The DOE, on the other hand, shut down the Yucca Mountain project in 2010, citing no technical or safety concerns. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission was ordered by a federal court in 2014 to complete safety and environmental evaluations of the plant.
What is the current status of 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 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 currently being used to store nuclear waste?
Currently, the majority of the waste for which the Yucca Mountain site was built is held at commercial nuclear power stations across the country; a smaller amount of waste is stored at DOE facilities. Currently, spent nuclear fuel is stored in specially built, water-filled pools and above-ground dry storage facilities at nuclear power stations; however, some of these storage spaces are nearing capacity. These locations were intended for temporary storage but have been used as long-term storage while a repository is built. The wastes produced by the Department of Energy are mostly the result of processing spent nuclear fuel for military purposes.
This material may change when new information about the Yucca Mountain project becomes available; the EPA will continue to update the Frequent Questions about Radiation Protection as new information becomes available.
Please see the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) webpage, Operating Nuclear Power Reactors, for a list of all currently operational nuclear power reactors (by Location or Name).
Did Yucca Mountain ever open?
Edison has created a panel of nuclear specialists and engaged a consulting organization to draft a plan as part of a 2018 out-of-court settlement “to devise a “strategic plan” for getting the waste off the plant’s property.
While Trump’s action may appear to rule out a significant option, David Victor, chairman of the SONGS Community Engagement Panel, believes it may create the way for other options to emerge.
“First, it will loosen Yucca’s stranglehold on any other bigger political attempt to address spent fuel,” Victor wrote in an email. “In the past, getting enough Republicans to approve spent fuel legislation was impossible unless the arrangement included restarting the Yucca process. Perhaps that stumbling block will dissipate.
“Second, it will serve as a reminder that the country lacks a long-term policy for used gasoline. The more politicians who acknowledge that truth, the more likely it is that an interim storage plan will be enacted.”
Two private groups have indicated interest in building what is known as the “SONGS and other commercial nuclear facilities’ waste will be transported to “consolidated interim storage” sites.
One proposed location is in Andrews, a small hamlet in west Texas, and the other is in eastern New Mexico. Both organizations have made headway toward acquiring all essential licenses, but political and environmental opposition are skeptical about both projects.
Even though Shimkus is retiring at the end of the year, Trump’s decision hasn’t deterred Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), one of the greatest supporters of restarting the Yucca Mountain plant on Capitol Hill.
“We’ve spent 30 years and at least $15 billion on Yucca,” Jordan Haverly, Shimkus’ director of energy and environmental policy, said, “and whatever the idea is to do something else is going to take at least 30 years and at least $15 billion.” “If we’re serious about solving climate change, we’ll almost certainly need to continue using nuclear power, and we’ll need a location to store the waste.”
The Yucca Mountain repository was set to open in 2020, but when Nevada Democrat Harry Reid became Senate majority leader in 2007, and Barack Obama was elected president a year later, his administration re-evaluated the project, and funding was shut off in 2010.
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.
Why was the Yucca Mountain project discontinued?
The DOE, on the other hand, shut down the Yucca Mountain project in 2010, citing no technical or safety concerns. Decades of scientific research, on the other hand, had consistently found that the planned repository could safely protect future generations.
What are the cons of Yucca Mountain?
Yucca Mountain generates a lot of debate let’s face it, if it didn’t, a four-part blog series wouldn’t be necessary. Part of the dispute stems from concerns about the impact of spent fuel disposal on the environment and the health of people living and working in the vicinity as well as along traffic routes. So, to wrap up this series, I’d like to take a look at some of these worries to see which ones are valid and which are exaggerated. A website created by the State of Nevada in 1998 is a good place to find a lot of these concerns.
