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

So what

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:So what

[Penguinisto]

...so how much of that cost was in fending off lawsuits, and putting up with bucketloads of other legal (and not-so-legal) obstruction?

Seriously - they were working on this thing 20+ years ago. Most of the time it was held up, off and on, due to lawsuits, protests, demands for still more environmental impact statements...

Shit, I wouldn't be surprised if at least $5bn of the total cost-to-date wasn't spent in legal fees, money paid to contractors (and their employees) who were forced to sit idle while awaiting the outcome of an injunction, and various other BS shenanigans.

Re:So what

[BitZtream]

Jordan lake's dam broke (as has happened to other dams in NC recently), could all that water could flood the Sharon Harris plant?

No Jordan Lake is on a different basin. Geography prevents Jordan Lake from posing any threat. Well, thats not entirely true, its possible that a flood could cause the outflow from Jordan to spill over into Sharron Harris, but at that point, the East coast is going to be under a few hundred feet of water.

Second, no Corp of Engineer dams have broken in the history of the US, so lets not be retarded shall we? Comparing some dams at mill sites that were just piled high with dirt as needed to a Corp of Engineer flood control lake is rather retarded.

You're referring to Hope Mills dam, which is remnant of an old factory dam for powering a mill, not an engineered lake. Both times the dam at hope mills 'burst', it was 'bad' and they evacuated some people but there was no reported damage. The second time it just drained uncontrollably but at a rather safe rate as they were already lowing it to make repairs. You're talking about a large pond, not a real lake.

No long term consistency

[Sabalon]

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.

Re:No long term consistency

[Yvanhoe]

Actually I like this system : for a long term project to succeed, it requires it to be consistent, non-partisan and well done. Arguably, the Yucca project had a lot of shortcomings, and the increasing maturity of fast-breeder reactors makes it likely that some of the wastes we want to bury will actually be usable as very precious and energetic fuel in 20 years. It makes sense to keep it stored in a more accessible fashion.

Re:No long term consistency

[ackthpt]

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.

Democracy is the worst method of government, except for all the alternatives.

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.

Re:No long term consistency

[daemonenwind]

It's worth noting a few things about the Yucca Mountain project that are not apparent from your post:

-The Department of Energy first started investigating Yucca Mountain in 1978, under Jimmy Carter (D).

-The site was supposed to begin accepting nuclear waste for storage in 1998 under Ronald Reagan (R)

-The county in which the storage facility lies backs the site; it's other Nevadans who do not

-The site was only shut down when a Nevadan had control of the Senate by supermajority, and his party held the House and the Presidency. Since that time, any bill which could force the President into a difficult decision has been blocked in the Senate. Considering that the Department of Energy is a Presidental Cabinet department, the horsetrade is obvious, and the terrific national cost is both clear and disregarded.

The project was consistent and and non-partisan, having crossed through periods of control by either party. (Carter D, Reagan R, Bush R, Clinton D, Bush R) Until after the 2008 elections, that is.

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.

Re:All power comes at a price

[Penguinisto]

Dunno about the others, but I call bullshit on this bit:

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.)

Err, no.
* The panels themselves bear and handle the heat. It isn't as if you're instantly piping all the heat somewhere else, since the panels are bolted to the ground.

* Shade does not automatically kill everything. You won't find plants under one which demand full sunlight, but anything else (especially animals) would probably appreciate and take advantage of the shade. Finally, if you park the panels in the desert (where nearly nothing grows anyway), it's not even a worry.

* Energy transport from space to Earth is actually a solved problem.

Re:All power comes at a price

[ackthpt]

Wind doesn't kill loads of migrating birds. It slices and dices a few hawks but that's about it. The 1.5 megawatt turbines move slow enough birds are usually out of the way of the blades. Most slice 'n dice jobs are the older, smaller turbines.

Further, it lends well to dual purpose land-use, the Shiloh II Wind Farm, Solano County, California, is grazing land so there's no lost land use.

Re:All power comes at a price

[KeithJM]

As a Seattleite, I'll point out that solar energy isn't the solution everywhere. I think the real issue is that we can't just choose a single energy source and decide it is going to replace oil. If you look at the numbers, we don't grow enough corn to make enough ethanol to do it (and we grow a ton of corn). We don't receive enough sunlight to completely replace oil with sunlight with our current solar panels without covering most of the planet, etc. What we can do is use multiple sources to generate electricity, and work to improve battery technology so we can more efficiently cart it around (oil is a really efficient way to transport energy). We don't need to pick one. We can use a bunch of them, and Seattle can use the tide while Arizona uses the sun.

Re:All power comes at a price

[Culture20]

Then we'll have to make nice with Pyongyang for their Unicorn Lair.

