It’s time for the U.S. nuclear industry and its advocates to acknowledge an unpleasant truth: it’s time to start over from square one on disposing of the high-level radioactive waste (spent fuel) from the nation’s nuclear reactors. Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, which has been the great waste hope for over 30 years, is dead.
The latest evidence of the failure of the Yucca Mountain enterprise came yesterday when the Senate Appropriations Committee voted 31-0 to approve a fiscal year 2020 spending bill for the U.S. Department of Energy at $49 billion. The bill contains zero funds for restarting work at Yucca Mountain, which has been stalled since the Obama administration. The Trump administration had requested $130 million to restart Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing for the long-stalled Yucca Mountain underground waste repository.
The House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi has long said she won’t support any money to try to revive Yucca Mountain, had also zeroed out the Trump administration’s money request for the nuclear waste dump. The Las Vegas Review Journal correctly reported that the vote to approve the DOE spending bill was “a decision by lawmakers that likely dooms any chances the project can be revived in fiscal year 2020, which begins Oct. 1.”
Let me go farther, as someone who has covered the issued since the controversial passage of the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act and the subsequent inability of the federal government to implement the legislation over the understandable, bipartisan opposition of Nevada politicians. Yucca Mountain is a giant, expensive, useless whole in the ground. No nuclear spent fuel will ever be interred there.
The Trump administration has supported reviving the project, but congressional Republicans have resisted. In the last Congress, the Senate GOP rejected funding for the repository in order to protect Republican Sen. Dean Heller, as the waste project is politically toxic in the state. He lost in 2018 anyhow.
This time around, the Review Journal noted, “Nevada’s two Democratic senators, both in their first term, have lobbied [California Democratic Sen. Diane] Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on energy, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, against reviving the waste project in Nevada.”
Outgoing Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, a long-time nuclear energy booster who is not running for reelection in 2020, pledged earlier this year, according to the Review Journal, that he would seek a “full up-or-down vote in the full Senate to determine if there was enough support for continuing with licensing to support it in the spending bill.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, anxious to see spending bills passed to avoid another government shutdown, never let Alexander’s up-or-down vote come to the floor.
A good quick summary of the political history of Yucca Mountain is a July 31 Forbes magazine article by Andy Stone, host of the Energy Policy Now Podcast from the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. He concluded, “If Yucca is revived, it could be two decades before disposal begins. If a totally new site is selected, disposal will come even later. If. Already forty years in, disposal is nowhere in sight.”
— Kennedy Maize