The current cost estimate of $96.2 billion comprises $13.5 billion already spent on the project, $54.8 billion for the repository’s construction, management, and decommissioning, $19.5 billion for used fuel transportation, and $8.4 billion for miscellaneous program operations.
Why was Yucca Mountain Cancelled?
The DOE, on the other hand, shut down the Yucca Mountain project in 2010, citing no technical or safety concerns. Yucca Mountain had already cost $12 billion, and 65,000 metric tons of spent fuel were in temporary storage in 39 states at the time.
How much nuclear waste is stored at Yucca Mountain?
Yucca Mountain is a proposed spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level radioactive waste (HLW) repository that might be used to dispose of both types of radioactive waste. If built, a tunnel complex would be built around 1000 feet below the summit of Yucca Mountain and roughly 1000 feet above the aquifer beneath the repository. The primary concept of geologic disposal is to store radioactive materials in neatly packaged tubes deep down. The Yucca Mountain facility would achieve this by isolating the waste from the surrounding environment using a combination of natural and artificial barriers.
Unless a second repository opens during its operating lifetime, it is statutorily limited to storing 70,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste.
How much would it cost to build a nuclear waste storage facility beneath Yucca Mountain?
Since then-President Obama defunded Yucca Mountain, the proposal to permanently deposit high-level nuclear waste underground in southern Nevada, it has been declared dead. President Trump, on the other hand, has taken steps to resurrect it. His budget blueprint for 2018 includes $120 million for resuming licensing and providing interim garbage storage elsewhere.
Since 1987, when Congress designated the parched, remote ridge as the only area to be examined for a national repository for high-level nuclear waste and spent nuclear fuel, the Yucca Mountain idea has received intense resistance from Nevada residents, environmentalists, and elected leaders. The funds allocated in Trump’s budget proposal are merely symbolic. In 2008, the Department of Energy anticipated that the project will cost up to $96 billion to complete; taxpayers have already paid $15 billion.
Is Yucca Mountain being used?
Despite existing US legislation designating Yucca Mountain as the nation’s nuclear waste depository, the Obama administration moved to close the repository beginning in 2009. In May 2009, the DOE, an administration agency, began implementing the President’s proposal. The administration’s closure plan was also approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Various state and Congressional entities fought to overturn the administration’s closing intentions in court and through legislation.
In August 2013, a US Court of Appeals judgment instructed the NRC and the Obama administration to “accept or reject the proposal for the never-completed waste storage site at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.” They can’t just plan for its shutdown without breaking US law.
Yucca Mountain will not be used as a repository. We’re going to take a step back and say, “Let’s take a step back.” We recognize that we now know a lot more than we did 25 or 30 years ago. According to the NRC, dry cask storage at current sites is safe for decades, giving us time to figure out what we should do for a long-term strategy. We’ll put together a blue-ribbon panel to look into the problem. We’re interested in reactors with a high-energy neutron spectrum that can truly burn down long-lived actinide waste. Fast-neutron reactors are what they’re called. Others include a comeback of hybrid fusion fission systems, in which fusion provides not just energy but also high-energy neutrons that can burn down long-lived actinides.
Some of the garbage has already gone through the vitrification process. There is no economic rationale, in my opinion, to consider bringing it back into a prospective fuel cycle. So it’s easy to imagineagain, it depends on what the blue-ribbon panel saysthat for a specific classification for a certain type of waste, you don’t want to have access to it any longer, which means you might utilize sites other than Yucca Mountain, such as salt domes. The salt seeps around it once it’s in there. For a time period of 50 to 100 million years, these are geologically stable. The problem with these kind of repositories is that you no longer have access to them. However, if you no longer wish to have access to particular forms of waste, that’s fine. It’s a very natural containment… whereas with other garbage, you may say, “Well, since it has some inherent value, let’s keep it around for a hundred, two hundred years because there’s a good chance we’ll come back to it and want to recover it.”
So, let’s get some extremely smart people together and work out how you’re going to handle intermediate and long-term storage. Yucca was meant to be everything to everyone, and given what we now know, I believe there will need to be several regional zones.
Failure to meet contractual obligations, according to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works in 2008, could cost taxpayers up to $11 billion by 2020. The taxpayer liability estimate was upped to $21 billion in 2013. The House of Representatives voted 388 to 30 in July 2009 to not defund the Yucca Mountain repository in the FY2010 budget (Roll call vote 591, via Clerk.House.gov). The House of Representatives rejected Yucca Mountain as the nation’s only nuclear waste option twice during the 2014 Energy and Water Appropriations debate in 2013, by a margin of more than 80%.
The state of Washington filed a lawsuit on April 13, 2010, to block the closure of Yucca Mountain, which would stymie attempts to clean up the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Washington was joined by South Carolina, Aiken County (the site of the Savannah River), and others. In July 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit dismissed the lawsuit, stating that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had not to rule on the license application’s withdrawal. On July 29, Washington and South Carolina filed a new complaint.
