It’s time to put up a headstone at Yucca Mountain with this epitaph carved in stone:
YUCCA MOUNTAIN NUCLEAR WASTE REPOSITORY
1984-2019
R.I.P
The House of Representatives’ $46 billion spending bill for the Department of Energy, released by the House Appropriations Committee this week, has no money for the long controversial Yucca Mountain high-level nuclear waste repository on federal land in Nevada, capping 25 years of contention.
The Las Vegas Review Journal reported that the committee Democrats’ bill “slashed President Donald Trump’s request for funds to revive the licensing process needed to develop Yucca Mountain.” The Trump administration asked for $116 million to resume Yucca Mountain work. The bill Speaker Nancy Pelosi supports contains no Yucca money.
The bill passed the Energy and Water subcommittee and moves to the full committee next week, where Republicans are going to offer an amendment to fund the project. They will almost certainly fail, setting up a likely showdown with the Senate, officials said Tuesday. That showdown is likely to favor the House, given the past history of the troubled project.
Congress has not funded Yucca Mountain since 2011.
The entire Nevada congressional delegation – two Democratic senators, three Democratic members of the House, and one Republican House member – are all opposed to continuing down the so-far black hole of Yucca Mountain. According to General Accounting Office figures, the total cost of Yucca Mountain could be over $400 billion, with no date certain for the waste site to open. That’s far in excess of the funds flowing into the nuclear waste fund under a tax on consumers of nuclear power in the largely feckless 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act.
A little bit of nuclear waste history. After discovering at the end of World War II that developing nuclear weapons created a huge amount of nuclear waste (still not remediated), the late Atomic Energy Commission began looking for a solution. In the early 1970s, as the added waste burden of spent civilian nuclear fuel began accumulating, they looked to salt beds as a disposal answer. They focused on Lyons, Kansas, as the site for the burial of the radioactive waste.
That was a failure. Then the AEC and the industry turned to reprocessing, relying on commercial companies to do the work of chopping up spent fuel, saturating it with chemicals, and retrieving plutonium, to use as new fuel. That failed in the face of enormous costs and no real market for expensive plutonium fuel.
In 1982, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, designed to spread the political pain of hosting a nuclear waste dump among a number of candidate sites. It was the brainchild of the late Rep. Mo Udall (D-Ariz.), but was brain dead. In 1984, Energy Secretary John Herrington, facing the possibility of Republican losses in states that were candidates for a waste dump in upcoming Senate elections, cut short the search for a waste site.
The search for a permanent waste site languished until 1987, when former Sen. J. Bennett Johnson (D-La), decided to push what came to be known as the “Screw Nevada” bill, designating Yucca Mountain for the site (knowing at the time that the state’s Congressional delegation was heavily Republican). But the waste law gave the state opportunities to delay work at the site.
Over the years, and billions of dollars later, it became clear that Yucca Mountain had myriad geologic problems. As geologist James Conca, a frequent analyst of nuclear issues in Forbes magazine, who worked on the original Yucca Mountain license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, wrote recently, “Our understanding of corrosion, transportation, permeability, engineered barriers, shielding, packaging, waste form development, material science, among others, have been increased enormously by studying Yucca Mt.
“In fact, that understanding is what makes choosing Yucca Mt. an obvious mistake.”
Conca advises returning to salt beds for nuclear waste, on the model of New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Project (itself plagued with many problems).
So, the best course is to say goodnight to Yucca Mountain, and look for other alternatives. In the meantime, keeping spent fuel at the site of the nuclear power plants that generated it makes sense. The NRC says that is safe, and it buys more time for a better answer than Yucca Mountain.
— Kennedy Maize