nuclear-news

Yucca – Mountain of Doubt

Mountain of Doubt Will the country’s only planned nuclear waste dump survive Obama? BY JUDITH LEWIS/HIGH COUNTRY NEWS FEBRUARY 25, 2009- “……………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………………

Doubts about Yucca Mountain’s geologic suitability have piled up as well.

Six hundred earthquakes have rumbled under Yucca Mountain in the last 20 years, one as great as magnitude 5.6. A panel of scientists put the chances of “igneous disruption” in the ridgeline’s ancient field of volcanoes at one in 6,250 over the next 10,000 years—which seems low until you consider that, in most of the United States, the probability of a volcano erupting is zero.

Even the site’s chief meteorological selling point—the dryness of the Nevada desert—may no longer play in its favor. For one thing, climates can change: In the winter of 2004 to 2005, enough rain fell in Death Valley, 20 miles to the West, to revive seedbeds that had lain dormant for a century.

For another, the absence of water may not be as significant as the presence of air. “Yucca Mountain is an oxidizing environment,” said Allison Macfarlane, an associate professor at George Mason University and editor of a book on Yucca Mountain, “and spent nuclear fuel is not stable in the presence of water and oxygen.”

Boise Weekly: Features: Feature: Mountain of Doubt

February 26, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, wastes