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SECTION MENU
- The Results of Our
Safety Analyses |
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Nuclear Regulatory
Commission and Environmental Protection
Agency regulations require us to perform
a separate assessment of a hypothetical
scenario where a person drills for
water at Yucca Mountain and inadvertently
drills through a waste package.
The scenario prescribed by the regulations assumes that
this could only occur if the driller does not detect a
waste package while drilling.
Our analyses show the human intrusion scenario, as described
in the regulations, is not likely to occur within the
10,000-year regulatory period because the robust waste
packages are expected to remain intact for tens of thousands
of years. However, for our Environmental
Impact Statement, the TSPA
still calculates the dose
to people living in the area if this event were to happen
beyond the regulatory time period.
According to our analyses, the earliest a human intrusion
could occur without recognition by the driller is expected
to be at least 30,000 years. If a human intrusion did
occur at about 30,000 years, a person living in the area
could be exposed to radioactive
particles from the event. The consequence to that
person is estimated to be on the order of 0.002
millirem.
If the Yucca Mountain repository is filled to capacity
and sealed some 100 to 300 years from now, the site will
be marked to tell future generations of its existence.
“Passive institutional controls,” or markers,
will be designed to tell our descendants that the area
at Yucca Mountain is not totally in a natural state —
that a previous generation left something beneath the
mountain that needs to remain undisturbed.
DOE has extensive experience in addressing regulatory
requirements for such markers. For example, the agency
worked with Sandia National Laboratories to design a marker for the Waste
Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico.
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