This is correct, but it has no bearing on the matter of Yucca Mountain’s safe disposal because no one will ever come into contact with the spent fuel. As I explained in my last piece, the spent fuel will be stored in heavy-duty casks that are meant to reduce radiation to less than 10 mR/hr at a distance of 2 meters from the cask. The fact that the fuel is highly radioactive doesn’t matter as long as it stays inside the casks no one can be hurt by radiation to which they are not exposed. In terms of the wasted fuel still inside the casks, keep in mind that the casks are tough; they’re built to withstand strikes from rapid locomotives, and they won’t even be exposed to that risk after they’re buried. Finally, while the fuel remains radioactive for millennia, the radiation levels decline rapidly over time; after a few decades (much shorter than the design lifetime for the waste site or the casks), radiation dose rates are a fraction of what they were.
True, but not to the extent that it appears. Yes, plutonium is present in spent fuel because it is formed when uranium-238 atoms capture neutrons during nuclear fission. Yes, plutonium is a highly poisonous heavy metal. However, plutonium is far from the most deadly element known to man; a toxicologist with whom I used to work could identify a dozen compounds that are far more dangerous (including shellfish toxins and fungal toxins). In fact, plutonium was given to humans to help researchers figure out how it behaves and moves within the body, and those who received it lived to tell the tale (and yes, many of these tests would be considered unethical today, and they have sparked a lot of debate but that doesn’t change the fact that those who were tested were unharmed).
Consider what must happen in order for the plutonium in the fuel to reach a person who could be injured by it. To reach the spent fuel containers, groundwater would have to seep down hundreds of feet of rock. Then it would have to corrode the metal and soak through the concrete layers to get through the casks. It would have to dissolve the fuel ingredients, including the highly intractable plutonium, once within the barrels, and then escape. Finally, it would have to transport the dissolved plutonium several hundred feet through further rock to the water table, where it would have to be transported however many miles to the nearest human with a well drilled into the aquifer. Possible? Yes. Is it plausible, especially in millennia-scale time? Not at all.
Casks can fail due to geologic phenomena such as earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, hastening the release of radiation into the environment.
Let’s start with the easy one. Volcanic eruptions have occurred in the American Southwest during the last several thousand years, and Yucca Mountain is formed of volcanic rocks. So it’s reasonable to expect more of these eruptions in the next few tens of thousands of years. However, there are two types of eruptions: those that produce lava and those that do not. The American Southwest has a history of ashfalls rather than lava eruptions; a lava eruption would just serve to encase the used fuel even deeper, while the ash is too chilly to melt the spent fuel casks. The casks are more likely to be damaged if they are submerged in lava, although the lava itself is unlikely to spread as far as the Las Vegas suburbs. To expose people to high amounts of radiation, the lava would have to submerge the casks long enough to melt them, then continue to flow, carrying the fission products with it and continue far enough to expose people. Lava flows have covered hundreds of miles in the past, but not in millions of years. While it’s possible that volcanic eruptions could leak radioactivity into the environment, the debris or lava is more likely to bury the waste even deeper than it is to discharge it into the environment.
Earthquakes are a little more problematic; there are concerns that an earthquake will open up new fractures, speeding up the flow of water from the surface to the casks and from the casks to the water table. Another risk is that an earthquake could burst the casks, allowing radiation to escape. Both of these scenarios are feasible; we know that earthquakes may fracture rock and affect groundwater flows, and Yucca Mountain is no exception. We know they can fracture rock, therefore we’re confident they can also fracture old fuel casks. As a result, it’s reasonable to believe that an earthquake could discharge radionuclides from spent fuel casks. But we must also consider the possibility that an earthquake will develop a fissure in the precise rock the exact portion of the rock in which the casks are housed. It’s conceivable, but the chances are stacked against you.
Plutonium might seep from the canisters and build up to a critical mass in the environment, causing an explosion.
This is a personal favorite of mine. Not only must we get the plutonium out of the casks (water leaking into the waste repository, penetrating into the casks, dissolving plutonium, contaminating the environment), but we must also get enough plutonium out of solution in the same place and under the same conditions to form a critical mass. It’s also vital to remember that a critical mass isn’t something that will explode; rather, it’s something that will maintain a fission chain reaction in the correct conditions. It’s difficult enough to get plutonium into the environment as it is, and it’s unlikely to happen. The risk of plutonium precipitating out of solution in a critical mass is increased. And putting something together that could go off is nearly impossible.
