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Officials At Odds Over Storing Nuclear Waste WLTX19 Eric Connor, Greenville News March 17, 2014 Plans to ship decades-old weapons waste from South Carolina’s Savannah River Site are on hold still as the underground nuclear waste dump in New Mexico that was to be its home remains shuttered indefinitely a month after a mysterious radioactive leak stopped shipments from sites nationwide.

The leak at New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant raises new questions over another multibillion-dollar disposal site shut down in the American desert: Yucca Mountain……..

For environmentalists skeptical of nuclear energy, the incident in New Mexico stands as evidence that geologic disposal akin to the Yucca Mountain project is too risky.

“The situation clearly shows there are unanticipated hazards lurking anytime you put nuclear waste inside a geologic facility,” said Tom Clements, a Columbia-based nuclear adviser to the South Carolina Sierra Club.

“It may be better in the medium term to keep this material above ground until scientific methods of disposal are improved.”…….

Allison M. Macfarlane, Obama’s U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman, a longtime critic of burying waste at Yucca Mountain, wrote in “Uncertainty Underground: Yucca Mountain and the Nation’s High-Level Nuclear Waste,” a 2006 collection of articles, that “It is almost impossible to decipher the detailed history of a rock, let alone predict reactions into the geologic future,” and that “Geology has not advanced far enough yet to expect that it can do this for the rocks of Yucca Mountain,” The New York Timesreported.

The Senate confirmed Macfarlane as NRC chairman in 2012 and reconfirmed her in 2013 for a five-year term……..

The New Mexico disposal site was developed in contrast to Yucca Mountain, with acceptance from political leaders under the framework of a consent-based approach.

The facility opened in 1999 as the home for so-called “transuranic waste,” the plutonium-laced byproducts of weapon production that are heavier than uranium and often come in the form of rags, tools and lab equipment.

Most of the waste can be safely handled and is less radioactive than spent reactor fuel, but nonetheless remains radioactive for thousands of years.

The New Mexico site has been held up as a potential model for the larger dilemma of disposing of higher-level commercial waste, which is currently being stored in deep pools and in concrete casks on reactor sites.

The site accepts transuranic waste from various Cold War-era nuclear weapons complexes across the country, burying waste more than 2,000 feet underground on salt beds of an ancient sea.

However, the Feb. 14 leak — which the Department of Energy has said left 13 workers with small traces of radiation — has put all shipments on hold, including shipments from the Savannah River Site…….

The leak at the New Mexico facility occurred about two weeks after a separate incident in which a truck carrying a salt load underground caught fire.http://www.wltx.com/story/news/2014/03/17/south-carolina-officials-at-odds-over-storing-nuclear-waste/6515449/