Official: Yucca project not dead yet

LAS VEGAS - A federal project to entomb the nation's nuclear waste beneath a mountain ridge in the desert northwest of Las Vegas isn't dead yet, the head of the state agency working to kill the project said Wednesday.

"There are significant questions about process and procedures, no matter what the outcome" of a pending Nuclear Regulatory Commission ruling, Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects chief Bruce Breslow said.

The NRC is expected to issue a ruling in coming weeks on its review of a commission legal panel finding that the Energy Department can't pull the plug on the Yucca Mountain project after 27 years of study without an act of Congress.

Breslow told the state Legislature's Committee on High-Level Radioactive Waste on Tuesday that if the NRC decides the Energy Department must proceed, it would jump start a Yucca project licensing application process that is expected to take up to four years to complete.

An NRC administrative ruling that the Energy Department can end the Yucca project will almost certainly be appealed to a U.S. District Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C.

The Energy Department maintains its Yucca Mountain shutdown effort is a policy decision within the power of Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

Congress in 1982 directed the Energy Department to study plans to bury at least 77,000 tons of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel in tunnels bored beneath an ancient volcanic ridge 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The NRC panel tallies the cost of the project to date at $10 billion, and estimates have projected the total cost at more than $90 billion over 100 years.

Opponents have raised concerns about air, water and soil contamination. Nevada state officials and attorneys argue the technology for entombing radioactive material isn't fully proved, and that transporting waste from more than 100 nuclear power plants and sites around the country poses more risk than leaving it where it is.

The states of Washington and South Carolina, plus Aiken County, S.C., the Prairie Island Indian Community of Minnesota and the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners want the NRC to order the project to proceed.

They argue that Congress promised a way to move high-level radioactive waste from sites including the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state and the Savannah River site in South Carolina.