The federal government had $27 billion remaining, including interest, after receiving $32 billion from power companies to fund the project and spending $12 billion to study and develop it. Senator Lindsey Graham sponsored a measure in March 2012 requiring that three-quarters of the money be returned to customers, with the remaining going to firms for storage enhancements.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was instructed by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in August 2013 to “accept or reject application for never-completed waste storage site at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.” The NRC was “simply flouting the law” in allowing the Obama administration to pursue efforts to close the intended waste site, according to the court judgment, because a federal legislation designating Yucca Mountain as the nation’s nuclear waste repository remains in existence. “The president may not refuse to implement a statutory obligation or ban solely because of policy reservations,” the court said.
As a result, the NRC released the final volumes of the Yucca Mountain Safety Evaluation Report (SER), which included a statement from NRC staff that the facility would meet all applicable criteria. At the same time, the staff indicated that the NRC should not approve the repository’s construction until the land and water rights requirements were met and a supplement to DOE’s environmental impact statement (EIS) was completed. On March 3, 2015, the NRC directed the staff to finish the supplemental EIS and make the Yucca Mountain licensing document database public utilizing all previously granted licensing money.
Senator Lamar Alexander introduced the Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2015 (S854) in the United States Senate in March 2015. It was planned to create a completely self-contained Nuclear Waste Administration (NWA) to construct nuclear waste storage and disposal facilities. Construction of such facilities would necessitate the approval of any impacted state, local, or tribal governments. The NWA would have to finish a mission plan by 2021 in order to construct a prototype storage facility for nuclear waste from decommissioned reactors and other “emergency” deliveries (called “priority waste”).
By 2025, a storage facility for waste from operational reactors or other “non-priority waste” would be accessible, and by 2048, a permanent repository would be in place. The present 70,000 metric ton restriction for the nation’s first permanent repository would be removed. Any nuclear waste fees earned after the passage of S854 would be placed in a newly created Working Capital Fund. Unless yearly appropriations or authorizations prohibit it, the Nuclear Waste Administration would be able to take whatever funds needed to carry out S.854 from that fund. In committee, S854 died.
The Nuclear Waste Fund had a $54.3 billion investment fair value as of September 30, 2020.
Is Yucca Mountain being used 2021?
WASHINGTON, D.C. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto was informed on Wednesday by Energy Secretary nominee Jennifer Granholm that the Biden administration has no plans to begin the licensing process for a nuclear waste site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
“During a hearing on her nomination, Granholm told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, “The administration opposes the use of Yucca Mountain to store nuclear waste.”
Granholm, a former Michigan governor, gave the Nevada senators assurances on the removal of weapons-grade plutonium housed in the state, as well as Yucca Mountain and the three-decade deadlock over nuclear waste storage from power plants and Navy vessels, when questioned by Cortez Masto.
“Following the hearing, Cortez Masto, D-Nev., told the Review-Journal, “This administration, like Nevada, is dedicated to moving forward on finding a solution that does not entail Yucca Mountain.”
Granholm’s guarantees, as well as her pledge to identify a location where states, local governments, and tribal leaders agree to accept a nuclear waste repository, delighted Cortez Masto. Most Nevada leaders, with a few exceptions, oppose depositing garbage at Yucca Mountain.
Biden opposed the use of Yucca Mountain during the 2020 campaign, as did former President Donald Trump, whose administration failed for three years in a row to reopen the application process to permit the repository 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
When Biden was vice president, the Obama administration halted the Yucca Mountain nuclear storage project.
Granholm also assured Cortez Masto during questioning that she would follow through on a negotiated arrangement to begin removing weapons-grade plutonium housed in Nevada.
In 2018, the Energy Department surreptitiously moved one-half metric ton of weapons-grade plutonium from the Savannah River Site in South Carolina to the Nevada National Security Site north of Las Vegas.
The cargo sparked a two-year legal battle between Nevada and the Department of Energy.
Cortez Masto worked out a deal with then-Secretary of State Rick Perry to start removing plutonium from Nevada in 2021. By 2026, the plutonium should be totally eliminated. Granholm stated that she would follow through on the negotiated arrangement.
What is currently happening at Yucca Mountain?
The most recent full press reports about the status of Yucca Mountain can be found here.
Background: The intended repository at Yucca Mountain’s status is still unknown as of 2019.
To give you some context, Yucca Mountain was identified as the site for storing the nation’s spent fuel and high-level radioactive waste in 2002.
President George W. Bush approved the location after Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham suggested it. The decision was vetoed by then-Governor Kenny Guinn of Nevada, as allowed by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (NWPA), but the veto was later reversed by Congress.
