A state official says a new report by federal regulators points to new problems if the U.S. government restarts stalled plans to build a national nuclear waste dump in the Nevada desert.
The Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects is expected on Tuesday to rip a 301-page environmental study completed last week by U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff members as technically and legally defective.
The document revises studies filed in 2002 and 2008.
It focuses on contamination from radioactivity seeping out of tunnels drilled and filled with spent nuclear reactor fuel from across the nation into of underground water over hundreds of thousands of years.
Projections are that contaminated water could migrate beneath the Amargosa Valley farm area 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas toward Death Valley National Park in California.