About a Mountain Read online

  So, on the morning of May 12, 2004, while standing before live cameras at the National Press Club, a geoscientist from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and another geoscientist from the Geosciences Management Company in Boulder City, Nevada, placed three samples of Alloy-22 in separate glass beakers. They poured over these samples a mixture of water that contained the same minerals found inside Yucca Mountain.

  Then they stood back and waited.

  The home audience watched.

  The two geoscientists were silent in their smocks. The hundred or so members of the Press Club took notes. There were photographs. Cameras rolling. One of the geoscientists eventually said, “Okay,” and then lifted the first sample of the metal from its beaker.

  The cameras zoomed in, and some flashes went off.

  The metal had corroded in twenty-one minutes.

  “Don’t you agree that your studies at the Yucca Mountain site have just barely begun to scratch the surface of this enormous technical problem?” a member of the Review Board asked a scientist from Yucca at a hearing about the mountain on Capitol Hill.

  “I don’t know,” said the scientist, “if I would say ‘barely.’”

  In its earlier incarnation as the Atomic Energy Commission, the Department of Energy oversaw the development of the first atomic bomb at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a facility that was discovered to have dumped over 10,000 gallons of nuclear waste every single day between 1946 and 1957 in an area of desert that’s now called “Acid Canyon,” a region of New Mexico that contains 600 times more radioactive contaminants than any other place on Earth.

  In 1970, another project overseen by the Department of Energy was revealed to have intentionally released the equivalent of over 340,000 lethal doses of radiation over northeast Washington in a study that it called “The Green Run Experiment,” the purpose of which was to track radioactivity in the event of a nuclear strike. Because the project was top secret, however, local residents were never informed of its potential hazards.

  “Anything that we saw that was odd, or that we’d call in and ask about,” said one resident in an interview in 1990, “they explained was swamp gas and wouldn’t be a problem. When they drove up our driveway and asked for specimens of dead animals, or if they took dirt samples from our gardens, they’d say, ‘We’re monitoring this to make sure that you’re safe.’ And so we’d ask, ‘From what? Are you finding anything?’ And they’d say, ‘No, but if we do we’ll let you know.’”

  But the Department of Energy never did let them know, and twenty-seven people died eventually there of cancer.

  And most recently, documents released through the Freedom of Information Act revealed that from 1948 to 1971 the Department of Energy dumped over 200 billion gallons of waste into the soil around Washington’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation. An investigation by the state’s Government Affairs Committee estimated that the amount of waste that had been dumped at Hanford could fill a lake that was roughly the size of Manhattan, three and a half stories deep.

  “Let me be perfectly frank,” wrote one retired general of the United States Air Force in a letter he addressed to the Department of Energy, “this is unforgivably scandalous.”

  By then, a report from the United States Geological Survey had declared that the Department of Energy’s experiments were “generally…inept.”

  A report from the Nuclear Energy Commission found their science “exceedingly faulty.”

  And the General Accounting Office, the office of independent congressional oversight, called the Department of Energy’s funding—which was twice as large as Social Security’s, thirteen times larger than the Department of Education’s, and thirty-nine times larger than the Department of Justice’s—“vulnerable to waste, fraud, mismanagement, and abuse.”

  “Maybe if we can find out where all this money is going,” said the governor of Nevada in 1993, “we can put the waste in there, and then we won’t have any problems.”

  But the problems with the Department of Energy continued in Nevada. In 1998, the California Institute of Technology revealed that Yucca Mountain was stretching, seismically, ten times faster than anyone had thought. Based on satellite surveillance studies, the institute estimated that the entire mountain was likely to move almost fifty full feet over the next 1,000 years. In addition, since 1994, the department had known that running directly through Yucca Mountain was a 900-foot-wide earthquake zone that was called the Sundance fault. It had known that crisscrossing just beneath it was a fault called Ghost Dance. And it had known that Yucca Mountain’s own chief geologist, Jerry Szymanski, had discovered as early as 1988 that any kind of fault movement in or around the mountain could cause what he was calling “massive upwelling,” a surge of steaming water from deep within the Earth that could flood the site’s repository and corrode the waste’s containers, sending their nuclear waste into the desert’s ecosystem, the nearby water table, and eventually into the city of Las Vegas itself.

