Political Commentary: Joan McCarter

If Not Yucca Mountain, Where?

By Joan McCarter, 3-16-09

I’m not faulting the Obama administration for putting the kibosh on Yucca Mountain as the nation’s nuclear waste dump, which it did in releasing its budget a few weeks ago. The Yucca repository was defunded, which wasn’t a huge surprise, since Obama campaigned in Nevada on that promise.

It also wasn’t a bad idea based on the science of the place. Geologists have learned that water flows through the mountain much faster than was believed when Yucca was settled on as the site. Because of the high volume of water flowing through, the water table in this area just 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas stands a much greater chance of being poisoned than anyone previously knew. Of course, when Yucca was decided upon, back in 1987, science didn’t really play any part of it. The politicians just decided it was “out there” far enough in the desert, and Nevada was weak enough politically, that it might as well go there.

And speaking of politically weak, here’s one of the main problems with the decision to scrap Yucca--what about Idaho?

Yucca Mountain is slated to be the permanent repository for more than 300 metric tons of nuclear materials produced by the U.S. military and 4,400 cubic meters of high-level waste that was sent to Idaho for temporary storage.

Under court-ordered provisions of the 1995 “Batt Agreement,” the waste must be removed from Idaho by 2035, but the Obama Administration’s Fiscal Year 2010 budget proposes deep cutbacks in planning for the Department of Energy to open Yucca Mountain.

Yucca wasn’t slated to be open until 2020, and it’s highly unlikely now that it will ever be given the clout of Harry Reid and the new evidence about the danger to some of Nevada’s scant water resource. But that means that the state lower on the totem pole is going to be stuck with the “temporary” waste for decades to come. Meanwhile, the stuff just keeps piling up, “accumulating at 122 temporary storage sites in 39 states for more than 20 years. The estimated 53,440 metric tons of radioactive waste accumulated from nuclear power plants would cover a football field 10 feet deep. The military has generated another 22,000 large canisters of nuclear waste.”

Nuclear waste is being “temporarily” stored within 100 yards of Lake Michigan. There’s some 53 million gallons of the stuff essentially on the Columbia River at the Hanford Reservation in Washington state.

It’s being “temporarily” stored at pretty much every nuclear power plant in the nation.

But nearly all of the nuclear power plants in the U.S. have already run out of storage space, because these pools were not designed to be long-term containers and enough room needs to be preserved in case of a crisis such as a meltdown. In the absence of a long-term solution (such as burying the waste deep inside Yucca Mountain), the nuclear industry has turned to so-called dry cask storage....

Some 9,000 metric tons of spent fuel rods are already stored encased in some 900 such casks—the bulk of them stored vertically in concrete casks but some placed horizontally into concrete bunkers. Their makers—companies like New Jersey-based Holtec International and AREVA’s Transnuclear, Inc.—and the NRC maintain that such dry cask storage will last for at least a century, if not longer. “They’ve had an excellent safety record over the past 22 years they’ve been in use,” McIntyre says. “All signs are that they are safe and secure.”

But some environmentalists and other nuclear power critics contend that such dry casks present a tempting target for terrorists and a disaster for the environment if ever breached. In fact, the San Luis Obispo, Calif., chapter of Mothers for Peace has successfully sued the NRC and power utility Pacific Gas & Electric Co.—owners of the Diablo Canyon power plant—for failing to take into account the impact of a potential terrorist strike when assessing the environmental risks of a new, proposed on-site dry cask storage area.

The solution may be one or many interim storage sites, centralized depots where such dry casks could be stored until a permanent repository is opened. Eleven communities in Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee and Washington State have expressed an interest in being the host of such a facility, according to NEI. “It should be wherever it can be sited and it should be at a voluntary location,” NEI’s McCullum says. “Anything that is on the way to Yucca Mountain from most of the reactors,” which are in the eastern half of the U.S.

Billions have already been spent trying to prove that the waste should go to Yucca. Billions more will be spent trying to figure out where it goes next, and don’t count on the populations of those eleven communities mentioned above to be clamoring to take it in, not if the reaction in Idaho to the Yucca budget cut is any indication. The stuff isn’t just physically and environmentally toxic. It’s politically deadly, too.

Whatever the ultimate decision for the waste ends up being, two things need to be kept at the fore. First, there’s the reality that there just aren’t many places out there that should house it and therefore bringing more nuclear plants online until we have better technology for dealing with the waste. Second, while it’s going to be damned hard to get away from politics in the final decision-making on siting, that decision has to be guided by science.

And finally, there might be one place they can add to the list of possible sites. There’s an old pig farm in Crawford, Texas that’s no longer serving much purpose, now that the cameras are gone and the brush has all been cleared.

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