Maybe the Nye County Commissioners need YMP education?

Published Pahrump Valley Times, by Mel Bauer, September 12, 2001 issue.

This column may not make many people happy. It may be disturbing information to some, dismissed as the ramblings from an over-the-hill writer to others, or an affront to a number of elected and respected officials in the county. It may be all of these, but, it is also the opinion shared by more than a few of those who live in the primary area affected along the Amargosa valley and Death Valley.

The Commissioners claim the county is "Semi-neutral" on Yucca Mountain? Maybe it’s the position of the Commissioners, but not that of all the residents of the county. In fact this position really makes me wonder who does need the education on the Yucca Mountain Project. I certainly have been unable to attend many of the meetings due to health restriction, but the information available to the average citizen (from the DOE) should be sufficient to raise serious questions as to the suitability of the site as a nuclear waste repository.

Sure, the transportation routes and the monitor wells cost funded by DOE to the county addresses a couple of short term concerns. But the method of transportation and the routes are subject to change at the discretion of those in charge and the wells may serve a purpose for a couple of hundred years but they may never detect contaminates in a rapid moving plume of water just a few hundred yard away from the site. The oversight funds may give an illusion of some measure of control to the commissioners, but I would challenge anyone to provide one concrete fact generated by these funds that would lead anyone to confirm or reject the proposed project.

We are talking about a site where the earths crust is rife with deep faults, fractures, and fissures related to past geologic disturbances. Images were shown at the Devil’s Hole Workshop held at Death Valley that confirms this statement indicating that the under-pinning of the earth’s surface deep below the Yucca Mountain area is ripe for seismic activity on a grand scale. Sure, two panels of scientific experts have evaluated the site for DOE’s purposes, but this is from experts that are only now determining the indicators of an impending quake. They have yet to predict either the time or location of seismic activity.

This particular site is over a portion of the mantle that is thin and potentially geologically active as evidenced volcanic activity and by frequent and widespread intrusions of hot water into the aquifer and groundwater. These intrusions follow fissures in the mantle are from relatively recent earth timeframes of geologic activity.

Although the quantity of virgin water that is intruding into the aquifer has not been established, these fissures appear to also have extended channels feeding the ground water table that is less than 100 feet from the surface in many locations of the valleys. One such hot water intrusion a few years ago carried sufficient heat for a short period of time to melt the PVC pipes distributing domestic well water.

If these fissures are capable of carrying heated water generated by the combustion of hydrogen and oxygen (virgin water) from below the earth’s mantle into the groundwater, in all probability these same vents are capable of carrying groundwater (and contaminates) down into the aquifer if they lose their positive upward pressure. The result is a contamination potential to the aquifer with far reaching consequences. While the groundwater transport of contaminates probably will only affect the area south and west of the site, the underlying aquifer could affect a much wider area in any or all directions.

Will the design of the storage facility be safe? Will the containers withstand the stress of seismic activity? Based on the low level of activity projected for the area by the ‘experts’, the design as currently projected, probably will. But those same experts will also tell you that the longer the period between major (7.0 to 9.0) quakes, the higher the probability one will occur. The documentation in the Impact Analyses only considers historic and limited pre-historic evidence. It offers no viable projection as to the magnitude or frequency of future seismic active.

Will any of us in this lifetime be required to address a catastrophic event at Yucca Mountain that will threaten the residents of the Amargosa and Death Valleys? Probably not!

But it would only take one major event in the 8.0 range in this unstable region to shear the tunnels and split a storage container as easily as you, or I, might crush an aluminum soda can. How long would it then be before the area would be uninhabitable?

Think about it.