  “The point is that the Yucca Mountain scientists all have kids, just like you,” Blair said to the class in the Information Center, “so that’s why they’re busy trying to prove that Yucca Mountain will be safe.”

  She passed out her final exercise to the children that morning: a plastic bag of Silly Putty, Kitty Litter, Styrofoam peanuts, and a small water bottle that was labeled “waste container.”

  “Now,” she said, “let’s pretend that these water bottles are the same metal containers that the waste is going to be stored in. I want you to build a waterproof seal around your waste to prove that these containers won’t leak into the mountain. Then I’m going to pour water over each of your containers in order to determine who made the tightest seal.”

  One student picked up a plastic bag and asked, “Wait, which one’s the waste? The peanuts?”

  “No, honey,” said Blair, walking over and leaning, “the Kitty Litter’s the waste, the Styrofoam peanuts are your protective barrier.”

  “Then what’s the Silly Putty for?” another student asked.

  “The scientists call that ‘Alloy-22.’ It’s a very strong metal,” Blair said, sitting down.

  “So we’re being graded on whether or not the Kitty Litter will last?” a student asked while smashing Silly Putty to his face.

  “No, stupid,” said a girl sitting across the table, “it’s based on how much the litter is going to leak out. Duh.”

  “Well, we don’t want it to leak,” Blair said, standing up.

  “Well, yeah,” said the girl. “I know.”

  “So it’s based on how long the Silly Putty can last?” the boy with the putty on his face asked again.

  “It’s based on what you think will last the longest,” said Blair.

  “So is the bottle biodegradable?” a different boy asked.

  “It’s not a bottle,” said Blair. “It’s your container, remember?”

  “Then how long can the container last?” asked the Silly Putty boy.

  “Well, that’s the point,” said Blair. “You’ve got to figure that out.”

  “How long does it have to last for?” the Putty boy asked.

  “Ten thousand years,” Blair said, sitting down.

  About 10,000 years ago, the Pleistocene was ending. Sheets of ice were stretched over Greenland and Canada and Oregon and Michigan and Ohio and New York and Maine. They covered Finland and Russia, Germany and Britain. The Andes were fully covered, and the Caucasus were fully covered, and even the Himalayas, to their peaks, were covered up.

  Between these sheets were 5 million scattered human beings, living in small groups in which they mainly hunted, gathered, and had just begun to farm.

  They had dogs but not sheep.

  Goats, but not cows.

  Among them were wooly mammoths, as well as sabertooths.

  There were bears that could stand almost twelve feet tall.

  There were brand-new species of firs in the ground.

  There was prairie grass in deserts.


  A sea inside Iraq.

  And there is even some evidence, according to cave paintings, that human beings were living side by side with werewolves.

  Back then we spent time making knives out of stones. Spears and harpoons and arrows and bows. We wore necklaces and bracelets and sometimes paint tattoos, and in India and Syria and Iran and Pakistan we ate lentils, peas, fava beans, wheat. In China, we ate apples. We had corn in northern Chile. Grapes in southern Turkey. Plums on the Nile’s shore.

  What we hadn’t yet discovered on the planet, however, were oranges and cotton and mangoes and olives and squash and tomatoes and dates.

  We had not yet found peaches.

  Nor yet the potato.

  We had not yet found sugar, chocolate, almonds, or wine. Not watermelons, bananas, strawberries, or limes.

  There wouldn’t be any paper for 6,000 years. No coffee beans or tea for 7,000 years. No soap for 8,000. No glass or books or currency for more.

