WASHINGTON (CBS News) Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which has been authorized to store spent nuclear material for almost 30 years, remains the safest answer to this national problem.
Nuclear energy is cost-effective, safe, dependable, and emission-free. Nuclear power must be a part of any effort to combat climate change. If you want to confront climate change, retain America as the world’s dominating energy power, and believe in science and the rule of law, you should support Yucca Mountain.
The United States requires a strong nuclear fleet as well as a permanent home for the spent nuclear material that is currently stored in 121 communities across 39 states. This national problem requires a long-term solution.
Yucca Mountain was the subject of a piece on CBS This Morning on how the US has struggled to solve this decades-long problem. According to the co-anchor, “You don’t want to wait until it’s too late and you have to get it somewhere by the weekend.”
Yucca Mountain was chosen by Congress in 1987 as the site for a national permanent nuclear waste storage. A test tunnel was built, but it was never approved.
Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming is now supporting legislation to reopen the licensing process for Yucca Mountain, which was put on hold by the Obama administration almost a decade ago because to objections from a bipartisan group of Nevada legislators.
“Sen. Barrasso stated, “It is an isolated location with the correct geology that can make the difference for years and generations to come for safe use of nuclear power and storage of nuclear waste.”
Along with Senator Barrasso, Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL), the top Republican on the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment, has been a vocal supporter of the bill. Mr. Shimkus has been at the forefront of the effort to complete Yucca Mountain’s licensing assessment.
H.R. 2699, the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2019, was introduced by Reps. Jerry McNerney (D-CA) and John Shimkus (R-IL) on May 14, 2019. The bill is comparable to H.R. 3053, which was passed by an overwhelming majority of 340 to 72 in the 115th Congress. The legislation, in detail, is as follows:
- Assists in the resolution of the pending permanent repository license, allowing the formal licensing procedure to determine if the Yucca Mountain site may be licensed and built;
- Reforms a faulty financing process to safeguard consumers and ensure that the Department of Energy (DOE) has the money to build and maintain a multigenerational infrastructure project;
- Directs the Department of Energy to press forward with a temporary storage program to consolidate spent nuclear fuel from sites with defunct reactors while the Yucca Mountain repository is being built, and prioritizes the transfer of spent fuel from seismically active areas to interim sites.
- Allows the state of Nevada and local stakeholders to interact with the federal government as the repository’s host state; and
- Provides the quickest approach to removing “defense-waste” from DOE installations, protecting our nation’s national security interests.
What are the risks of Yucca Mountain?
Nuclear Waste Risks in General The waste that will be disposed of at Yucca Mountain is highly radioactive and deadly if it comes into contact with it. The propensity of nuclear waste to remain radioactive for thousands of years is the primary environmental worry.
Is Yucca Mountain a good idea?
Yucca Mountain was chosen as the site for the nation’s nuclear waste dump in a process that began in 1982 and ended in 1987 when the Nuclear Waste Policy Act was revised by Congress (NWPA).
The National Nuclear Waste Program Act (NWPA) created a comprehensive policy for permanent geologic disposal of the country’s spent fuel and high-level radioactive waste.
The Act outlined a step-by-step process for the government to look for, investigate, select, and eventually build a nuclear waste site by 1998.
The NWPA authorized the Department of Energy (DOE) to pick three viable geologic disposal sites, study them thoroughly, and suggest the most suitable to the President.
The governor of the site’s state could veto the decision if the President agreed with the suggestion and officially designated the site, but the governor’s veto could be overturned by a simple majority in both chambers of Congress.
All of this was meant to happen before 1998, when the government committed to begin collecting trash from nuclear power plants around the country.
By December 1984, the DOE had narrowed the list of potential repositories to Texas, Washington State, and Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
However, the expected characterisation cost of $60 million per site has already risen to almost a billion dollars.
As a result, Congress opted to focus its research on just one site.
In 1987, Congress revised the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to designate Yucca Mountain as the exclusive site for a nuclear waste repository.
The question of whether Yucca Mountain is the optimum location for a nuclear waste dump in the United States is still being debated.
Yucca Mountain, according to the DOE, was chosen because it regularly ranked as the location with the best technical and scientific attributes for serving as a repository.
