I have blogged about the Yucca Mountain geological repository in Nevada for the permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel and other nuclear wastes. The U.S. Department of Energy spent over ten years working on the creation of the repository but President Obama cancelled the project in conjunction with Henry Reid (D-Nevada), the current Senate Majority Leader. In 2013, a court ruled that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had to finish a uncompleted study of the suitability of Yucca Mountain for nuclear waste disposal. The NRC finished the study and has issued a report that the Yucca Mountain repository is sufficiently isolated from the environment so that it would be safe to store nuclear waste. In order to renew work on the Yucca Mountain repository, it would be necessary for Congress to allocate new funding to the project.
The Bulletin of Atomic Sciences recently published an opinion piece about the safety of Yucca Mountain which concluded that it is not really as safe as the NRC report stated. The main question that concerned the author of the op-ed piece has to do with what the DoE calls a "drip shield." The Yucca Mountain repository is intended to store thousands of sealed containers of waste in the tunnels under Yucca Mountain. The DoE plan calls for putting a corrosion-resistant titanium cover over each of the waste containers to prevent water from dripping onto the containers and possibly corroding them. If the corrosion ate through the storage containers, radioactive materials could seep out into the ground water. The covers would be necessary because there is more water moving through the Yucca Mountain site than originally estimated by the DoE.
This sounds good but the plan calls for the covers to be installed in one hundred years. Even supposing that our civilization still exists in a hundred years, this is long after the Yucca Mountain repository is supposed to be permanently sealed. Human beings would not be able to do the work because the radiation would be too high inside the repository. The op-ed writer was skeptical that there would be any support or interest in spending huge sums of money to re-enter the collapsed tunnels of the Yucca Mountain repository to install the covers in one hundred years.
The op-ed writer speculated that the idea of delaying the installation of the titanium covers for a hundred years may well have been raised in order to reduce the cost of finishing and filling the repository. He criticized the NRC for going along with the proposal instead of alerting the government and the public to the danger of radioactive materials leaking out into the environment.
With the capture of the U.S. Senate by the Republican party, there will likely be renewed calls for the completion of Yucca Mountain. If a Republican wins the White House and they maintain control of Congress in 2016, it is almost a certainty that the Yucca Mountain repository will be completed.
Artist's diagram of the Yucca Mountain Repository:
