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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.'"
end of story
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
1) $15 billion is small potatoes if that's all it's cost through now, not per year. 2) This seems like a fairly iffy idea anyway for any number of reasons 3) If you're really concerned about costs, actually read the goddamned report and see (page 27) where it would cost $41-67 billion more to actually complete.
Cutting off an iffy project that would result in many times its current cost seems like a win.
That's the biggest problems with shifts in power, especially if parties change every four years. One party spends four years getting something in place, or sets some long term goals, and then next election someone else comes in and changes it all. So they spend all the time and money getting one thing spun up and then it gets canned and they spend the next four years doing something else and it may be canned.
Gotta be a better way.
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.
Not to mention the idea of every morsel of radioactive waste being transported on public highways to a single location (Yucca Mountain) is not that popular. Sucks we still don't have a long term solution to this nasty problem. Oh well fuck it, we will leave it for the next generation - right?
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?
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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.
It's scary how much president's get away with doing unilaterally these days. They start wars (Libya, Serbia) without congressional authorization. They unilaterally put into effect laws that they couldn't get passed through congress (like the DREAM act). Congress has become so cowed that the only tool they have against the president, impeachment, is pretty much a dirty word.
I wish both parties in congress would start defending their institution more. Congress is supposed to be the source of laws and an obstacle to actions they deem appropriate. The president is supposed to make sure the laws are followed out, not make the laws himself.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
"must be stored in isolation for tens of thousands of years"
I find this to be extremely silly and wrong
It does not need to be stored for tens of thousands of years
It needs to be stored until technological and political change turn it from a waste into a valuable material for reuse
Yucca mountain may or may not be a great/terrible solution. Argue amongst yourselves.
Here are the facts:
* Billions spent
* About 14 years late for initial use (scheduled for 1998)
* No sign that it was ever going to get used
I believe we need a solution. But I can't get to mad about scrapping a multi-billion dollar project that looks doomed to failure.
Obama isn't to blame for this. The OP ignores the fact that the Yucca project has been in trouble long before Obama was on the political landscape. Use of it was initially blocked before anyone even knew who Obama was. Penn and Teller did an episode of Bullshit! called "Nukes, Hybrids and Lesbians" which called out all years of different tactics that were blocking the use of the site for its intended purpose. That episode aired in 2007, one year before Obama was even elected into office. Penn and Teller pointed to all kinds of NIMBY groups and the complaints they put forth over the years...like the fact that nobody had tested to see how well the site would do in a flood. (Mind you, it's a mountain...in the middle of a desert.) Did it become official on Obama's watch? Sure. But the funeral isn't where the murder took place. Yucca was dead long before now.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
This has been the case since at least Reagan. At least he's the first one to do it overtly and every president since had been leaning his way politically. There is no left party in the US, only the right and the extreme right. You have bad choices, don't choose.
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"right"
At least in America, that word doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. Here the people on the "right" are usually the one's calling for limits on government power. And neither party has been very good about that. The Republicans talk a good game about limited government but don't seem to mean it while Democrats laugh at the idea of limited government (Nancy Pelosi literally laughed at it when someone asked her about the Constitutionality of the health care law). We have two parties on the left, none on the right.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
They don't care. And they'll make toys and toothpaste out of it and sell it back.
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
The real problem is that nobody wants nuclear waste because it is... well, radioactive, duh!
This is the core problem with nuclear (fission) energy. There is no way to deal with the radioactive waste. Nobody wants it anywhere. Nobody wants the risk of disease. Everybody is a nuclear NIMBY.
Much better to look at other sources of energy which don't have this waste problem which is qualitatively much different than any other industrial process.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Um, spent nuclear fuel is not waste. It is actually more fissionable material. Only an idiot would bury it. The french reprocess their nuclear fuel because they are sane, since Jimmy Carter we have been on the other side of the spectrum. When you separate the actinides from the rest you actually will have something that will decay below natural uranium in radioactivity in a relatively short period of time, say 400 years or so. We should use the money to build liquid chlorine fast reactors and burn up the spent fuel to make energy, not bury something worth more then gold per ounce into the ground. Fissionable fuel has this wonderful property that it makes more fuel, it truly has the Midas touch. A light water reactor only burns around a few percent, leaving around 98% of the energy in the fuel. Of course the neutron damage to a solid fuel element means we have to completely remake the thing before we can use it, and all the short half life isotopes mean you have to do it robotically. With a liquid fueled solution like a molten salt reactor you can continuously reprocess the fuel and use extremely high percentages of the fuel.
I never understood what people have against reprocessing. The plutonium from a reactor is pretty much worthless for making bombs. It is not P-239, but usually has multiple more neutrons and is not desirable if you want to make a bomb. I suppose they are afraid that the infrastructure could be re-purposed, but reactor grade plutonium is super crappy for making bombs. I suppose people aren't rational about nukes, so I shouldn't be surprised.
The problem of waste storage is the main objection to nuclear power. Some of our leaders don't want that problem to be solved (either by Yucca or by breeder reactors), because they don't want that objection to be overcome.
Never mind that nuclear power is the ultimate in green energy (no CO2 emissions, etc.); they oppose nuclear power in all forms. (Maybe they had proto-hippie parents who filled their minds with tales of glowing three-eyed fish.) If it's not an anemically low-energy-density source that can never hope to meet the needs of an energy-intensive civilization -- i.e., if it's not wind or solar -- it doesn't meet their definition of green.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
1. A friend of mine was on a team that was tasked with confirming the first hydrology study of Yucca Mountain that was used to select it for nuclear waste storage. Their results showed significant risk to the water table over the 10,000 year use period. Their results were tables and another confirmation study was done that looked remarkably like the first study.
2. A relative of mine works at WED - Disney's design firm. He was asked to bid on a project for some branch of the government; I think it was the Department of Energy. The project was to come up with a combination of sculture and architecture for Yucca Mountain that was so primordially frightening that it would keep humans away for 10,000 years even if they couldn't read warning and no matter what culture had evolved.
Just some fun data points for my fellow /. community members.
Every rule has more than one consequence.