Last week, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) essentially said that the proposed Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada would probably be OK for storing our Nation’s high-level nuclear waste for a million years.
This is a big win for Science, a big win for The Process, and a big win for the Rule of Law. Along with the recent NRC Waste Confidence ruling that long-term storage of spent nuclear fuel is safe for over a hundred years, this gives us two options for our waste. And there are more, better options out there as well. No one can say we don’t know what to do with this waste or that we don’t have viable plans.
But this report wasn’t a surprise and doesn’t really change anything.
In 1987, when DOE said to the scientists and engineers working on nuclear waste, ”Congress chose Yucca Mountain out of the candidate sites, so make it work”, we all knew it could work. I mean, that’s what we do.
Even rocks like the volcanic tuffs at Yucca Mountain can be made to work. It takes some special costly design features and engineered barriers, but geologists know rocks and America’s the richest nation in Earth’s history.
So when we submitted the Yucca Mountain License Application in 2008, we knew it would be technically adequate. Thousands of us had spent 20 years and $12 billion working on it, so we better have come up with a decent technical design.
But the science and engineering have never been the problem. It’s been politics and money.
We did know Yucca Mountain would cost a lot but, hey, it was before the Great Recession, cost was no object.
And thanks to the public’s irrational fear of radiation, it will cost ten times what its needs to cost anyway. There are ways to use science and engineering to reduce the cost, but they never seem to get seriously considered. Only the grandiose, most complicated, most costly ideas resonate with non-scientists when it comes to nuclear. Shooting it into the Sun still sounds good to some people.
On October 14, the NRC published just Volume 3, out of 5 required, of its Safety Evaluation Report (SER) on the proposed underground geologic nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. They found that the design met the requirements for the million-year time period after the repository would be filled and permanently closed.
The SER is a five-volume document prepared by NRC staff as part of the NRC licensing process that is only the beginning of the discussion period. According to NRC’s own rules, the NRC shouldn’t release any volume until the whole thing is finished, since Volume 3 kind of depends on Volume 2, and so on. Volume 1, an introduction and history of the whole project, was completed and released in 2010 as the final act before DOE shut the project down.
However, last year a federal court ordered the NRC to complete the SER, as much as they could, with what funding they had. The NRC was supposed to release reports on November 6 of this year, and offered no formal explanation for why they released Volume 3 before the November elections.
“For the NRC staff to publically release just this one volume of the SER outside the proper context of an ongoing licensing proceeding and in the absence of a complete SER is unprecedented,” said Bob Halstead, Executive Director of the State of Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects. “It creates a false impression that the safety review has been completed. It is difficult to see what reason there could be for such a release except to provide political support and encouragement for Yucca Mountain supporters in Congress”.
Indeed, it’s strange that there is any support in Congress for Yucca Mountain since we’re broke. Congress used up all the remaining money in the Nuclear Waste Fund for deficit reduction and the courts ruled utilities don’t have to keep paying the nuclear tax until we fix this mess.
Just to complete the licensing process to authorize Yucca Mountain, NRC needs at least $100 million. But they have less than $15 million in carry-over funds.
DOE stated that over $1.6 billion would be needed to complete just the licensing and administrative activities before any actual work could begin on the repository itself. But DOE has only $30 million in carry-over funds.
$100 billion will be needed to build the repository and operate it over 60 years, although with even marginal inflation and material cost uncertainties, that price will rise to $200 billion. $2.5 billion alone is needed to build a rail spur into the site. An additional $100 billion is needed just to get the high-level waste ready at the various sites for disposal at Yucca Mountain.
We can’t even get medical care for our veterans or fix our crumbling bridges. Does anyone think Congress will allocate billions for a project like this in our lifetimes?
It won’t. It doesn’t need to. The recent NRC waste confidence ruling on long-term storage of spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors said spent fuel is fine in dry casks for over 100 years, when it will be easier to handle and re-use, and won’t even be high-level anymore. We already knew this since we’ve been storing spent fuel this way for decades with no problems.
The defense high-level waste left over from the Cold War has its own path. It doesn’t need to be co-mingled with commercial waste and certainly doesn’t require Yucca Mountain just for itself (Where has all the Nukewaste Gone?).
Besides, we need to rethink the whole nuclear waste plan anyway since it’s a leftover from the 1970’s when we didn’t know very much and Congress thought they could just dictate something this important to the States and they’d have to accept it (The Screw Nevada Bill).
When Yucca Mountain was halted in 2009, President Obama formed the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future (BRC) to rethink the plan and get the nuclear program back on track. If followed, their recommendations would do just that (BRC).
I do strongly urge that the license application review process be completed. Regardless of what we finally do in the future, we should follow through on such an important scientific effort. We should have vigorous debate over what scientific studies we do perform. We want to know how good Yucca Mountain would be, if we ever decide to use it. And we must see how this whole process works so we can fix it if necessary.
Besides, most of the scientific results and discoveries that came out of the Yucca Mountain Project are useful for any site we end up choosing. We did not actually waste much of that money and effort.
The fact that our nuclear waste program has become tied up in courts and politics is not good. I like lawyers as much as the next guy, but we need to back up and let science and public consent lead us down the right path for our nuclear future.