Democrats Could Doom Yucca Mountain

WASHINGTON – A few years ago, the plan to store the nation’s nuclear waste in Nevada seemed all but certain.

Congress decided that highly radioactive waste from commercial nuclear-power plants, which takes centuries to decay, needed to be stored underground, and it reaffirmed by wide margins in 2002 that Yucca Mountain, 100 miles from Las Vegas, was the place to build such a repository.

But now that’s being rethought, for a variety of reasons. And the Nov. 7 elections, which propelled Democrats into power on Capitol Hill, are likely to accelerate that thinking despite strong bipartisan support for Yucca Mountain in Congress.

The incoming majority leader of the Senate, Nevadan Harry Reid, long has pledged that Yucca Mountain will never open. The incoming chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Californian Barbara Boxer, agrees. Both voted against the Yucca repository.

They think nuclear waste should stay right where it is – at the nation’s nuclear power plants – at least until better waste technology comes along.

There are questions about how safe the Yucca Mountain facility would be, and others about whether transporting radioactive waste on roads and rail lines would pose unacceptable risks of accidents or terrorist attacks.

More than 100 national and state environmental groups – including the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council – coalesced in September behind a set of principles that include permanent storage of used fuel at the reactor sites.

“The problem is the concept that the public wants the waste moved,” said Michele Boyd, the legislative director and nuclear expert at Public Citizen. “That’s a 20-year-old concept.”

Even the nuclear-power industry is giving ground. It still wants Yucca Mountain opened, but it’s willing to allow taxes that plant operators pay into a fund for the site to be used for interim storage, a kind of euphemism for above-ground storage until there’s a way to reprocess old fuel assemblies safely into new fuel.

Nuclear Energy Institute President Frank L. Bowman told the Senate environment committee in September that surface-level interim storage could “instill public confidence in the waste-management program.”

That confidence may have eroded because the Energy Depart-ment is eight years late in responding to a federal mandate to open an underground repository. Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell said recently that it could be decades before Yucca Mountain opens.

Because of the long delay, plants already are turning to surface storage. At facilities such as Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo on California’s scenic central coast, construction is under way on thick concrete pads that will hold concrete-encased steel containers where fuel assemblies would be entombed.

PG&E spokesman Shawn Cooper said the company was still hopeful that Yucca Mountain would open someday. But as long as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses cask storage, the waste could be there well into the next century.

“It’s called temporary dry-cask storage, but the canisters can hold the waste 100 years,” he said.

Among Ms. Boxer’s biggest concerns about Yucca Mountain is that it’s not as impervious to water as initially thought. Testing has shown that water percolates through its caverns and heads toward the Colorado River.

“Sixteen million Californians drink from that river,” she said.

Victor Gilinsky, who served on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 1975 to 1984 under Presidents Ford and Carter, said a reshaping of the waste debate was under way, which eventually would spell the end of the notion of a repository at Yucca Mountain.

(c) 2006 Augusta Chronicle, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.