Winograd and Roseboom have written a thoughtful comment “Nuclear Waste: Yucca Mountain Revisited” in Science magazine and featured in Physics Today’s News Picks.

It might be helpful to expand on a few of the issues touched upon in this article. Regarding the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruling concerning the time frame for regulating the release of radioactivity, Congress in 1992 has legislated that the EPA must follow the advice of the National Academy of Sciences in forming their regulations. This the EPA failed to do. Even more puzzling is why the EPA has failed to issue revised standards as ordered by the Court. The EPA originally announced they would do so by the end of 2006. The DOE has recently had to submit its Yucca Mountain Construction License Application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission without knowing the radioactivity release standards the repository must meet.

Winograd and Roseboom mention as a major attribute of Yucca Mountain that the planned repository lies above the water table and hence facilitates possible retrieval of waste if it were so desired. However, location of a repository below the water table does not preclude retrieval. For example, the Homestake Mine in South Dakota has hosted scientific experiments with continuous access at depths below the water table for many decades. There are important metallurgical advantages to locating a high-level nuclear waste repository in the chemically reducing environment below the water table, and both Sweden and Finland have opted to do so.

The major attribute of Yucca Mountain that the planned repository lies above the water table is to minimize the mobility of the waste, rather than to facilitate its possible retrieval. Groundwater flow below the water table greatly increases the waste mobility. Thus to locate a repository below the water table may facilitate fast spread of waste to far away places.

Let me first tell you that I am a consultant for the State of Nevada, which of course opposes the Yucca Mountain project.

Winograd and Roseboom (WR) proposed the project twenty-five years ago, in particular proposed to put the nuclear waste repository in Yucca Mountain's unsaturated zone. They are now chagrined that it remains controversial and let themselves off the hook by ascribing this controversy in part to public concerns about nuclear projects in general. You have to wonder where they have been for the last quarter century.

WR may have thought they were recommending a dry site but in the mid-1990s the Department of Energy discovered there was lots of water. And it was moving faster than allowed by DOE's geologic site criteria. Instead of abandoning site, DOE abandoned its criteria and decided to rely on waste package design to compensate for the site's deficiencies. A critical feature is a 5-ton titanium-palladium alloy cover over each waste package to protect it from dripping water and rapid corrosion. The Department's name for this--"drip shield"--tells the whole story.

The computer simulations described in DOE's application, just submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, demonstrate why the drip shields are essential. Without them the projected dose would be many times over the allowed limit, and this would happen not eons in the future but, according to DOE's simulation, less than a 1,000 years in the future. The catch is that DOE does not intend to install the drip shields (the required number is about 11,000, at a cost of many billions) with the waste packages. It wants a license from NRC now on the promise that it will install the vital drip shields just before repository closure, about a hundred years from now. Aside from the tremendous cost, this would require maintaining the remotely operated underground rail system, and developing robotic equipment to work in the face of rock falls, humidity, corrosion, radiation, heat, and limited visibility. I will let the reader judge whether this government promise is something you could take to the bank.

And by the way, no country has followed the US lead in even considering an unsaturated zone site, and for good reason. The combination of heat, air, and water with dissolved minerals spells corrosion. And the water's fairly rapid movement will transport radioactive leakage to the biosphere. The criteria of other countries rule out these conditions, and in particular require a reducing environment. Other countries building repositories also have much tougher radiation dose standards for repositories. I would judge that Finland's standard for the distant future are about 100 times tighter than the ones that EPA proposed in 2005 for Yucca Mountain--which may account for the greater confidence the Finns have that their repository will provide adequate protection for the public.

I have proposed HLW storage deep under the seabed, using petroleum industry drilling technology. We can drill in 5000 feet of water, then 30,000 feet further into the seabed. Nuclear waste fuel rods fit nicely into the holes, and about ten such wells will hold all the disposal proposed for Yucca Flat. By drilling adjacent to a subduction zone, e.g., off the Pacific Northwest, the HLW will eventually be melted into the earth's molten core, even if forgotten by careless civilizations. If desired, the rods can be extracted for reprocessing. Why not??