  It was before there was a Bible, a Koran, a Chinese Book of Changes. It was around the time the last dragons in Sweden disappeared. Around the time Atlantis was destroyed by a flood. And it’s when 45 percent of Americans believe, according to a Gallop poll from 2003, that God first created the Earth.

  On the bus that morning to Yucca, someone asked Blair why 10,000 was picked.

  “Well,” she said, “they picked ten thousand years because that’s how long the half-life of the waste is going to be. Who knows what a half-life is?”

  She extended her arms with her palms up before her and waited with her eyes for an answer.

  The girl who asked the question put her headphones back on.

  “Well, think of a half-life as nature’s egg timer,” Blair said, standing in the aisle of the bus with a mic. “After the buzzer goes off, the half-life is over, and all of the radioactive elements are safe.”

  Someone’s PlayStation slid down the aisle of the bus.

  A boy stood up, walked down the aisle, said Hey to some girls on his way to the game, picked it up, turned around, then walked back up the bus.

  “Yucca Lady,” someone said, with his hood up over his head, “is this bus gonna show any movies?”

  The half-life of iodine-131, a common compound in commercial spent nuclear waste, is approximately eight and a half days, which does in fact mean that the material in that time will lose half of its power, but it does not mean that it loses its lethality. Even after fifty years of cooling, for example, the surface dose rate of the typical nuclear waste cocktail would be 8,000 rem per hour, which is 100,000 curies.

  Which is, more simply put, still dangerous enough to kill someone within five minutes of exposure.

  Most environmental scientists don’t consider radioactive materials “safe,” therefore, until they’ve been dormant for ten times their projected half-life.

  One day I asked the librarian at the Information Center why a period of 10,000 years had been set for Yucca Mountain.

  “Good question,” she said, nodding her head and squinting. “So, let’s see…. Hmm…. Well, okay…Umm…I think that’s gonna be a question for someone at DOE.”

  I went to the regional office of the Department of Energy in order to ask my question about the 10,000-year-long period. But the spokesman they sent down to speak with me in the lobby said that the period had been set for them by the Environmental Protection Agency.

  I drove south to the local office of the EPA, but the woman on the intercom at the locked front door told me that my request would have to be in writing.

  I wrote to the EPA in Las Vegas three times, and finally was told in an e-mail that the 10,000-year-long period for the Yucca Mountain project was established by the Yucca Mountain Development Act of 2002.

  I looked up that act, which is one page long, and only found a reference in it to another act of Congress, the Energy Policy Act of 1992.

  According to the Energy Policy Act of 1992, “scientists of the National Academies are to consider whether it is possible to make scientifically supportable predictions of the probability that the repository’s engineered or geologic barriers will be breached as a result of human intrusion over a period of 10,000 years.”

  So I asked the National Academies of Science how it determined that 10,000-year-long period. The Academies is a nonprofit consortium of scientific advisers that was established by Abraham Lincoln in the early 1860s for the purpose of “counseling the government on matters of technology and dedicated to the furtherance of knowledge for the American citizenry.” But when I reached the librarian at the National Academies, he sent me to the office of the National Research Council.

  At the National Research Council, which was chartered in 1913 in order to help Congress monitor the activities of the National Academies of Science, I asked a woman in Public Affairs about the 10,000-year-long period, and she told me that the best people to talk to about that would be the National Research Council’s Board on Radioactive Waste Management.

  The Board on Radioactive Waste Management at the National Research Council is a twenty-member committee of geologists, nuclear physicists, and chemical engineers that has been commenting on the plan to store waste at Yucca Mountain since the late 1980s, so I asked one of their secretaries about the 10,000-year-long period, and she sent me to the Radioactive Waste Management Board’s Committee on the Technical Bases for Yucca Mountain Standards.

  Chaired by Robert Fri, a scholar at Resources for the Future, an environmental policy group in Washington, D.C., the Committee on the Technical Bases for Yucca Mountain Standards has written 145 reports on Yucca Mountain.

