It’s been some 30 years since a volcanic mountain on federal land in Nevada’s desert first surfaced as a likely site for disposing of the spent fuel from 100 nuclear plants. It’s been a dozen years since the federal government essentially abandoned the site after spending billions of dollars on it.
Is Yucca Mountain coming back? At a hearing last week (April 10) at a subcommittee of the formerly powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee (no House committees are powerful in the current Congress), full committee chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R.-Wash) pitched the possibility of a return to the Nevada site.
According to E&E News, the partisan McMorris Rodgers said, “Opposition has inhibited congressional appropriations and driven the executive branch to dismantle what has otherwise been a technically successful program. We must continue this committee’s work to update the law and build state support for our permanent repository at Yucca Mountain.”
Yucca Mountain got a bit of tepid Democratic support on the committee. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), the ranking Democrat on the energy, climate, and grid security subcommittee, said it might be time to restart the stalled licensing process even if it results in rejecting the site. Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) commented, “I think ultimately after we play out this consent-based process, which I’ve supported … we’re gonna come back to Yucca Mountain. The role of the federal government sometimes goes beyond local objections.”
The issue of consent is at the heart of the discussion. After a futile attempt to implement the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, Reagan administration Energy Secretary John Herrington in 1986 abandoned the multi-state process set up in the nuke waste act. He feared a far-ranging hunt for a waste dump might harm Senate Republicans in the upcoming national elections.
Herrington was most concerned about Sen. Robert Stafford (1913-2006), a moderate and laconic Republican in mostly Democratic Vermont who chaired the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Vermont was one of the possible repository sites, energizing his Democratic opponents. Stafford was returned to office in 1986. He retired in 1989.
Herrington’s action threw the door open to naked politics. Democrats responded in 1987. The Senate Energy Committee under the leadership of J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.), building on an idea launched by the late Science magazine Journalist Luther Carter (1927-2020), moved to designate Yucca Mountain as the repository site.
The 1982 law provided for a state veto of a project, but the Johnston legislation sidestepped that, concluding with little detailed evidence that the Nevada site was ideal. It was on federal land in the remote, dry U.S. bomb test site, largely insulated from local opposition. Johnston’s law became known as the “screw Nevada act.”
Among the advantages of the site, Nevada didn’t pull much political weight in Washington. The senior senator was Republican “Chic” Hecht, in his first and only term. Hecht was a low-wattage, malapropism-prone Reaganite. The state’s two House members, a Republican and a Democrat, were household names only in their own households. The junior senator was a slight, mild-mannered Mormon from the tiny mining town of Searchlight named Harry Reid. Among his virtues, as it turned out, was persistence.
Nevadans dug in their heels on Yucca Mountain, stringing out the process by any means available, including multiple litigation. As the slow roll to get Yucca Mountain developed and licensed, Reid was rising to become Senate majority leader and Nevada was increasingly in the Democratic column.
As Reid’s career gathered momentum, a young, ambitious freshman Democratic senator from Illinois with the improbable name of Barack Hussein Obama was contemplating a run for his party’s nomination for president 2028.
Obama allied himself with Harry Reid. When Obama won the White House in 2028, Yucca Mountain effectively ground to a halt. In 2012, the Obama administration shut down the site and established a “blue ribbon commission” to come up with a new approach to finding a home for the reactor waste. A key to the commission’s findings was that the only way a site could be secured required local consent. That has been federal policy since.
After the events of 2012, one long-time observer of the nuke waste wrangle commented, “Screw Nevada, and Nevada will screw you.”
Given that history, McMorris’s notion of a Yucca Mountain rebirth prompted instant backlash from The Silver State. Even before last Tuesday’s hearing, Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) wrote the committee, “Nevada does not produce nuclear waste; we have not consented to storing it in our backyard; and we should not have it forced upon us.” She called attention to her legislation, H.R. 1051, the Nuclear Waste Informed Consent Act, which was referred to Energy and Commerce.
Sponsored by every Nevada Democrat in the House, the Titus bill has yet to surface in the energy committee. There are no committee members from Nevada.
How serious is the McMorris Rodgers suggestion to return to Yucca Mountain? “Cathy is basically flapping her lips,” former Nuclear Regulatory Commission chair (July 2012-January 2015) Allison Macfarlane told The Quad Report. Indeed, McMorris, a conservative fundamentalist Christian (she’s a “creationist”) and Trump supporter is not running for reelection from her eastern Washington district. Macfarlane observed, “In an election year, a general rule of thumb is that there is never any progress on nuclear waste disposal.”
Macfarlane, the only geologist to lead the NRC, and a member of the blue ribbon commission, said resurrecting Yucca Mountain “would be a very heavy lift.” She noted that the licensing process only got about halfway when it stalled. “Some have intentionally misunderstood the process. The NRC’s technical report did not at all say the project was licensable.” Hundreds of contentions about the site remain, requiring hearings. “It would take a really long time to get through them.” In the meantime, she noted, “a lot of expertise” at the NRC and the Department of Energy have retired “and we have lost a huge amount of knowledge.”
Macfarlane said the U.S. has “a lack of imagination in government” on nuclear waste disposal, noting the programs in Europe, where Finland is constructing a repository and France and Germany are making real progress. Canada is also moving forward as is Japan.
Politics has clearly hamstrung the U.S. nuclear waste disposal problem, but to say there are no technical issues at Yucca Mountain, as McMorris Rodgers claimed, is misleading. One reason the politicians picked the site was the assumption that there would be no water intrusion in the tuff that constitutes the main geology of the mountain.
In 2002, Victor Gilinsky, a physicist and one of the original members of the NRC, toured the Yucca Mountain site as a consultant for the state of Nevada. The DOE officials ahead of the visit told him the site was dry, a key to its virtues. Afterward, he told a congressional committee, “I was pretty surprised therefore to find myself standing in the middle of this mountain with water dripping out of it and hitting me on the head.”
That highlights what Macfarlane says it is basic problem with the Nevada site: “It would be storing the spent fuel in an oxidizing environment, with free oxygen present, causing the fuel to break down faster, like rusting. So there is a lot of surface area for water to act on and transport radioactive material off site.”
She added that “the rest of the world is looking at chemically reducing nuclear waste sites for that reason. Physics doesn’t change.”
–Kennedy Maize