Plans for New Nuclear Storage Facility Still Up in the Air: Yucca Mountain

By David Sneed, The Tribune, San Luis Obispo, Calif.

Jun. 26–California electricity customers have paid $1 billion to the federal government to permanently store high-level radioactive waste, but the fate of a proposed storage facility at Yucca Mountain remains uncertain.

Federal officials and nuclear power representatives told the California Energy Commission on Monday that the underground repository will open someday. But Nevada officials do not want the facility built in their state, and scientists continue to question whether the facility can safely store nuclear waste for thousands of years.

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. is building an aboveground storage facility at Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant because pools now being used to store the plant’s highly radioactive used uranium are nearly full.

Diablo Canyon–as well as the nation’s other nuclear power plants — was designed with the assumption that spent fuel would only be stored on site for several years before being either reprocessed into new fuel or shipped to a centralized federal storage depot.

The Energy Commission is holding two days of hearings this week in Sacramento concerning the status and future of nuclear power in the state.

Energy commissioners told the U.S. Department of Energy, which is building the Yucca Mountain facility, that they are angry over repeated delays in the project and have little confidence it will ever open.

In contrast, Eric Knox with the Energy Department’s radioactive waste office told the commission he’s never been more confident about the future of Yucca Mountain. The earliest the facility could open is 2017. But it is likely to be delayed to 2020.

“Between 2017 and 2020, it’s something that will become a reality,” Knox said.

The nuclear industry maintains that there is no scientific reason not to open Yucca Mountain. The only thing lacking is the political will.

“Because it must be done, it will be done,” said Alan Hanson, an executive with Areva, a company that manufactures nuclear waste storage casks.

Bob Loux with Nevada’s Yucca Mountain office was much less optimistic about the future of the storage facility. Nevada elected officials, including U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, have vowed to stop the project.

“The prospects (of Yucca opening) are very dim,” Loux said.

Allison Macfarlane, a nuclear waste storage specialist with George Mason University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the commission that Yucca Mountain is a less-than-ideal location for storing nuclear waste.

Yucca Mountain’s chief appeal is its isolated location 60 miles from Las Vegas.

Yucca Mountain is problematic because the area is seismically and volcanically active. The atmosphere inside the storage tunnels would soon become corrosive to the storage casks because of humidity and oxidizing minerals in the soil, Macfarlane said.

“There are plenty of other sites in the country that are reasonable,” she said.

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