  “Hi, sir,” I said, when I reached chairman Fri. “Thank you so much for giving me a second of your time…. First, I guess I’m just wondering if you’re the right guy to ask about the ten-thousand-year-long period that’s been set for Yucca Mountain.”

  “I could try to help, sure,” said committee chairman Fri.

  “Great,” I said. “Then the only other thing I’m trying to figure out is why the time scale for the waste that’s headed for Yucca Mountain was set at ten thousand years. I mean, is there a reason why ten thousand specifically was picked?”

  “Well, yes,” said the chairman. “But, also, no.”

  “Yes and no?” I said.

  “Right,” he said. “In other words, there were definitely reasons why we chose the time frame we did.”

  “Okay.”

  “But ten thousand years isn’t the time frame we chose.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No.”

  “What happened?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Could you explain it?” I asked.

  “Well, basically,” said the chairman, “Yucca Mountain is what happened.”

  In a study of the mountain entitled Technical Bases for Standards at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, chairman Fri and his committee originally wrote:

  “The reason for imposing a time frame on the Yucca Mountain project would be to ensure that there are no significant health risks to humans during the waste’s storage. Taking into consideration that some potentially harmful exposures may still be possible several hundred thousand years following the mountain’s closure, we therefore recommend that a time frame be established that includes those periods of peak potential risks…which could be on the order of a million years or more.”

  But stability at Yucca Mountain couldn’t be guaranteed for as long as a million years, so somewhere within that long chain of federal policy wranglers the time frame for securing the nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain was decreased by approximately 99 percent.

  “What we’re dealing with here,” explained Bob Halstead, a nuclear waste consultant for the state of Nevada, “is an exercise in planning for a nuclear catastrophe that is fundamentally rhetorical. It’s theatrical security, because the preparations that are being made by the Department of Energy have no real chance of succeeding. They satisfy the public, however, because they’re a symbol of control. Ten
thousand years sounds like a long time, right? But in terms of actually doing what that mountain needs to do, ten thousand years is useless. This waste is going to be deadly for tens of millions of years.”

  Bob Halstead was hired by the state of Nevada in the late 1990s after he successfully defended other states from proposals for waste repositories.

  “In reality,” he said, “I’ve come to believe that the greatest threat we face at Yucca Mountain isn’t actually posed by the waste’s half-life. The biggest threat we face is the transportation of this shit.”

  Seventy-seven thousand tons of spent nuclear waste currently await disposal at nuclear power plants. It’s estimated that it would take 108,000 individual shipments just to truck it all out to Yucca, 1,000 pounds at a time, carried in shipping casks that have never been subjected to full-scale safety tests.

  “Why haven’t they ever been tested?” Bob asked me over the phone. “Because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn’t require full-scale tests of nuclear waste containers. And why don’t they require full-scale safety tests of these things? Nobody really knows. But I suspect it’s because none of these nuclear waste containers could actually pass a safety test.”

  In “Testing to Failure: Design for Full-Scale Fire and Impact Tests for Spent Fuel Shipping Casks,” a report that Bob delivered at the 32nd Annual Waste Management Symposium, a single shoulder-launched missile was shown to be able to breach the wall of a waste shipping cask, deeply penetrating its innermost core, and ejecting just 1 percent of the cask’s cargo into the atmosphere, which is enough to produce 21,000 curies of radiation.

  “One percent might not sound like a lot,” said Bob, “but one percent is about all you need to do massive damage in Vegas.”

  For example, imagine a power plant somewhere in the United States where pencil-thin fuel rods are being removed from their reactor, chopped into nuggets, packed into casks, and then driven aboard a truck across the U.S. Highway system, day after day, for the next four decades.

  During that time, the trucks carrying the nuclear waste will pass through thirty-one states, 700 different counties, and within three and a half miles of 120 million Americans.