WASHINGTON, April 18 (UPI) -- Both sides in the ongoing battle over placing a nuclear waste storage facility at Nevada's Yucca Mountain have demonstrated enough disregard for the facts that it sometimes appears they have licensed Steve Jobs's famous "reality distortion field."
The sad fact of the matter is there is plenty of opportunity for rational discussion on the subject without resorting to examples of creative omissions and flat-out inaccuracies, such as those found in Thursday's House hearing on the state's objection to the project.
"There's a lot of fear-mongering going on," observed Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee subcommittee that held the hearing. But he was only half-right -- there was quite a bit of hope mongering, too.
Perhaps the most glaring departure from reality arose several times as both opponents and supporters dealt with the idea that antitank missiles pose a grave threat to shipments of spent nuclear fuel that would travel from all parts of the country to the Yucca repository.
Subcommittee chairman, Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, supports Yucca. He said tests showed a missile would put an "indentation" in a shipping cask. In fact, tests have shown the warhead puts a small hole entirely through the cask.
United Press International looked at the missile scenario and found that, while serious, it is not the catastrophe envisioned by Yucca foes such as Nevada's Republican senator, John Ensign, its Democratic representative, Shelly Berkley and others.
"We know the canisters can be breached with a TOW missile," Ensign said. "They can't be adequately protected, at least with current technology."
Ensign seems to have forgotten that a defense called reactive armor exists against the shaped-charge warheads found in TOWs and less-sophisticated antitank weapons. Since shaped charges rely on a precise explosion to penetrate targets, reactive armor disrupts the warhead with an opposing detonation.
Several armies, including Russia and Israel, have made wide use of reactive armor on their tanks. Adapting the technology to protect shipping casks is a viable option. Also, if missiles are determined to be a problem for mobile shipments, the technology for certain would be helpful in protecting the stationary "dry cask" storage facilities found at several nuclear plants around the country.
Yucca opponents tend to say two things: Transporting the waste is unsafe, and there are alternatives to Yucca. But the two are contradictory, because the alternatives also would require moving the waste from its current locations.
The spent fuel itself is another area of debate where facts are scarce. Yucca supporters say the site will consolidate the nation's nuclear waste, making it easier to protect. Opponents rightly point out that nuclear plants will have to hold onto spent fuel until it cools enough for transport. They stretch credibility, however, when they say this negates the protection of one permanent site. Once the backlog of spent fuel is transported, any new waste would reside in indoor cooling pools, not exposed in the dry cask system.
When the Nevada congressional delegation complains the Yucca choice was "purely political," they omit a few details. The current Nuclear Waste Policy Act does indeed present the matter as an all-or-nothing choice, but not because nothing else was looked at.
About a dozen sites across the country were originally considered, but all others fell to the wayside for scientific as well as parochial considerations. For example, one proposal would have stored the waste in subterranean salt domes near the Gulf Coast. The idea was dropped when studies showed the waste canisters would heat the salt to the point that it would flow over the waste, making future retrieval difficult if not impossible.
The Department of Energy is not off the hook either when it comes to distortions about Yucca. At the House hearing, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham warned legislators if the plan is rejected, waste holders would turn to an "ad-hoc" approach to finding alternative storage sites, as opposed to a coordinated DOE effort.
This is not as bad as it sounds. Civilian sites would have to go through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which could take care of coordination.
Abraham also strained hyperbole to the limit when he compared DOE's 20 years of Yucca research to the more quickly achieved Hoover Dam, Manhattan Project and Apollo space program. Each of those past achievements required a huge engineering effort, but for issues of much narrower scope than Yucca.
Despite Abraham's invoking those feats, society's success in those projects has very little to do with whether or not Yucca will work. With all due respect to the physicists, rocket scientists and workers that made those plans work, determining all the factors affecting a nuclear waste repository over an expected 10,000-year lifespan is a few orders of magnitude more complex.
