With Yucca Mountain out, nuclear waste has nowhere to
go
Apr 05 - The Seattle Times
The tanks are still there, 177 in all, packed with 53 million gallons of
radioactive waste. One million gallons have leached into the desert
soil.
A decade from now, this byproduct of the atomic age at Hanford nuclear
reservation was to be turned into 14-foot-long glass rods, loaded in
steel canisters and shipped to Nevada, where it could sit forever
beneath a mountain. An additional 2,300 tons of spent nuclear fuel would
go with it.
But now the worst waste from the country's most polluted place has
nowhere to go.
The Obama administration's recent decision to withdraw licensing to
build a high-level nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain leaves
future storage of the Manhattan Project's nastiest goop undecided. Some
worry the move means waste could remain at Hanford indefinitely and that
nuclear garbage from elsewhere might even join it.
The decision has prompted a legal fight between the federal
government and the states of Washington and South Carolina - and a
public-relations war with local newspapers in the Tri-Cities and Aiken,
S.C., which also produced plutonium during the Cold War.
President Barack Obama and his energy team have faced withering
criticism from Congress - including from many in the president's party.
Even some who agree Yucca Mountain might not be the best place to store
nuclear waste were quick to highlight what they see as the naked
politics of Obama's move.
Yet, as a blue-ribbon commission met for the first time late last month
to start the new hunt for permanent nuke-waste storage, some citizen
activists who watch Hanford most closely remained entirely unfazed.
"A lot of us were quite confident way back in 1995 that we would
probably end up right at this spot," said Todd Martin, former chairman
of the Hanford Advisory Board, an independent, nonpartisan group that
attempts to advise the Energy Department on Hanford cleanup. "I'm much
more concerned about when we're going to make our first teaspoon of
glass."
The road to Yucca Mountain always has been messy. In the 1950s, the
National Academy of Sciences urged disposal of nuclear fuel and waste
underground. Salt beds in Michigan and Ohio were politically
unpalatable, and a mine in Kansas was found to be filled with holes from
oil and gas wells.
More burial sites were batted about for years until Congress eventually
selected a mountain ridge 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Over a quarter-century, the government spent $10.5 billion studying the
region's rock formations, climate and hydrology.
But Yucca is wildly unpopular in Nevada, a swing state that's home to
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, an early supporter of Obama. Reid
faces a tough re-election race in November.
As a presidential candidate, Obama - like Hillary Rodham Clinton and
John Edwards - declared himself an opponent of Yucca Mountain, citing
concerns about earthquakes and transportation of waste across the U.S.
When Obama killed it, reaction was swift. The Tri-City Herald and the
Aiken Standard of South Carolina wrote a joint editorial condemning a
decision that threatens to "keep these deadly legacies in our
backyards."
Washington Reps. Norm Dicks, a Democrat; Jay Inslee, a Democrat; and Doc
Hastings, a Republican, signed letters highlighting the billions of
wasted dollars _ and the billions more to come in legal claims by power
plants paying to guard nuclear fuel the government promised to store.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., angrily challenged Energy Secretary Steven
Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, in a public hearing: "What seems
to be missing (in the decision) is the why."
In a rambling answer, Chu said, "Other things, other knowledge, other
conditions as they evolved made (Yucca Mountain) look increasingly not
like an ideal choice."
When Murray asked for scientific evidence, Chu said, "It's an unfolding
of issues that continued, and I would be happy to talk to you in detail
about some of the issues."
Yucca had legitimate problems, said Tom Cochran, a nuclear physicist
with the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council. The site
rests above a water table, and moisture leaks through. It might not have
been big enough to hold all the waste.
Still, "I wouldn't have done it the way Obama did it," Cochran said. "He
came in saying he was going to make decisions based on science. In this
case, I think it was a political debt to Harry Reid."
Cochran said Yucca could have held some waste safely, but he, like
others, now expects to see a push to consolidate waste from across the
country at regional sites such as Hanford.
The Washington Attorney General's Office fears delay in finding a
permanent home increases the odds that waste will stay in the state _
and that other waste will join it. Idaho has a written agreement that
spent fuel it stores from nuclear subs must leave the state by 2035.
"If Idaho has a legal agreement that the naval waste needs to leave and
you don't have a repository somewhere, well, Hanford is right next
door," said Andy Fitz, an assistant state attorney general. His office
has asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to let the state intervene
in the decision to withdraw Yucca's license, and may turn to other legal
challenges if that fails.
Ken Niles, with Oregon's Department of Environmental Quality, agreed:
"They always say Hanford has the infrastructure, the experience, the
trained workers, and it's a desert."
Meanwhile, construction of the treatment plant to turn Hanford's poisons
into glass is designed to meet standards appropriate for Yucca. Some
fear a new site will mean new delays and new technical problems for a
project that's already one of the most complicated and expensive in the
world.
"The risk is whenever you get behind and let the waste pile up faster,
the government tends to start cutting corners," Cochran said. When
contractors in South Carolina fell behind in cleaning up waste, local
politicians pushed to change laws to let them leave it in the tanks -
"it was just crazy," he said.
That's why Todd Martin, with Hanford's advisory board, is chiefly
concerned with getting the poisons out of Hanford's 177 tanks. The point
of turning waste into glass is to neutralize the radioactive materials
so they can't ever leach into the ground again. After that, he's less
concerned about where it goes, even if it winds up being stored on
Hanford's plateau.
"The primary goal should be to get it out of the tanks and get it
stable," he said.
(c) 2010, The Seattle Times.
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