13 April 1999
Contacts:  Arjun Makhijani (301-270-5500) or Bob Schaeffer (617-489-0461)

ENVIRONMENTAL INSTITUTE UNVEILS ALTERNATIVE STRATEGY FOR MANAGING HIGHLY RADIOACTIVE NUCLEAR WASTE

New Plan Calls for Government Payments to Utilities for On-site Storage and
Research on Three Alternative Disposal Methods

Yucca Mountain and WIPP Repository Locations Could Become Non-Radioactive
Repository Research Centers

Washington, DC, April 13, 1999: A comprehensive alternative to current official US government plans for management of highly radioactive wastes was unveiled at a press conference today by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) at the National Press Club.  The plan calls for cancellation of work on the Yucca Mountain and Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) repositories which IEER president Arjun Makhijani says are "technically unsound and politically motivated" and funding of research into safer disposal alternatives.  Pending adoption of a new waste disposal policy, IEER endorses on-site retrievable storage after suitable stabilization for military wastes and federal payments to utilities for interim on-site storage.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) had promised to begin taking charge of nuclear utilities’ spent fuel by 1998 and may therefore  be facing substantial fines as a result of its failure to do so.

"Rather than pay fines to nuclear utilities, we would rather see ratepayer resources go to on-site storage that is as safe as possible until a long-term disposal mechanism can be found," said Janet Zeller, Executive Director, Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League in North Carolina.

To avoid the fines and fend off Congressional demands for a centralized storage, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson has offered to pay for additional on-site storage and take over management of spent fuel from the nuclear utilities.  "The DOE should pay up, but it should not manage the wastes," said Dr. Arjun Makhijani, President of IEER and author of the alternative plan. "Given the mess that the DOE has made at the nuclear weapons sites and its problems with managing its own irradiated fuel, this would be a grave step backward in nuclear waste management."

The new waste plan recommended three alternative long-term approaches for disposal:

·  research into various types of geologic repositories and into engineered barriers that would mimic natural materials that prevent the spread of radioactivity for millions of years

·  some research into sub-seabed disposal, which has both advantages and disadvantages relative to geologic repositories

·  disposal outside the biosphere, by very deep burial beneath the Earth’s crust, in a layer called the upper mantle.

The IEER plan stated that disposal below the Earth’s crust, if it could be done safely, might pose the least risks to generations far into the future.  But it is not technologically feasible today.  "It is unclear if technologies needed to drill so deep and to characterize the locations with confidence can be developed," said Dr. Makhijani.  "But the concept of disposal outside the biosphere is important enough from an environmental perspective that its feasibility should be carefully studied."

In a set of articles prepared for the forthcoming issue of its newsletter, Science for Democratic Action, IEER recommended that a new federally-chartered non-profit corporation be created to fund on-site storage of power reactor spent fuel, take over storage from nuclear power plant operators when they close the plants, and fund R&D on long term options.  The corporation would be financed from the federal Nuclear Waste Fund, created by a charge on nuclear utility ratepayers.

The long-term management of waste that is highly contaminated with plutonium and other transuranic elements (called transuranic, or TRU, waste), mainly from nuclear weapons production, should be integrated with management of nuclear reactor spent fuel and military high-level waste from plutonium separation. The DOE has recently started transporting TRU waste stored at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to the WIPP, a salt repository in New Mexico.

"The DOE should be focusing on cleaning up the mess it has made in the nuclear weapons complex, rather than playing a shell game with waste that is relatively safely stored," said Don Hancock, director of the nuclear waste safety program of the Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque.  "Moreover, the DOE doesn’t have a state permit to put waste in WIPP.  It should remove the waste that is in WIPP, which is an unsuitable site, and respect the laws and regulations of the State of New Mexico."

"The TRU waste that DOE dumped in shallow landfills until 1970 is now threatening some of the most important water resources in the United States, such as the Snake River Plain Aquifer in Idaho and the Columbia River in Washington and Oregon," said Beatrice Brailsford, Program Director of the Snake River Alliance in Idaho.  "Recovering this waste and stabilizing it should be the top priority for TRU waste management, both for environmental and security reasons. The buried waste in Idaho alone contains almost two and half thousand pounds of plutonium."

One of IEER’s recommendations is that the Yucca Mountain and WIPP repositories could be converted into high-tech research centers for geologic repositories, provided the states of New Mexico, Nevada and the Western Shoshone people agree.

"The waste management crisis is partly due to the fact that DOE has kept pouring money into the Yucca Mountain site despite evidence that it is a poor site for a waste repository," said Lee Dazey, Northern Nevada Director of Citizen Alert, a grassroots environmental group in Nevada that has sought to stop the Yucca Mountain repository program.  "For example 620 earthquakes of varying magnitudes have rattled the Yucca Mountain region in the last 20 years.  Moreover, Yucca Mountain is on Western Shoshone land, which was never ceded to the federal government; nor was permission given by the Shoshones to store the most dangerous waste made by man there.   Our government departed from the scientific query of where to store nuclear waste when it passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act Amendments in 1987 to only study one site in Nevada. It’s time to get back to science.  Converting Yucca Mountain project into a research effort that would never use any radioactive materials appears to be a good idea that should be investigated."

"We endorse IEER’s plan as environmentalists because we feel that the present course is a gross waste of ratepayer and taxpayer dollars," said Ms. Zeller. "But we believe that there is no truly good solution to this problem.  So it is crucial to note that this plan would not deal with waste from new reactors or from new license extensions.  Enough is enough."

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For more information about IEER's alternative waste plan, visit
http://www.ieer.org