THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, July 13, 1995 TAG: 9507130421
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A4 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWS SERVICE
LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines
The House of Representatives on Wednesday voted to slow or stop exploratory work at Yucca Mountain, Nev., the most likely burial ground for high-level nuclear waste.
The House - frustrated by the project's delay and expense - ordered the Energy Department to proceed with a ``national interim storage program'' to hold spent fuel for up to 100 years until a long-range solution can be found.
The Clinton administration and the nuclear power industry objected. They said the House action would simply prolong the search for a final repository for the mounting piles of waste.
The Energy Department has spent 13 years and $4.5 billion exploring Yucca, a former nuclear test site and bombing range 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Questions have been raised about cracks inside the mountain and the possibility that earthquakes, explosions or water runoff could carry radioactive material into the countryside. A decision on its suitability is at least nine years away.
Now, nuclear-waste casks in several states, including Virginia, will wait even longer to be buried.
At Virginia Power's nuclear plant in Surry, 26 massive cylinders of iron, lead and steel are waiting - standing on a concrete slab surrounded by armed guards and a chain-link fence.
Each cylinder is stuffed with fiery-hot rods of spent fuel from the plant. That's 15 tons each of intensely radioactive waste.
The casks, 16 feet high by 8 feet in diameter, are symbols of an unsolved riddle of the atomic age: What to do with nuclear fuel when it outlives its usefulness. Forty years after the dawn of the commercial nuclear industry, the government still can't decide where to put its deadly by-products.
``The safe isolation of highly radioactive waste remains one of the most challenging environmental problems facing the nation and indeed the world,'' Daniel Dreyfus of the Energy Department told a congressional committee last month.
Virginia has company in its wait. While Washington dithers, nuclear plants in five other states - South Carolina, Maryland, Colorado, Michigan and Minnesota - have already run out of storage space in the pools where they normally put their used fuel to cool.
As a result, they have started to store their wastes - mostly uranium with a dash of even more dangerous plutonium - above ground, in so-called ``dry cask'' storage.
By next year, five other states will follow: Arkansas, New Jersey, Ohio, Wisconsin and California. By 2010, the Department of Energy says, 30 states will be holding 11,000 tons of nuclear waste on open pads or in concrete bunkers.
Some of the poisonous garbage from the Surry plant's twin reactors has been sitting in the open for almost nine years. The casks are designed to last 40 years - but the potency of the radioactive material is tens of thousands of years.
Although there have been no serious incidents, above-ground storage makes some people uneasy. They worry about leaks, as heat and radiation corrode the containers, or an accident as casks are loaded or unloaded.
As well, about 35,000 tons of spent fuel have accumulated underwater in storage pools at the nation's 73 commercial reactor sites since the 1950s. An additional 2,000 tons are added each year.
Counting excess stocks owned by the Defense and Energy departments, there will be more than 100,000 tons of high-level military and civilian nuclear waste on hand by 2010. by CNB