What are the odds that Yucca Mountain will become the final U.S. nuclear waste repository? Ask the odds makers in Las Vegas. They would be glad to take your money, because the odds are slim and none, and Slim is leaving the room.
Late last month, three members of the San Onofre Community Engagement Panel, a volunteer group working on issues related to the decommissioning of the San Onofre nuclear plant in Southern California, wrote an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times. The headline was filled with naivety and a sense of déjà vu: “Nuclear waste has been piling up across Amrica with nowhere to go. Congress needs to act.”
This is a headline that could have been written anytime in the past 60 years, as Congress has acted repeatedly, often with bad legislation, and the federal government has flailed fecklessly to implement bad law. It started in the 1940s with the Manhattan Project’s accumulation of liquid radioactive waste, much of it stored in large tanks at Hanford, Wash., still a problem.
When civilian reactors came on the scene, several attempts to deal with spent fuel crashed. Reprocessing failed in the 1960s and the West Valley site near Buffalo, N.Y., has not been fully remediated. Then there was the Lyon, Kansas, fiasco, where the old Atomic Energy Commission badly botched a project to bury used fuel rods in a salt formation.
In 1982, under the leadership of the late Rep. Morris Udall (D-Ariz.), Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. It was bad law, which created a fund, paid for by nuclear power’s customers, to finance a final burial place after reviewing a handful of candidates. The Reagan administration’s Department of Energy pulled the plug on that approach when it threatened Republican incumbents in the candidate states.
Congress tried again in 1987, under the leadership of former Sen. J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.), in a masterly piece of bad law, aka the “Screw Nevada” act. That legislation singled out Nevada as the site for a final burial place for spent fuel, on federal land at Yucca Mountain near Las Vegas. The result was that nearly every politician in the state vowed to stop the project. DOE went ahead with the project, eventually digging a $10 billion tunnel into the mountain.
The project, which encountered several major technical problems, ground to a halt when Nevada’s Democratic Sen. Harry Reid became Senate Majority Leader. Reid’s opposition eventually doomed the Yucca endeavor, with the Obama administration putting a final nail in the project’s rocky coffin.
Many Republicans have pledged to revive Yucca Mountain, but with no success, in part because the Obama administration succeeded in cutting off funds for the project and Congress has been unable to pass appropriations including money for Yucca. Many thought that would change when Donald Trump became president.
But Trump’s crowning has not changed the situation on the ground, and he doesn’t seem particularly interested. The Washington Post reported in October that Trump, speaking in Elko, Nev. in support of Sen. Dean Heller’s reelection campaign, told a radio station, “I think you should do things where people want them to happen, so I would be very inclined to be against it. We will be looking at it very seriously over the next few weeks, and I agree with the people of Nevada.”
The people of Nevada ousted Heller and elected Democrat Jacky Rosen as their junior Senator. The senior Senator is Catherine Cortez Masto, also a Democrat. Congress has continued to be unable to fund Yucca Mountain, not to mention being able to mount a major legislative effort to rewrite federal nuclear waste law. It’s a non-starter.
In the meantime, spent fuel sits at the reactor sites, where it was created, in short-term pool storage or longer-term dry cask storage. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulates the storage and says the dry cask technology is safe. Let’s hope they are correct, because it is going to be there for as long as most of us can see.
And among those who continue to oppose the Yucca Mountain project is the American Gaming Association, the national lobbying group for the gambling industry.
— Kennedy Maize