the U. S. Supreme Court would not be a surprise. In addition, EPA could simply rewrite its regulations as the court requires, although that process could take years.(6) Tellingly, pro-dump Senate Energy Committee Chairman Pete Domenici (Republican of New Mexico) referred to the court ruling as “ominous” and said “It is terrifically important that we find a solution to this…The entire nuclear power industry in the United States could stand or fall with this interpretation.”(7) The court’s decision came at a bad time for dump supporters. A miscalculated attempt by the Bush Administration to take Yucca “off budget” (that is, to allow DOE to access the Nuclear Waste Fund directly without the YMP having to compete with other federal programs in the annual congressional budget and appropriations battles) has left the YMP facing a major budget shortfall for Fiscal Year 2005 (FY05).(8) In addition, DOE’s attempt to initiate the license application phase of the YMP has been successfully challenged by Nevada, with “friend of the court” briefs filed by Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force, NIRS/WISE, and Public Citizen to an NRC Atomic Safety Licensing Board (ASLB). DOE “certified” its over 5 million pages of documentation in support of a YMP license application on June 30, 2004. The dump opponent’s challenge argues that DOE’s rushed filings are incomplete, impossible to access effectively, and not even posted to the official NRC “Licensing Support Network” website. Oral arguments took place before an ASLB three-judge panel on July 27, 2004. If the ASLB had ruled in favor of DOE’s document certification of June 30, opponents to the YMP who want to challenge DOE’s license application as official intervenors before the NRC ASLB would have had only until September 30 to file any and all documents they plan to use in the upcoming 3 to 4 year long licensing proceedings, despite the fact that DOE has not yet submitted its license application, nor even settled upon a final repository design.(9) But the ASLB ruled against DOE on August 31 st, 2004, thus ordering DOE to complete its documentation in full before NRC can docket its submission (10). This ruling allows more time for NIRS, Nevada, and other parties committed to officially intervening against DOE’s application to prepare documentation to support arguments against the dump. The recent court decision should end the YMP outright, since the site’s geology cannot meet a 200,000 year standard of performance. Combined with its skyrocketing price tag (DOE admits building and operating the dump would cost $60 billion; that figure will only go up with time), current budget woes, and DOE’s license application mismanagement, the White House and Congress would be wise to cut their losses and abandon the project. But the nuclear power industry and its friends in government are gearing up for the approaching 2004 lame duck session of Congress after the presidential election. They hope to restore Yucca’s full funding. The Bush Administration is seeking an unprecedented $880 million next year for the YMP, or nearly $2.5 million per day! Budget projections foresee $2.4 billion annual budgets just a few years from now – or the spending of over $6.5 million per day on the Yucca dump. The bulk of this money comes from nuclear electricity ratepayers, although that money will one day run out, and U. S. taxpayers will be stuck with at least half the cost of the dump. But in addition, dump pushers see the lame duck Congress as their best chance to reverse the recent court decision. They can be counted on to lobby both Houses of Congress to enact legislation restoring the legality of the arbitrary 10,000 regulatory period at Yucca, a woefully weak standard that the nuclear establishment is confident its atomic septic system repository design can meet through radioactive dilution in the underground drinking water supply. NIRS/WISE will continue the vigilance it has exercised for well over a decade. It will continue to expose Yucca Mountain as merely the “illusion of a solution” as Mike Keegan of Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Great Lakes calls it, a public relations enabler for the Bush Administration’s proposed relapse into the nuclear power addiction – the building of new reactors, the extended operations of old ones, and the continued generation of HLRW for which there is no place to go. NIRS/WISE calls for atomic abolitionists near and far to help stop the Mobile Chernobyl plan in its tracks, and to join the campaign to drive the final nails in the Yucca dump’s coffin in the months and years to come. References:
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