Putting all of the spent fuel which contains plutonium in one location attracts terrorists and poses a proliferation danger.
Placing all of the spent fuel in one spot undoubtedly increases the amount of plutonium in that one site. On the other hand, we must consider whether having only one place at risk is preferable to the 50+ that exist presently. We can make a good case that guarding and making impenetrable a single place is easier than trying to defend every reactor facility in the country.
In terms of non-proliferation, anyone trying to build a nuclear weapon would have to first get to the spent fuel casks, then either steal some very large and heavy casks or open them up at the waste site and remove the fuel both actions that would be hampered by high radiation levels in the coming decades. Did I mention that the wasted gasoline has to be moved off-site and out of the country? The alleged terrorists (or infiltrators from a potential nuclear power) would then have to remove the fuel, break it up, dissolve it in acid, and chemically treat it to extract the plutonium. The main truth is that neither a terrorist group nor most countries have the resources to pull this off. So…possible? Maybe, in the sense that winning the lotto with a single ticket is a possibility. No, it’s not plausible. This is another another one that fails to materialize.
I could go on and on about why spent nuclear fuel should not be disposed of at Yucca Mountain; there have been several reasons made in support of this position. Some of these arguments, such as the one about plutonium leaking out, building a critical mass, and blowing boom, are either intentionally disingenuous or worst-case wishful thinking; they will very likely not occur in the real world. Others are feasible, such as the potential of an earthquake rupturing the used fuel casks, but the odds are stacked against them. But here’s the bottom line: we’ll be able to come up with a long list of arguments for and against dumping spent nuclear material almost anyplace. We must say one of three things at some point:
- We’re content with the current scenario and will continue to do so indefinitely.
- We’re either going to take it and dispose of the waste in a location where our best science tells us it will be safe under any reasonable set of circumstances, or we’re going to suck it up and dispose of the waste in a location where our best science tells us it will be safe under any reasonable set of circumstances.
- We’re going to abandon nuclear power in favor of finding another way to meet 20% of our electrical needs.
The bottom line is that nuclear energy benefits the entire country – again, nuclear energy accounts for 20% of our electricity generation. There are plenty of areas where the waste from these reactors can be stored safely without endangering the environment or people. We may never find a single location that we can certify as “best,” and the nit-pickers among us will always be able to find arguments no matter how irrational, spurious, or ill-informed that appear to mitigate against any given site. However, the nation will eventually need to identify a location that, while not perfect, is good enough to suit our needs because it meets all realistic trash disposal standards in the actual world.
Whether the country continues to use nuclear energy or not, we will need to find a place to store the spent reactor fuel that has amassed and is now being kept across the country at some point. It makes sense for this region to be dry and sparsely populated, close to major transportation routes, and geologically and hydrogeologically ideal for isolating the hazardous waste while it is still harmful. These places do exist, and one of them is Yucca Mountain. The technical issues of long-term radioactive waste disposal, I believe, are modest the natural nuclear reactor at Oklo has demonstrated that even damp and broken rock can keep radioactive waste for millennia it is the political issues that have proven insurmountable thus far. But don’t be fooled: the ostensibly scientific arguments to Yucca Mountain are only pretexts for the underlying political objections. Our trash disposal solution is being held up by politics rather than science or engineering. And, until these political issues are resolved, we will continue to store our waste in a variety of susceptible sites across the United States.
The article Yucca Mountain: Questions and Concerns first appeared on ScienceWonk, FAS’s blog for expert and thought leaders.
How Safe Is Yucca Mountain?
According to a new analysis, the current suggested site, Yucca Mountain in Nevada, is safe to use. The United States now has around 65,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel, which is predicted to increase by 2055.
Why was Yucca Mountain chosen?
Experts and the nuclear industry seek a long-term, safer dump than the over 100 pools that now hold nuclear waste.
Yucca Mountain was chosen because it is located in a desert setting far away from population centers and is bordered by government territory.
Republicans and some Democrats in Congress want the project reopened, claiming that shutting it down was a waste of billions of dollars already spent on the facility’s construction.