How Yucca Mountain Was Killed

ATKeiper writes "The Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, which was selected by the U.S. government in the 1980s to be the nation's permanent facility for storing nuclear waste, is essentially dead. A new article in The New Atlantis explains how the project was killed: 'In the end, the Obama administration succeeded, by a combination of legal authority and bureaucratic will, in blocking Congress's plan for the Yucca Mountain repository — certainly for the foreseeable future, and perhaps permanently.... The saga of Yucca Mountain's creation and apparent demise, and of the seeming inability of the courts to prevent the Obama administration from unilaterally nullifying the decades-old statutory framework for Yucca, illustrates how energy infrastructure is uniquely subject to the control of the executive branch, and so to the influence of presidential politics.' A report from the Government Accountability Office notes that the termination 'essentially restarts a time-consuming and costly process [that] has already cost nearly $15 billion through 2009.'"

Comments

All power comes at a price

[Toe, The]

There is no such thing as a free lunch. All power has its cost. Yes, even wind and solar.

Solar panels huge enough to collect loads of energy also cool the ground underneath them; changing climate patterns. And they kill what lives under them. (And if you put them in space, then you have the little problem of transporting the energy.)

Wind farms huge enough to create loads of energy may actually affect wind patterns and temperature dispersal. Plus they kill loads of migrating birds.

And both require many, many resources to build and maintain the collection devices.

Hydro; well, that's an eco-disaster because you have to dam a river to produce it.

Collecting energy from tides? If you did that on a huge scale, I'll bet it would have some major effects on marine life.

Just want to put it out there. I'm not saying nuclear is fantastic. Just want to point out that nothing is.

Sounds like a great "plan"

[Baloroth]

So instead of storing highly toxic and radioactive waste deep underground in specially designed and very expensive long term storage meant to keep it safe from all kinds of disasters, we can keep storing it above ground in short-term storage pools that we know will fail if they should be exposed to a decent sized disaster. Keep in mind this isn't storage just for future waste, but stuff that actually exists, right now, sitting in short-term storage, and if you read TFA, you'll find out not only is there no other long-term storage option, there isn't even a plan for one. So who are most people going to blame when (not if, but when, unless we do something about it) those current storage sites fail? I'm betting it won't be Obama. Anyone want to take that bet?

Neocon View

[Sponge Bath]

The author Adam J White, is a lawyer specializing in fighting federal regulation and is a contributor to the neocon rag The Weekly Standard (founded by Bill Kristol). This piece places the failure of Yucca mountain singularly on president Obama while saying worshipful things about Reagan every other paragraph.

So take this "article" with a grain of salt. Any federal regulation is wrong to this neocon and everything is the fault of the current president. There was plenty of controversy and challenges to Yucca before Obama became president.

Re:No long term consistency

[radtea]

Actually I like this system : for a long term project to succeed, it requires it to be consistent, non-partisan and well done

This is as much about regional as partisan politics, although both have a role. The US is a relatively weak federation in important respects, and the ability of regional power bases to disrupt national policy is considerable.

In science and technology, this usually appears as pork for supporters: various bits of the space shuttle (most famously, the SRBs) had to be made in particular states to garner the support of the appropriate senators.

For single-site projects, like the superconducting supercolider in the '80's, everyone was for it until a specific site was identified, at which point everyone but the representatives from that state (Texas, I think), and that concerted opposition was enough to kill it.

In the case of Yucca Mountain, the representatives from Nevada (notably Harry Reid) were able to concentrate their opposition, while no one was particularly zealous in favour of it.

So in the US, single-site projects that have high political or economic costs or benefits to the state involved tend to fail. This is built in to the US system of regional representation.

As such, local storage of waste--which would eliminate the decidedly non-negligible transport risk--is likely the only viable solution for Americans, because your government is structurally incapable of sustaining any other solution.

That's why Nevada was the right place

[Anonymous Coward]

Nevada was selected for the Nation's dangerous nuclear activities PRECISELY because it was barren and relatively unpopulated. Having polluted it with many nuclear blasts over decades, we effectively made it even MORE appropriate that we concentrate all the waste there.

Any civilian who moved there after the testing began in the 1940's has no right to complain; that's like moving into a house next to the airport (which you guy at a discount because of the noise) and then demanding the airport get shut down because it is depressing the value of your home

What could possibly be WORSE than putting all the waste into a single multi-billion dollar containment facility (designed by the nation's top scientists in the field) where it can be guarded and monitored? Oh... let's seeee.... the OBMA PLAN: let it accumulate in various containers at power plants and medical facilities all over the country with dubious monitoring/guarding.

Even if we were to abandon nuclear power (not gonna happen... we will always have nuclear-powered naval vessels) we would still produce lots of nuclear waste in industry and in the medical field, so the current no-plan plan is mind-blowingly stupid and short-sighted

Re:Two dirty words harry reid

[Immerman]

What crack are you smoking? In theory it was safe - in reality the geological structures were considerably more flawed and fractured than the perfection assumed by the theory, revised analysis painted a very different picture. Yucca Mountain *might* be able to safely contain the waste for a few centuries, at which point you now have a glowing, radioactive hellhole that's beginning to leak into the water table and will require MAJOR cleanup because the waste won't be substantially less radioactive for a few thousand more years. Do you want to count on politicians actually funding said cleanup?

I agree we do need a solution though. Yucca Mountain would be perfectly adequate if all we were storing was low-level waste. Even mid-level waste would probably be okay, that stuff is mostly harmless in a few centuries. And if we would just start reprocessing spent fuel again then that would be pretty much all we have, the high level waste is basically a mix of mid-level waste and perfectly good fuel, it's just become cheaper to dig up more fresh uranium than separate it out. Here's an idea - charge a "reprocessing deposit" on all nuclear fuel purchased, said deposit being held in escrow to finance the reprocessing when the fuel is spent so that reprocessed fuel has a sizable market advantage. Boom, problem solved.