Reply #7: Earthquakes In The Vicinity Of Yucca Mountain [View All]

[struggle4progress]

Nevada ranks third in the nation for current seismic activity ...

<A> magnitude 5.6 earthquake near Little Skull Mountain, about 8 miles southeast of the Yucca Mountain site, .. occurred on June 29, 1992. This earthquake caused damage to a nearby Department of Energy field office building. This earthquake, and many after-shocks, occurred on a fault that had not previously been identified. The Little Skull Mountain earthquake and numerous others at about the same time in the western U.S. are considered to have been triggered by the magnitude 7.4 Landers earthquake, in California.

.. <I>n 1948, there was a magnitude 3.6 event on the southeast boundary of the Yucca Mountain site, in an area known to have a number of faults. Recently, there have been other events recorded beneath Yucca Mountain with magnitudes less than 2.5.

Earthquake activity is a safety concern both during operation, above and below ground, and after closure of a repository at Yucca Mountain ...

http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/yucca/seismo01.htm


Yucca Valley earthquake surprised experts
July 17, 1992
By Diane LaMacchia

Soundly asleep in their beds, the residents of Yucca Valley and Big Bear Lake were not the only ones jolted by last month's early morning earthquakes. Scientists met with surprises, too.

"When I drove down there, I fully expected to find that a major east-west fault line called the Pinto Mountain fault had ruptured," says LBL geologist Pat Williams, who has been studying ancient fracture patterns along the Hayward fault (see Currents, June 29, 1990). Instead, the largest earthquake to occur in the contiguous 48 states in the last 40 years broke through four separate, lesser-known north-south fault lines in the Mojave Desert. "It let me know again that the Earth will always surprise you," Williams says.

The magnitude 7.4 Yucca Valley quake, named the Landers earthquake for the nearest, hardest-hit town, ruptured at 5 a.m. on June 28. A second one, 6.5 on the Richter scale, hit about three hours later, 30 kilometers west at Big Bear Lake, a ski resort in the San Bernardino Mountains. News reports that day said the two quakes were "unrelated," but reports the next day said they were related. Williams explains that although technically speaking, the second may have been too far away to be called an aftershock, the two earthquakes were clearly related in that the Landers earthquake lowered the compressional stress on the Big Bear fault and allowed it to rupture. <snip>

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/yucca-valley-earthquake.html


July 9, 2004

Victory in Yucca Mountain Lawsuit; Court Overrules Government’s Lax Radiation Standards for Nuclear Waste

Statement of Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook

Today’s ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) illegally set its radiation release standards for groundwater for the proposed high-level radioactive waste dump at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, marks a major victory for citizens of Nevada, for the environment and for science over politics.

The EPA set 10,000 years as the period during which radiation in the groundwater cannot exceed drinking water standards at the site’s boundary, but this time frame would not protect the health of future generations. As the court ruled, the Energy Policy Act requires that the EPA determine public health and safety standards for Yucca Mountain “based upon and consistent with” the National Academy of Sciences’ recommendations. The Academy’s recommendation is that the compliance period should extend through the time of the peak risk for radiation doses from the repository, which studies show are likely to occur in 300,000 years or more. To compensate for Yucca’s geologic unsuitability, the EPA ignored the findings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“It would have been one thing had EPA taken the Academy’s recommendations into account and then tailored a standard that accommodated the agency’s policy concerns. But that is not what EPA did,” the Court wrote in its ruling. “Instead, it unabashedly rejected NAS’s findings, and then went on to promulgate a dramatically different standard, one that the Academy had expressly rejected.” <snip>

http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/release.cfm?ID=1745