Yucca Mountain was a hot topic for politicians running for president in the recent Nevada Caucus. But what is it about Yucca Mountain that raises the ire of so many of Nevada’s citizens and gets Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards giving so many speeches opposing it?
Yucca Mountain is short form for the Yucca Mountain Project (Nuclear Waste Repository) and the underlying concern is this: The nightmare scenario of nuclear fuel buried deep beneath Yucca Mountain leeching out through fissures or corroded containers, killing inhabitants across Nevada, and laying waste to the area for thousands of year. A scary picture.
Some background. Yucca Mountain sits on federal land in Nevada, not far from Death Valley, in a remote stretch of desert, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. In 1982, Congress set up a national policy to solve the issue of nuclear waste disposal when it enacted the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The Act authorized the US Department of Energy (DOE) to find a site, build, and operate an underground disposal facility called a geologic repository (seen by the scientific community as the most effective way of disposing of nuclear waste).
In 1984 some 10 sites were being studied. A year later, three were selected for intensive analysis: Deaf Smith County, Texas; Hanford, Washington; and Yucca Mountain. By 1987 Yucca Mountain was the sole site under consideration.
Under the DOE’s original plan, deep tunnels in Yucca Mountain would become the final resting place for more than 70,000 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste. Transported from all over the country by truck or by rail, the material would be stored under the mountain in tunnels for the next 10,000 years — which is how long the nuclear waste will emit deadly radiation.
The government’s arguments for this storage plan are simple: Consolidation, security, and safety. Nuclear waste is currently being kept in 126 temporary facilities scattered across 39 states, in cooling ponds and in storage buildings near nuclear reactors. Some of this waste sits on sites near rivers or on top of water tables, and some 160 to 170 million Americans live within 75 miles of one of these sites. The prime contractor for digging the tunnels for the Yucca Mountain project is Bechtel SAIC (a consortium of contractors Bechtel and SAIC). Under the original plan, nuclear waste was scheduled to begin arriving in 1998. But fierce opposition by environmentalists, local citizens (including local Native Americans), and politicians has meant that the target date for the first shipment has been pushed back to 2017, or possibly 2020.
According to Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear, a national watchdog on nuclear power and radioactive waste issues, Yucca Mountain is located above an earthquake fault line and that rainwater percolates quickly through the proposed burial site, risking fast corrosion of the waste burial containers and release of catastrophic amounts of deadly radioactivity into the drinking water and agricultural irrigation supply.
Local citizens are against it. A Reno Gazette-Journal poll in November 2007 showed that 76% of Nevadans were against the Yucca Mountain plan. Beyond the safety aspects of the site and the uneasiness about having trucks and trains shipping nuclear waste to the mountain, there was a general protest against having Nevada, which has no nuclear power plants, becoming the dumping ground for all of the nation’s spent fuels and retired nuclear weapons material.
The original inhabitants are against it, too. The facility is within the treaty lands of the Western Shoshone Indian Nation, whose members object on cultural and religious grounds to their sacred lands being used for nuclear dumping.
Perhaps most telling, Yucca Mountain is falling out of political favor at a national level. All the Democratic candidates for president have stressed their opposition to the project. Two of its big Republican supporters in Congress are on their way out. Senator Larry Craig will leave office at the end of his term, while Senator Pete Domenici, the ranking member on the Energy Committee, has announced he won’t seek re-election.
As a testimony to the current confusion concerning the project, in late 2007 the DOE announced plans to expand capacity of the Yucca Mountain Project from 72,000 tons to 135,000 tons. But in early 2008 the DOE suddenly announced it was shutting down nearly all activity at the nuclear waste site in response to deep budget cuts.
Conclusion: Future uncertain.
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