Yucca Mountain Flattened

Yucca Mountain Flattened

March 25, 2009

Ken Silverstein
EnergyBiz Insider
Editor-in-Chief

If not Yucca Mountain, then what? That's the question that the nuclear energy sector is asking the Obama administration, which has effectively killed the permanent repository for spent fuel by cutting off its funding.

It had long been thought that if the nuclear sector is to make a revival, it would need a permanent place to bury its radioactive material and Yucca Mountain, 90 miles outside of Las Vegas, provided such a spot. But the site has been entangled in one legal morass after the next -- a predicament that will now force the industry to rethink its growth strategies.

In the short run, the answer will be to let the roughly 60,000 tons of waste that exist at the 104 existing nuclear facilities stay on site in above-ground dry cask storage. Long-term, though, that won't be adequate, necessitating either expansions of existing sites, a permanent place or a scientific breakthrough that allows the spent fuel to be used again for the generation of power.

"The 60,000 metric tons of fuel would go from goal post to goal post and be 20 feet high," says John Grossenbacher, director of the Idaho National Laboratory. "It's nasty stuff and highly radioactive. But managing it to protect public health is not a problem. In the near term, it is clear we can safely store this stuff in concrete containers. In the end, we will need a geologic repository. Yucca Mountain is a one-million-year technical solution. But it would be irrational to inhibit the use of nuclear energy if we are unable politically to engineer a one-million-year solution."

It may be possible to one day reuse this spent fuel, says Grossenbacher. Other countries are grappling with similar issues. France, for example, now reprocesses its waste and uses it in other reactors. The country also buries it underground in storage at two sites there and in ventilated wells to control the temperature. An underground research laboratory in eastern France is now researching more effective ways to bury such waste.

Nuclear energy became an issue on the presidential campaign trial with candidate Obama saying that he favored the concept but not until a safe repository could be found. It's a point also underscored by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. He adamantly opposes storing the waste at Yucca Mountain and argues that the repository is near a fault line, making it too dangerous.

President Obama will choke off funding for Yucca Mountain beginning in 2010, putting an end to a project that began in 1987 and one that had been vigorously pushed by the Bush administration. Altogether, about $13.5 billion of the $96 billion authorized to study and build Yucca Mountain has been spent. Instead, the Obama administration is saying that the current stock pile of nuclear waste that is growing by 2,000 tons a year will remain stored where it is generated until it develops a new plan.

This "represents our most significant victory to date in our battle to protect Nevada from becoming the country's toxic wasteland," says Majority Leader Reid.

Politically Difficult

Current law enacted in 1982 permits 70,000 tons of spent fuel to be buried 350 meters below the earth's surface at Yucca Mountain. But the U.S. Department of Energy says both the commercial and defense sectors could generate 119,000 tons of nuclear waste by 2035. In fact, a 2001 report by the General Accountability Office says that the site needs to be three times bigger than what has been proposed to make room for future deposits.

But Yucca Mountain is now off the table. At present, there are 120 nuclear waste storage facilities in 39 states. The Bush administration had long argued that those current sites were designed to be temporary and that the 1982 law requires the construction of a permanent waste disposal location.

The issue of storing spent nuclear fuel is one of the most pressing issues facing the nuclear power industry. While proponents have done a reasonably good job of promoting its environmental benefits, they have yet to persuade all parties that the generation and storage processes are totally safe. And, if current federal financial incentives are successful and more nuclear power generation is built, then more space will be necessary whether it is at multiple locations or at one central place.

An MIT study says that existing nuclear storage sites should be expanded to enable the storage of spent fuel decades into the future. At some point, the technology to allow that fuel to be recycled will have advanced. Instead of burying it all, some of the spent fuel could then be used to power other nuclear generators.

While the industry favors a permanent repository, many utilities such as Entergy and Exelon say that they are successfully storing on site the used material in dry casks. To speed along further nuclear development, those companies have generally backed off on their insistence that Yucca Mountain be developed.

"There were some questions early on over whether the lack of a central repository would prevent new plants," says Randy Hutchinson, senior vice president for Entergy Nuclear. "It won't. We do have a belief, however, that it would be better if the spent fuel were all in one place. Long-term, do we want spent fuel scattered all around the country?"

It's uncertain what new ideas the Obama administration will propose. But it would seem not just politically difficult but also prohibitively expensive to create another Yucca Mountain somewhere else. If the nuclear sector wants to increase its role in energy markets, its must work to expand its current accommodations and help to finance the science that will allow nuclear waste to be reprocessed.