Re:All power comes at a price

[Dan East]

Err, no.
* The panels themselves bear and handle the heat. It isn't as if you're instantly piping all the heat somewhere else, since the panels are bolted to the ground.

Err, yes. That is *exactly* what solar panels do. They convert some amount of the light energy to electricity which is piped somewhere else. So some of the heat from that surface area is ending up as heat somewhere else, transmitted in the form of electricity. Obviously solar panels are not 100% efficient, thus they still get hot. However they cannot be as hot as a simple surface with the same light absorption - the latter would convert all of the light it absorbs directly to heat. That difference in heat between a static surface and solar panel (with the same light absorption) is the electricity that the solar panels produce.

Additionally, the heat solar panels do emit doesn't travel into the ground. It convects into the air around it. Solar panels actually work best when cool. So it is important that air can flow under them to help keep them as cool as possible.

The point is any time you're bleeding energy away from one part of the earth and piping it to a different area you are going to have an effect. The larger the scale, the larger the effect. Nuclear doesn't move energy around - it literally creates it directly from matter. So the OPs points are valid. It's just a matter of how large an impact those forms of energy production will have when operating at global scale.

Re:All power comes at a price

[radtea]

Wind doesn't kill loads of migrating birds

The Committee for Supporting the Ridiculous Kabuki Theatre that Passes for Environmental Policy Discussion would like to extend its gratitude to you for stepping up and posting the mandated reply to the inevitable idiot who comments that "windmills kill birds" twenty years after the major changes to windmill design substantially mitigated the problem.

The Committee estimates that there are still roughly 3.2 billion idiots on Earth who have not updated their beliefs from the 1980s, and appreciate that while the task of replying to every single one of these unmitigated morons is arduous, tireless volunteers like yourself will eventually have replied to each and every one of them at least once by 2075.

By that time, it is estimated that the average idiot will have been corrected at least 5 times, and that perhaps as many as 1% of them will have updated their beliefs in light of reality. While this number may seem disappointingly small in fractional terms, remember: it is still upwards of 30 million human beings whose tiny little minds have been changed by pointing out just how stupid they look when repeating falsehoods from several decades past.

Keep up the good work!

Re:All power comes at a price

[kaatochacha]

oh, I think you overestimate the "not a worry" of the desert: http://e360.yale.edu/feature/its_green_against_green_in_mojave_desert_solar_battle/2236/

Re:All power comes at a price

[deimtee]

Your figures are off by a factor of 1000. Tera versus Giga maybe?. From wikipedia :
Last available year on wikipedia 2009:
USA = 3,741,000,000 MwHr /Yr
= 3741 TwHr /Yr

Which is : 3741 TwHr/yr / ( 5 KwHr/m2/day x 365 d/yr)
= 2049863000 m2
= 2050 square km

0r an area about 20 by 40 miles for the metrically challenged.
Still feasible, but a lot bigger.

Re:Two dirty words harry reid

[Penguinisto]

Pretty much, yeah. When you're one of the big guys in the prez' coterie, you get what you want, and Reid (D, NV) got what he wanted. ...of course, we still have to figure out where to put all the $#@%^! nuclear waste, but you know, at least Reid got what he wanted.

I propose we bury it in LA County, specifically Hollywood - earthquakes be damned.

Re:Two dirty words harry reid

[ackthpt]

end of story

Blame him if you like, but it's most of the NIMBYs. For years the Dept of Energy performed nuclear tests in the Nevada desert, pockmarking the landscape. Now traces of radiation have been found in ground water hundreds of miles from the sites, due to the nature of faults in the Basin and Ridge region and movement of underground water. Tends to scare people and they tend to make their will known to their representatives in the capitol.

Meanwhile, the Hanford site is in dire need (and has been) of shutting down, with no new disposal location in sight. A friend worked at Hanford for a couple years and explained to me how it was never meant to house as much waste as it does and the long-term storage wasn't in the original plans. Old vaults of waste have been found to be developing cracks and been reinforced.

Re:Two dirty words harry reid

[sycodon]

I think we should put all the waste in Reid's basement.

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:Neocon View

[guises]

Thank you. I'm disappointed that I had to read down this far to find a comment like this, I get suspicious anytime I see anyone talking about "the Obama administration" doing anything. It's like "anthropogenic climate change" - a phrase which is technically accurate, but generally only used by partisans.

Re:Neocon View

[slew]

Regardless of the piece, Obama made it a campaign pledge to stop Yucca Mountain, and stopping it has happened on his watch.

You can assign Obama blame for this or praise him for doing what he promised to do, but the result is the same and the facts do not appear to be in dispute.

