The United States has no permanent geological repository for the many tons of spent fuel from nuclear power plants. The spent fuel is rapidly filling up the cooling pools at the reactors and will most likely be temporarily stored in dry casks on the reactor sites. Congress approved siting a permanent geological repository in an old salt mine at Yucca Mountain, Nevada in 2002 and a great deal of time and money was devoted to studying the site and preliminary work. There was a debate about the migration of ground water through the site which turned out to be much greater that originally estimated.
Harry Reid, the Nevada Senator, strongly opposed the completion of the Yucca Mountain repository. When he became Senate Majority Leader in 2009, Congress stopped funding for the project. Barack Obama campaigned against it when he ran for President in 2008. When Obama became President in 2009, he immediately ordered the end of work on the repository.
There is currently a new push to restart the Yucca Mountain Repository project. Proponents of the project expect the government to fulfill a promise to dispose of seventy seven thousand tons of spent nuclear fuel. The states of Washington and South Carolina, plus Aiken County, South Carolina, the Prairie Island Indian Community of Minnesota and the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners filed a lawsuit in federal court to force t he NRC to act on the license application. The court returned a verdict that that the NRC either had to reject or accept the Yucca Mountain Repository license application. Congress ordered that the remaining money available for Yucca Mountain be spent to finish a study that had been commissioned.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has just released a report that says "...that most administrative and program elements of the Yucca Mountain repository reviewed by NRC staff members meet commission requirements." The report went on to say that the Department of Energy will need to secure land and water rights at Yucca Mountain before the project could continue. Nevada has refused to provide water rights to the site. There were land set-asides around Yucca Mountain held by the DoE but some of these are expiring and would have to be reacquired before the project could be completed. "The land is not free of significant encumbrances such as mining rights, deeds ... or other legal rights."
The report by the NRC is the third volume of a five volume series of reports that the NRC is releasing. The final two volumes will be released by the end of January, 2015. Although supporters of the Yucca Mountain Repository have said that a site safety report from October of 2014 concluded that the project could meet licensing standards. Opponents say that the site safety survey never says that the site is "safe."
The state of Nevada is still fighting the project. State officials state that the technology being used to dispose of the nuclear waste is untested. They say that there is a high probability that proceeding with the project may result poising the air, water and land of Nevada. They also expressed concern that it would be more dangerous to move spent fuel from more than seventy different sites around the U.S. than to store it onsite at the nuclear power plants.
