Nevada officials Monday accused the federal Department of Energy of trying to cover up a debate over whether a planned dump in the Nevada desert for high-level atomic wastes might erupt in a nuclear explosion and called for an independent federal investigation of the danger.
Nevada has long assailed the project as ill-conceived and ill-managed, as have some opponents of nuclear power.The New York Times reported on Sunday that for several months scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico have been quietly debating whether the planned repository at Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, might explode, poisoning the air and groundwater with radioactivity.
Monday on the Senate floor, Richard H. Bryan, D-Nev., accused the Department of Energy, which runs Los Alamos and the Yucca Mountain studies, of operating with reckless disregard for the lives of Nevadans in pushing the waste repository while saying nothing of the explosion debate.
"I am shocked and outraged that the Department of Energy and the nuclear power industry continues to force acceptance of a dump in Nevada when it appears that its own scientists cannot reach consensus on the most fundamental safety questions related to nuclear waste," he said in a statement released by his office.
Last Thursday, Bryan added, the Senate Energy Committee held a hearing on nuclear waste policy during which many witnesses said there were no scientific issues holding back progress at Yucca Mountain and that all opposition was purely political.
"As this article reveals, nothing could be further from the truth," he said. "The scientific community is still questioning the very premise of geologic storage."
Bryan told the Senate he would introduce legislation this week to force a full independent review.