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Yucca Mountain Is Dead. Now What?

Yucca Mountain Is Dead. Now What? THE NEW REPUBLIC  4 March 09  So what does this mean for the future of nuclear power in the United States? Not much in the short run, says Allison MacFarlane, a George Mason University professor and author of Uncertainty Underground, a book on Yucca Mountain and the long-term storage of high-level nuclear waste. The nation’s nuclear power plants, MacFarlane told me, will continue storing their spent fuel rods onsite—first in cooling pools and then in slightly more permanent dry-cask storage containers. The Energy Department is still contractually obligated to remove that waste and store it in some sort of permanent repository eventually, so it’s not as if utility companies are worried they’ll be left holding the bag………………………It will be important to construct a permanent geological repository at some point in the next few decades, especially if nuclear power production expands further as part of the push to curb carbon emissions. What’s more, the oft-mentioned option of reprocessing high-level nuclear waste and using it as fuel for fast-breeder reactors won’t make building a storage site any easier. Reprocessing may reduce the volume of high-level nuclear waste that needs to be stored, but it won’t reduce the amount of heat that the remaining waste actually produces—and that’s the main concern in finding a suitably sized repository, since you don’t want to keep hot waste too close together…………………….even if it is situated in a closed basin, there are still people who drink the basin’s groundwater.

Yucca Mountain Is Dead. Now What? – Environment and Energy

March 5, 2009 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, wastes | antinuclear