Without a miracle of some
sort, it is all over. Yucca Mountain, the federal
government’s choice for storing nuclear waste from Cold
War-bomb production and power plants, will never open.
The project that began with a congressional mandate 22 years ago
seems perennially stalled, even though $8 billion has already been
spent on everything from scientific studies and modeling to the
building of a railroad deep within Yucca Mountain.
Back
in the early 1980s, when Congress selected Nevada as the final
resting place for high-level radioactive debris, most Nevadans
vehemently opposed the plan. Our resistance, summed up in the
frequently seen bumper sticker: “Nevada is not a wasteland,” seemed
futile to some people. Not any more. What’s changed, is first
of all, the science. What began two decades ago as a trickle of
evidence suggesting that Yucca Mountain was incapable of isolating
deadly radioactive waste has become a deluge.
But instead
of acknowledging what its own scientists and research were showing
— that the geology of Yucca Mountain was so seriously flawed
that the site should be disqualified — the Department of
Energy turned the concept of geologic isolation on its head. The
agency set about changing rules, regulations and guidelines so as
to cover up site deficiencies and permit the program to go forward
in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
That
was borne out last July, when the U. S. Court of Appeals for the
District of Columbia upheld the state of Nevada’s legal
challenge to the radiation health-protection standards for the
Yucca site. The ruling meant that guaranteeing public safety for
10,000 years wasn’t enough; instead, radiation coming from
the dump must be safe for as long as 1 million years, the expected
lifetime of the dump. This will be a difficult feat for both the
Environmental Protection Agency and Energy Department, and a
license to open Yucca Mountain depends on it.
But there
have been other signs that Yucca Mountain may be one of the
nation’s costliest boondoggles:
- The Energy Department has pushed back Yucca
Mountain’s opening from 2010 to 2012 to 2015 to 2017, all
within a few months. - The Bush administration
cut Yucca Mountain’s 2006 budget in half, to $651 million.
Ted Garrish, Yucca Mountain’s acting director, has said that
the program will need more than $1.5 billion a year for the next
decade in order to open. - The National
Association of Regulatory Utility commissioners recently
resurrected a proposal to take the nuclear-waste management program
away from the Energy Department and turn it over to a
quasi-governmental corporation. - Some industry
representatives now delink the repository at Yucca Mountain from
the notion that new power plants can’t go forward unless
Yucca Mountain goes forward. Previously, the industry insisted that
getting Yucca Mountain open was essential for building new
reactors. - And, a report by the National
Commission on Energy Policy calls for interim, aboveground
spent-fuel storage as a backup to Yucca Mountain.
This is a startling turn of events. As the
Los Angeles Times put it recently in a news
story: “The state has stunned federal officials with its tenacity,
legal skill and evolving political acumen, scoring key victories in
federal court and in Congress that have repeatedly stalled the
project.”
The U.S. Congress probably chose Yucca
Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as the nation’s
nuclear dumping ground because it thought Nevada had neither the
will nor the clout to fight back. These days we are surprising
everyone — and maybe even ourselves. From Democratic Senate
Minority Leader Harry Reid, Gov. Kenny Guinn, Attorney General
Brian Sandoval, and Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, who even
promised to lay his body down in front of any truck carrying
nuclear waste headed for Yucca Mountain, we’ve shown our
smarts and our power.
Now, it is no longer a question of
whether Yucca Mountain will crumble, but when. The project is on
track to meet the same fate as other major Energy Department
projects of the last few decades, such as the super-colliding
superconductor and the Clinch River breeder reactor. Despite
billions invested, those projects became so weighted down with
mismanagement, cost overruns and political opposition that they
simply became impossible. So it is with Yucca Mountain.
Bob Loux is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is the executive
director of Nevada’s Office for Nuclear Projects, based in
Carson City.
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