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.
Why was the Yucca Mountain project canceled?
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.
Is Yucca Mountain still being considered?
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.
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.
Is Yucca Mountain being used for nuclear waste?
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.
Why there was a controversy with Yucca Mountain?
Yucca Mountain, according to the state’s official position, is a terrible place to store the nation’s high-level nuclear waste and spent nuclear fuel for various reasons: Hydrology, insufficiency of the proposed waste package, repository architecture, and volcanism are among the challenges.
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.
Is any waste stored at Yucca Mountain?
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).
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.
Does Michigan have any nuclear power plants?
Fermi 2, D.C. Cook Units 1 and 2, and Palisades are Michigan’s four operational nuclear reactors, which provide almost 30% of the state’s total electric power.