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News :: Environment : Nukes |
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Nuclear Expert Tells AP Yucca Mt. Unsafe |
Current rating: 0 |
by AP
(No verified email address) |
18 Feb 2004
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``The report says in ordinary English that under the conditions proposed by the Department of Energy, the canisters will leak,'' Craig said. ``It was signed by every single member of the board so there would be no confusion.'' |
RENO, Nev. (AP) -- The nation's nuclear waste dump proposed for Nevada is poorly designed and could leak highly radioactive waste, a scientist who recently resigned from a federal panel of experts on Yucca Mountain told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
Paul Craig, a physicist and engineering professor at the University of California-Davis, said he quit the panel last month so he could speak more freely about the waste dump's dangers.
Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is planned to begin receiving waste in 2010. Some 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste at commercial and military sites in 39 states would be stored in metal canisters underground in tunnels.
``The science is very clear,'' Craig told the AP in an interview before his first public speech about the Energy Department's design for the canisters.
``If we get high-temperature liquids, the metal would corrode and that would eventually lead to leakage of nuclear waste,'' Craig said.
``Therefore, it is a bad design. And that is very, very bad news for the Department of Energy because they are committed to that design,'' he said.
Craig, who was appointed to the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board by President Clinton in 1997, spoke to about 100 people later Wednesday night at a community forum in Reno sponsored by the Sierra Club.
``I would never say Yucca Mountain won't work. What I would say is the design they have won't work,'' he said Wednesday night. He said he's convinced the Energy Department will have to postpone the project and adopt a different design.
``It would require years of delay and my guess is that is what is going to happen. The bad science is so clear they will be unable to ignore it forever,'' Craig told the AP.
The 11-member technical review board outlined its concerns about the potential for corrosion in a report to the Energy Department in November about the metal for the canisters, called Alloy-22 -- ``an upscale version of stainless steel,'' Craig said.
It was the most important report the board has produced since Congress created the panel in 1987, he said, but largely has been ignored by Congress and the department.
``The report says in ordinary English that under the conditions proposed by the Department of Energy, the canisters will leak,'' Craig said. ``It was signed by every single member of the board so there would be no confusion.''
Energy Department spokesman Allen Benson defended the design plans for the repository and the metal in the storage casks.
``We stand by our work,'' he said Wednesday in Las Vegas. He said the department was preparing a formal response to the board's November report. He had no further comment.
In Washington, D.C., officials with the industry's Nuclear Energy Institute did not immediately return telephone calls seeking comment.
The board's report in November said the government had failed to take into account ``deliquescence'' -- a phenomenon regarding the reaction of salt to moisture -- in its plans to operate the dump at temperatures well above boiling water, or about 200 degrees.
At those temperatures, the metal canisters would heat up, causing salts in the surrounding ground to liquefy, thus leading to corrosion, Craig said.
``It turns out the metals which look like they act pretty good at temperature levels below boiling water -- those same metals act badly with temperatures that could exist'' at Yucca Mountain, he said.
Craig, who also has served as a member of National Academy of Sciences National Research Council Board on Radioactive Waste Management, said he sent his resignation letter to the White House in January before his term was to expire in April so he could shine more light on the government's plans.
``When you serve as a member of one of those boards, you cannot talk about the political consequences of the science or the big picture. You are supposed to stick to the science and you should stick to the science,'' Craig said.
``You cannot have the kind of conversation we are having now if I was still on the board.''
Copyright 2004 The Associated Press
http://www.ap.org/ |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
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Bush Administration Accused of Suppressing, Distorting Science |
by Seth Borenstein
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
19 Feb 2004
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WASHINGTON - A group of more than 60 top U.S. scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates and several science advisers to past Republican presidents, on Wednesday accused the Bush administration of manipulating and censoring science for political purposes.
In a 46-page report and an open letter, the scientists accused the administration of "suppressing, distorting or manipulating the work done by scientists at federal agencies" in several cases. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a liberal advocacy group based in Cambridge, Mass., organized the effort, but many of the critics aren't associated with it.
White House Science Advisor John Marburger III called the charges "like a conspiracy theory report, and I just don't buy that." But he added that "given the prestige of some of the individuals who have signed on to this, I think they deserve additional response and we're coordinating something."
The protesting scientists welcomed his response.
"If an administration of whatever political persuasion ignores scientific reality, they do so at great risk to the country," said Stanford University physicist W.H.K. Panofsky, who served on scientific advisory councils in the Eisenhower, Johnson and Carter administrations. "There is no clear understanding in the (Bush) administration that you cannot bend science and technology to policy."
The report charges that administration officials have:
* Ordered massive changes to a section on global warming in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's 2003 Report on the Environment. Eventually, the entire section was dropped.
* Replaced a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fact sheet on proper condom use with a warning emphasizing condom failure rates.
* Ignored advice from top Department of Energy nuclear materials experts who cautioned that aluminum tubes being imported by Iraq weren't suitable for use to make nuclear weapons.
* Established political litmus tests for scientific advisory boards. In one case, public health experts were removed from a CDC lead paint advisory panel and replaced with researchers who had financial ties to the lead industry.
* Suppressed a U.S. Department of Agriculture microbiologist's finding that potentially harmful bacteria float in the air surrounding large hog farms.
* Excluded scientists who've received federal grants from regulatory advisory panels while permitting the appointment of scientists from regulated industries.
"I don't recall it ever being so blatant in the past," said Princeton University physicist Val Fitch, a 1980 Nobel Prize winner who served on a Nixon administration science advisory committee. "It's just time after time after time. The facts have been distorted."
White House adviser Marburger, also a physicist, said, "I don't think that these incidents or issues add up to strong support for the accusation that this administration is deliberately acting to undermine the processes of science."
Each example cited was a separate case, Marburger said, often decided at the agency level for good reasons. He declined to defend any case.
Russell Train, an EPA administrator in the Nixon and Ford administrations who spoke on the protesters' behalf, described the Bush administration's treatment of science and scientists as so "dictatorial" that it was causing good scientists to leave the federal government.
James Zahn, a former Agriculture Department microbiologist, said he discovered accidentally that pig farms in southwestern Minnesota, northern Missouri and Iowa were emitting airborne bacteria. Because pigs are often fed antibiotics, Zahn speculated that airborne bacteria from farms could include drug-resistant bacteria, which, if breathed by humans, would make them harder to treat when ill.
Zahn presented his findings at a scientific conference in 2000, but the Bush administration stopped him from publishing his data 11 times between September 2001 and April 2002, he said. When Danish researchers sought to learn more about his work, Zahn wasn't allowed to share his techniques.
"It was truly a new problem with potential impact on human health," Zahn said.
The protest occurred on the same day that the independent National Academy of Sciences released its study of the Bush administration's plans for global warming research. The national academy's report warned strenuously about the dangers of politicizing climate change science, but said the Bush research plan was on the right track, though it noted that it was underfunded.
James Mahoney, who directs the global warming research plan, acknowledged that the Bush administration had cut the research budget from $2.2 billion this year to $1.96 next year.
William Schlesinger, the dean of the School of Environment at Duke University in Durham, N.C., participated in the academy's study and the scientists' protest. He gave the Bush administration's climate plan a grade of B-.
But, he added, the Bush administration's science policy is too politicized and gets a "D." He said, "Scientists are very disappointed at this administration's use and regard of science."
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For information on the Union of Concerned Scientists' report, go to:
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_environment/rsi/index.html
UCS website:
http://www.ucsusa.org/
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Web site is:
http://www.ostp.gov/
Copyright 2004 Knight-Ridder
http://www.realcities.com/ |
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