Yucca a Mountain of Nuclear Doubt

Mountain of doubt Will the country’s only planned nuclear waste dump survive Obama?Feature story – From the January 19, 2009 issue of High Country News by Judith Lewis”…………………………..Seventy-seven percent of Nevada voters object to storing nuclear waste in their state, which has no nuclear reactors of its own…………………………..It’s hard to know exactly how much Yucca Mountain had to do with his victory. “Obviously, there’s never one issue that determines how people are going to vote,” says Nevada Rep. Shelley Berkley, a fierce Yucca Mountain opponent. “But I believe there was a strong sense that President-elect Barack Obama presented a clear alternative to John McCain’s manic obsession with putting waste in Yucca Mountain.”

Sen. Reid has now pronounced Yucca Mountain dead, and Berkley believes he’s right. Nick Shapiro, a spokesman for Obama’s transition team, confirmed by e-mail that Obama believes “Yucca Mountain should not and will not move forward.”………………………….The disposal of high-level nuclear waste — mostly leftovers from atomic fission, as opposed to “crapped out” clothes and contaminated tools — has dogged the industry since the dawn of the atomic age. Waste from the very first reactor experiment, in 1942, still taints the groundwater near its burial site in a forest outside of Chicago; spent fuel rods — zirconium-alloy tubes stuffed with uranium pellets — wait in watery cooling pools and dry concrete casks at 121 operating and decommissioned reactors in 39 states…………………………….not only has reprocessing proved to be disastrously polluting, it separates out fissionable plutonium — and plutonium can be used to make bombs. Proliferation concerns made nuclear waste disposal the government’s problem……………………………..Fearing the collapse of an already faltering industry, Congress in 1982 drew up the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, ordering the Energy Department to open a nuclear waste storage facility within 16 years. But Congress did nothing in that time except select Yucca Mountain as the only location worth studying, delaying until 2002 to give the site final approval and allow the Energy Department to at long last apply for a license. As of December 2006, $13.5 billion from utility bills and taxes has gone into researching the site, and utilities have accumulated some 55,000 metric tons of waste. By 2010, the waste will exceed Yucca Mountain’s limit of 70,000 metric tons………………………………..o maintain that energy mix will require replacing and retrofitting the country’s aging fleet of reactors, and to support those efforts without the prospect of Yucca Mountain, the new administration will have to act quickly to locate a waste storage project. That won’t be easy. Congress will need to throw out all previous laws regarding nuclear waste disposal and start the site selection process from scratch. The Energy Department will need to tear up decades of contracts with nuclear energy providers and negotiate new terms for temporary storage. Legislators would then set to work investigating sites

Mountain of doubt — High Country News