According to the Department, Yucca Mountain is an ideal location for waste storage since the repository would be:
- Isolated from the rest of the world (Las Vegas, the nearest metropolitan area, is 90 miles away)
The State of Nevada and other groups, on the other hand, feel politics played a significant part in the decision. The Speaker of the House of Representatives at the time of the 1987 NWPA amendments was Jim Wright of Texas, and the House majority leader was Tom Foley of Washington State. Nevada was the smallest and least politically powerful of the three states.
With the 1987 NWPA changes, the State feels Congress compromised fairness for expediency.
Gary Taubes, a science and technology writer, described it this way: “Congress put the DOE in an untenable position by selecting Yucca Mountain as the only option for a nuclear-waste site. In effect, it sent the agency out to prove that Yucca Mountain could work as a repository, rather than doing an objective assessment of whether it could or was the best feasible location.”
(By Dawn Stover) (More History & Commentary Yucca Mountain’s “scientification”)
There’s also a question over whether Yucca Mountain’s geologic features and proposed constructed barriers will provide enough isolation for permanent disposal. A lot of stakeholders feel Yucca Mountain has particular qualities that make long-term isolation of highly radioactive material problematic. The Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects is concerned about a number of Yucca Mountain’s geology features, including:
- Numerous earthquake faults (at least 33 in and around the site) as well as volcanic cinder cones are present at the site.
- the presence of routes (many interconnected faults and cracks) that might quickly transport groundwater (and any escaping radioactive chemicals) through the site to the aquifer underneath it and hence to the accessible environment
Is Yucca Mountain currently 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.
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 radiation is in Yucca Mountain?
“Yuca felt like the perfect mountain back then,” Van Luik adds. Scientists thought they could simply dump rubbish cans in drifts – holes 35 feet wide and 3,000 feet long, cut 1,000 feet into the hard volcanic rock – in the early 1990s. However, scientists discovered water flowing through the rocks in unusually large amounts, water that might wash harmful radioactive isotopes into the aquifer beneath the mountain and into the wells of desert villages such as Amargosa Valley, 15 miles to the southwest. This discovery has made it even more difficult for the DOE to demonstrate that the repository can meet the EPA’s rigorous requirement that Yucca Mountain leakage expose people to no more than 15 millirems of radiation per year for 10,000 years.
If it wasn’t obvious when the legislation was written, it’s plain today that the need for 10,000 years of certainty amounts to massive regulatory arrogance. The Pleistocene Ice Sheet was retreating from North America ten thousand years ago, and hunter-gatherers began chipping away at stone tools. By definition, what the globe may look like in an equivalent number of years is speculative.
What are the benefits of Yucca Mountain?
Yucca Mountain has a role in this. Many people have pointed out its shortcomings, but considering the billions of dollars spent on the investigation, vulnerabilities were bound to be discovered. There hasn’t been a single one that hasn’t been a show-stopper.
However, the amount of water available is a fraction of what is available in most of the United States. There are earthquake-producing faults in the area, but the chances of these earthquakes compromising the facility’s security are slim. Volcanoes have erupted throughout geologic history, although none are currently active.
Some have suggested that moving the waste to Yucca Mountain will result in a “mobile Chernobyl.” This is a fabrication. The spent fuel rods, unlike liquid and gaseous dangerous chemicals that are frequently transported in railroad tank cars through our country’s towns and cities, are metallic solids that will be transported in crash-hardened railroad wagons.
Beyond the shortcomings, there are undeniable benefits. Yucca Mountain is 90 miles from the nearest major city. It is close to the current high-security Nevada Test Site and can be secured against terrorists. The mountain is steady, so we’ll be able to keep an eye on it and, if required, rescue it.
Yucca Mountain is, in fact, a compromise between some who urge for a centralized surface storage facility and others who favor irreversible geologic disposal at considerable depth. This is a one-of-a-kind plant, and there will very certainly be issues that only become apparent decades after it has been operational. The Yucca Mountain site’s design provides for continual monitoring and maintenance; if we store waste there, we must be cautious of both.
Many have urged that we should not use Yucca Mountain and instead wait for a technical solution that ensures the safe storage of waste indefinitely. This is wishful thinking at its finest. For the past 50 years, we’ve been seeking for a magic pill to fix the waste problem. There have been none thus far.