- A 1987 law passed by congress required the NRC to evalute the Yucca Mountain site for suitability for nuclear waste storage.
- In fulfilling his campaign promise, the Obama budget didn't allocate any new money to implement this law and Obama told the energy department to withdraw the application to the NRC to build the project.
- Henry Reed didn't want it in his state, and was successful in blocking further financing for it in the Senate (even theough the House budget funded it), but he did not have the votes to change the original law that required the NRC evaluate the site.
- It appears the NRC will now be forced by a federal appeals court to spend the previously authorized money to continue to evaluate the site until the money is gone (there isn't enough money to complete the evaluation) because of the 1987 law passed by congress.

Certainly there are many problems with Yucca, but it appears that the NRC will be effectively prohibited to publish its report on Yucca Mountain by budgetary manuevers to cut off it's funding w/o actually overturning the law that authorized the evaluation. It probably wasn't gonna happen anyways (even Romney was against Yucca Mountain), so all that money was just a sunk cost. I guess the ends justifies the means in this case...

Scary

[readin]

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.

From the article..

[MpVpRb]

"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

Re:Two dirty words harry reid

[Omega Hacker]

Old vaults of waste have been found to be developing cracks and been reinforced.

It's faaaaar worse than that. One of our borehole geophones came back from a job at Hanford with the 1/2" thick aluminium tube so eaten away that it had to be replaced. That would be 100's of meters down a hole (I think they had a 500m cable...).

I call shenanigans

[Shoten]

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.

Re:Two dirty words harry reid

[kelemvor4]

Pretty much, yeah. When you're one of the big guys in the prez' coterie, you get what you want, and Reid (D, NV) got what he wanted. ...of course, we still have to figure out where to put all the $#@%^! nuclear waste, but you know, at least Reid got what he wanted.

I propose we bury it in LA County, specifically Hollywood - earthquakes be damned.

The combination of the new nuclear waste and the human waste already stored there could form a singularity.

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

Nobody wants nuclear waste.

[mspohr]

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.

Re:Two dirty words harry reid

[Rich0]

Probably an acid of some sort.

The waste at those sites is not merely nuclear waste.

I knew somebody who had some connection to one of those sites, and he gave an interesting presentation on the mess that is left. Poor records were kept, so nobody really knows what is in those underground tanks. All kinds of stuff was dumped into tanks with little regard for compatibility. The mixtures in the tanks are not homogenous, which means that over time you get stuff happening as things mix and diffuse, and you can get buildups of stuff like hydrogen which of course can threaten to blow the whole tank up (talk about a mess with all that radioactive waste mixed in).

I have no doubt that a concerted effort could clean up the mess, but nobody wants to deal with it - let it blow up on somebody else's watch (I'm sure there is significant risk of an environmental disaster if the site is disturbed to try to remediate it, and what administration wants that on their watch?).

Just as with Yucca Mountain - the status quo is good enough for a few more years, and if something bad happens you could just say you were doing what everybody else did and "who could have seen that coming?" Worked for New Orleans, worked for the housing crash, will work for the next time a President keeps his head in the sand like all those before him.

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.

Would you bury gold?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Two dirty words harry reid

[bogjobber]

Exactly! I am a full-on proponent of nuclear energy, and I think a site *like* Yucca Mtn. is necessary for our country. As someone who was raised in rural Nevada, though, I think that people from outside the area don't really understand what NIMBY is all about in this particular case.

As you pointed out, the DoE performed nuclear tests for decades in the Nevada desert. That area has silently been carrying the legacy of the Cold War. People in rural areas of Nevada and Utah (and probably Arizona, too, I'm unsure) have experienced extraordinarily high cancer rates. There are several other unsavory federal sites in the region, like the plant that decommissions chemical weapons in the West Desert of Utah that have caused massive health problems for workers and area residents.

Citizens have born that burden in silence. This is an area of the country that is extremely patriotic, in a very old-fashioned sense. They sacrificed, quite literally, their lives and the lives of their children in order to help the military progress of our country. We, and our environment, are seen as less valuable and more expendable than other regions of the country which are equally suitable, or even more suitable for nuclear waste disposal. And that is, quite frankly, bullshit.

Senator Reid grew up in this environment. He is fully aware of the dangers of allowing the federal government free reign to do whatever they please. The federal government has *never* answered legitimate questions about how this will effect the environment long-term, particularly groundwater contamination. They have *never* answered questions about properly securing nuclear waste traveling across the region. They just want to dump their problems on Nevada and pay some hush money in the form of pork-laden jobs. In this particular case, I think Senator Reid's efforts to block the Yucca Mtn. project are laudable. Enough is enough.