The Department of Energy has selected 10 areas in six states for consideration as potential repository sites prior to 1987, as required under the NWPA. President Ronald Reagan approved three sites for full site characterization after extensive research. Hanford, Washington, Deaf Smith County, Texas, and Yucca Mountain, Nevada were the three locations.
Congress revised the NWPA in 1987, directing the DOE to investigate solely Yucca Mountain. The Act did state that “site characterization investigations” would be halted if Yucca Mountain was deemed to be inappropriate. The amended bill was dubbed the “Screw Nevada Bill” after its passage. (More information on how and why Yucca Mountain was picked)
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the United States Department of Energy (DOE) are in charge of regulating and disposing of the nation’s spent nuclear fuel. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) oversees the development and operation of commercial nuclear power facilities as well as spent fuel repositories (e.g., Yucca Mountain). The NRC also oversees spent nuclear fuel storage and transportation. DOE is responsible for site exploration, building, and operation of a federal geologic repository under the NWPA as amended (e.g., Yucca Mountain). The DOE is also required by law to apply to the NRC for a license to construct the repository, which must be approved before any work can commence. The DOE applied to the NRC for a license for Yucca Mountain in 2008. The Bush administration’s Energy Department submitted an 8,600-page license application, which NRC approved for examination and license approval.
Existing Regulatory Status: The Obama Administration halted financing for the Yucca Mountain repository in 2011 through an amendment to the Department of Defense and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act. As a result of this action, the US now lacks a long-term storage facility for civilian spent reactor fuel and defense-generated High Level Waste.
Due to financing and other constraints, the DOE and the NRC both paused their efforts to license the Yucca Mountain repository; this action prompted various parties to file lawsuits in an attempt to compel the NRC to resume the licensing process. In 2011, the states of South Carolina and Washington, as well as the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners and others, filed a lawsuit in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, requesting a writ of mandamus ordering the NRC to reopen the Yucca Mountain licensing process.
The petitioners’ wishes were granted by the court (giving the writ of mandamus), and on November 18, 2013, the NRC ordered the licensing proceeding to be reopened and directed its staff to finish the Yucca Mountain Safety Evaluation Report (SER). The SER comprises the NRC’s examination of the DOE license application, which was done to ensure Yucca Mountain’s compliance with NRC licensing standards. The NRC had finished all five volumes of the SER by January 2015. While the NRC staff has determined that DOE’s license applications are “appropriate,” it is proposing that the NRC deny the repository’s construction because DOE does not own or have authority over the land or water where the repository would be built. A addendum to DOE’s Yucca Mountain environmental impact statement was just completed, demonstrating that DOE lacks the requisite water rights to support the project. The area around the repository site is also under the control of numerous federal agencies, including DOE, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Defense, and transferring the lands to DOE will require an act of Congress.
In terms of water rights, DOE would have to get them from the state of Nevada.
Nevada has declined to appropriate the water, and legal action to overturn that decision has been halted.
In any case, the NRC has not made a final decision on the repository license application, but once environmental reviews are completed, land and water issues are resolved, and a series of lengthy and complex hearings on third-party challenges are heard, the agency could easily vote on DOE’s application to build the repository.
Federal funding for the DOE’s repository program is currently non-existent; no federal expenditures have been granted to support NRC licensing and/or DOE site investigations at Yucca Mountain as of January 2016. However, it’s worth mentioning that the US Department of Energy (DOE) has spent an estimated $8 billion on investigating the location and building the exploratory tunnel beneath Yucca Mountain to date. Furthermore, according to DOE estimates, the cost of building and operating a repository at Yucca Mountain may approach $97 billion.
On-the-Ground Achievements: The Yucca Mountain site is now abandoned, with only a boarded-up exploratory tunnel remaining; there are no waste disposal tunnels, receiving and handling facilities, or waste containers and transportation casks yet to be built.
Furthermore, there is no railroad to the location, and constructing one across Nevada might cost more than $3 billion. At Yucca Mountain now, the only thing that exists is a single 5-mile exploratory tunnel.
What is the controversy about Yucca Mountain?
GEOLOGY AND LOCATION: There are numerous scientific questions about the Yucca Mountain site’s suitability. Hydrology, insufficiency of the proposed waste package, repository architecture, and volcanism are among the challenges.
Is it safe to live near Yucca Mountain?
Proponents argue that Yucca Mountain is safe since the TSPA computed dose does not exceed the Environmental Protection Agency’s radiation limit for discharges from the repository.
What is the closest population center to Yucca Mountain?
The aquifer system beneath Yucca Mountain is distinct from that beneath Pahrump, the nearest significant population area, which is about 50 miles away.
Who pays for nuclear waste storage?
A $44.3 billion fund has been set up by the federal government for the construction of a permanent nuclear waste disposal site in the United States. In the 1980s, it began collecting money from energy customers for the fund, which today earns roughly $1.4 billion in interest each year.