This country has arrived at Yucca Mountain after decades of research and politics. Science and engineering have given us some reassurance about the site’s safety. Additional research and time, on the other hand, will not ensure a solution. Yucca Mountain is an acceptable solution in an imperfect world.
What are the alternatives to Yucca Mountain?
Following years of debate over the site-selection process, Congress chose Yucca Mountain, Nevada, as the nation’s sole candidate site for a permanent high-level nuclear waste repository in 1987. The Department of Energy (DOE) submitted a license application for the proposed Yucca Mountain repository to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in June 2008, despite the State of Nevada’s strong opposition (NRC). During the 2008 election campaign, then-President Barack Obama backed Nevada’s opposition to the repository, saying in an issue statement that he and Vice President Joe Biden “do not believe Yucca Mountain is a suitable site.”
DOE intends to begin delivering spent nuclear fuel and other highly radioactive trash to Yucca Mountain by 2020 under the present nuclear waste program. The deadline set by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1998 has been extended by 22 years (NWPA). Because nuclear power facilities in the United States would continue to generate nuclear waste after a repository opens, the Department of Energy forecasts that all waste from existing reactors will not be removed until around 2066, even if the present Yucca Mountain schedule is followed. However, until the NWPA’s current limit on the repository’s capacity is extended, not all of the estimated waste could be disposed of at Yucca Mountain.
If the Obama administration decides to terminate the Yucca Mountain project, it will be able to do so using a variety of measures. Although the President has no direct influence over NRC processes, the Secretary of Energy has the authority under NRC rules to withdraw the Yucca Mountain license application. The President might also lobby Congress to reduce or remove financing for the Yucca Mountain project, as well as propose legislation to reform the nuclear waste program.
The federal government’s disposal of nuclear waste from reactor sites would most likely be further delayed if Yucca Mountain were abandoned, increasing the government’s liability for missing the NWPA deadline. Even if Yucca Mountain opens as scheduled, the DOE anticipates that such liabilities will total $11 billion. Agreements between the DOE and states to remove defense-related high-level trash could be jeopardized. The licensing of proposed new nuclear power reactors could be compromised if the Yucca Mountain project is cancelled without a clear alternative path for waste management. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has found that waste may be properly kept at reactor sites for at least 30 years after a reactor has shut down, and it is proposing to extend that duration to 60 years. While that proposal would enable waste to remain at reactor sites for at least 100 years (including a 40-year reactor running term), the NRC’s policy is that new reactors should not be allowed unless the wastes can and will be safely disposed of in the future.
There is no alternate repository site to Yucca Mountain under current legislation, and DOE is not permitted to open temporary storage facilities until a permanent repository is operational. Without congressional action, indefinite on-site storage of nuclear waste at reactor sites and other nuclear facilities would be the default alternative to Yucca Mountain. Under present law, private central storage facilities can be licensed; one has been licensed in Utah, but its operation has been halted by the Department of the Interior.
Since the mid-1990s, Congress has examined legislation to establish a federal interim storage site for nuclear waste, but none has been passed. While reprocessing spent fuel could minimize waste volumes and long-term toxicity, such facilities are expensive and raise worries about plutonium separation, which could be utilized in nuclear weapons. Storage and reprocessing would still necessitate a permanent repository in the long run, and any search for a new repository location would have to avoid the roadblocks that have stymied earlier US initiatives.
Why is Yucca Mountain important?
The Yucca Mountain Repository is a planned Department of Energy (DOE) location for the permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste in the United States. The EPA has established environmental requirements to protect human health and the environment from radioactive material in the repository; the Yucca Mountain repository must meet these standards in order to be permitted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
Yucca Mountain is a volcanic ridge in Nye County, Nevada, about 90 miles southwest of Tonopah, the county seat, and 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The climate is desert-like in this location. Yucca Mountain is made up of layers of volcanic ash from eruptions that occurred over 10 million years ago. Over time, the ash from those volcanic eruptions changed into a type of igneous rock known as “tuff,” which has different properties depending on the setting in which it was created. The migration of the tuff layers produced the crest of Yucca Mountain due to regional geologic factors. Carbonate rock lies beneath the tuff, produced from deposits deposited at the bottom of ancient oceans that once existed in the area.
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.