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Posted on 06/15/2002 10:59:41 PM PDT by brat
A small earthquake Friday that shook an area 12 miles southeast of the planned Yucca Mountain Repository stirred a big reaction from Nevada leaders who claimed again, the place is not safe for storing nuclear waste.
Authorities reported no damage or injuries from the magnitude 4.4 earthquake that the Nevada Seismological Laboratory recorede on its statewide network at 5:40 am.
It struck about seven miles beneath Little Skull Mountain at the Nevada Test Site, slightly west of where a moderate, magnitude 5.6 temblor rumbled through the sparsely populated area 10 years ago this month. That quake damaged a field operations building for the Yucca Mountain Project, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
"Today we saw proof that the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear dump site is not safe," Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said in a statement.
Reid said though there also are risks with possible transportation accidents "from 100,000 truckloads of deadly waste through 43 states...we cannot forget that there's another danger that after the waste arrives at Yucca Mountain, it will still not be safe."
There is no need to rush to build a nuclear repository when there are so many unanswered questions about its safety and security," Reid's statement says.
His concerns were echoed by other Nevada officials as the Senate is poised to act on Gov. Kenny Guinn's veto of the Yucca Mountain repository site in a few weeks.
Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., was on a plane Friday afternoon heading to Nevada and could not be reached. But his spokeswoman, Traci Scott said, "This is something we've already known, that Yucca Mountain is not a safe place to store deadly nuclear waste."
However, Troy Wade, chairman of the Nevada Alliance for Defense, Energy and Business, an organization of Nevada Teste Site contractors, said Friday's earthquake is "good news."
"It provides very clear experimental data that shows the facility's design can withstand an earthquake."
David von Seggern, a seismologist at the state's laboratory in Reno, said scientists "we're not surprised. The region has had little earthquakes all along."
He said instruments up until noon recorded "tens of aftershocks" up to magnitude 3 after the main shock hit. Some Southern Nevada Seismological Laboratory to report the magnitude 4.4 quake.
"We got a half dozen or so reports from the Las Vegas area to Beatty," von Seggern said.
In Amargosa Valley, south of Yucca Mountain, residents felt shock waves from the quake as it rattled through rural Nye County.
"I was sitting in my livingroom drinking coffee and my house started to shake," said Amargosa School Principal Faye Porche.
This one was a pretty good one. It lasted 10 or 15 seconds. It was more like shaking, not rolling," she said.
No water sloshed out or leaked from a 1 million-gallon tank, a covered, plastic liner surrounded by a metal frame that was constructed and filled in February for the project, according to Yucca Mountain Project spokesman, Allen Benson.
Friday's quake is considered to be at the high end on the scale of small earthquakes. Magnitude 4.5 and greater is considered to be moderate, according to von Seggern.
The magnitude 5.6 Little Skull Mountain earthquake on June 29, 1992 knocked out windows, cracked walls and downed lights and ceiling panels in the Yucca Mountain Project field operations center.
The 21/2 story concrete structure, built in the 1950's is located about 10 miles from Yucca Mountain, the volcanic rock ridge where the Department of Energy wants to entomb 77,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel beneath the top of the ridge.
Energy Department scientists have said a repository in Yucca Mountain could be built to withstand earthquakes registering up to 6.5 on the Richter scale on faults close to the mountain.
The Nuclear Energy Institute, the lobbying arm of the nation's nuclear power industry, downplayed the significance of "Friday's earthquake. A fact sheet released by the institute said the repository "will be designed to withstand earthquakes and avoid specific fault lines."
"The design effort is backed by 20 years of scientific study of local fault movement which is infrequent, occurring at intervals of many thousands of years," the institute's document reads.
The repository, by law, must be able to safely hold canisters of highly radioactive, metal-clad spent fuel pellets for 10,000 years even though scientists estimate peak doses from some of the materials won't occur for 300,000 years to 800,000 years.
Here's a little info on other countries and companies which recycle nuclear waste:
US Nuclear Power Debate
... The Bush administration also wants to explore new technology to recycle nuclear
fuel, increasing its efficiency and possibly reducing its danger. ...
Other info:
Numatec - the Tri-Cities' 'French connection'
... Numatec other parent is Cogema, the owner and operator of facilities used to produce
and recycle nuclear fuel, including many designed and built by SGN. ...
Nuclear Electricity
... gas equivalent). • Uranium offers a long-term source of energy. Unlike
fossil fuels, we can recycle nuclear fuel. We can recover ...
[MMA Alumni] Helping out MMA Nuclear Employed Alumni
... Many MMA Grads are employed in the Nuclear Power industry, ever since President Carter
killed the national plans to recycle nuclear fuel as was always intended ...
[PDF] U. S. Nuclear Waste Policy: Reaching Critical Mass
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
... An Aside: Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Overseas In addition to the United States,
only two other countries don't recycle nuclear fuel as a matter of national ...
Salon.com Technology | Nukes now!
... Other countries, such as Japan and France -- which gets about 80 percent of its
electricity from nuclear power -- recycle nuclear fuel, but President Ford ...
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