- RENO, Nev. (AP) -- The nation's
nuclear waste dump proposed for Nevada is poorly designed and could leak
highly radioactive waste, a scientist who recently resigned from a federal
panel of experts on Yucca Mountain told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
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- Paul Craig, a physicist and engineering professor at
the University of California-Davis, said he quit the panel last month so
he could speak more freely about the waste dump's dangers.
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- Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas,
is planned to begin receiving waste in 2010. Some 77,000 tons of highly
radioactive waste at commercial and military sites in 39 states would be
stored in metal canisters underground in tunnels.
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- ``The science is very clear,'' Craig told the AP in an
interview before his first public speech about the Energy Department's
design for the canisters.
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- ``If we get high-temperature liquids, the metal would
corrode and that would eventually lead to leakage of nuclear waste,'' Craig
said.
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- ``Therefore, it is a bad design. And that is very, very
bad news for the Department of Energy because they are committed to that
design,'' he said.
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- Craig, who was appointed to the Nuclear Waste Technical
Review Board by President Clinton in 1997, spoke to about 100 people later
Wednesday night at a community forum in Reno sponsored by the Sierra Club.
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- ``I would never say Yucca Mountain won't work. What I
would say is the design they have won't work,'' he said Wednesday night.
He said he's convinced the Energy Department will have to postpone the
project and adopt a different design.
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- ``It would require years of delay and my guess is that
is what is going to happen. The bad science is so clear they will be unable
to ignore it forever,'' Craig told the AP.
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- The 11-member technical review board outlined its concerns
about the potential for corrosion in a report to the Energy Department
in November about the metal for the canisters, called Alloy-22 -- ``an
upscale version of stainless steel,'' Craig said.
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- It was the most important report the board has produced
since Congress created the panel in 1987, he said, but largely has been
ignored by Congress and the department.
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- ``The report says in ordinary English that under the
conditions proposed by the Department of Energy, the canisters will leak,''
Craig said. ``It was signed by every single member of the board so there
would be no confusion.''
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- Energy Department spokesman Allen Benson defended the
design plans for the repository and the metal in the storage casks.
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- ``We stand by our work,'' he said Wednesday in Las Vegas.
He said the department was preparing a formal response to the board's November
report. He had no further comment.
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- In Washington, D.C., officials with the industry's Nuclear
Energy Institute did not immediately return telephone calls seeking comment.
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- The board's report in November said the government had
failed to take into account ``deliquescence'' -- a phenomenon regarding
the reaction of salt to moisture -- in its plans to operate the dump at
temperatures well above boiling water, or about 200 degrees.
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- At those temperatures, the metal canisters would heat
up, causing salts in the surrounding ground to liquefy, thus leading to
corrosion, Craig said.
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- ``It turns out the metals which look like they act pretty
good at temperature levels below boiling water -- those same metals act
badly with temperatures that could exist'' at Yucca Mountain, he said.
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- Craig, who also has served as a member of National Academy
of Sciences National Research Council Board on Radioactive Waste Management,
said he sent his resignation letter to the White House in January before
his term was to expire in April so he could shine more light on the government's
plans.
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- ``When you serve as a member of one of those boards,
you cannot talk about the political consequences of the science or the
big picture. You are supposed to stick to the science and you should stick
to the science,'' Craig said.
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- ``You cannot have the kind of conversation we are having
now if I was still on the board.''
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