“The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, as designated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act amendments of 1987, is to be a deep geological repository storage facility within Yucca Mountain for spent nuclear fuel and other high level radioactive waste in the United States. The site is located on federal land adjacent to the Nevada Test Site in Nye County, Nevada, about 80 mi (130 km) northwest of the Las Vegas Valley.” Wikipedia
The U.S. government began charging nuclear power plant operators for storage of their nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain beginning in 1999. However, the actual construction project at Yucca Mountain was approved by Congress and began in 2002. In 2009, Harry Reid, a senator from Nevada and U.S. President Obama worked together to end the Yucca Mountain project. All work was halted in 2009.
The power plant operators who had paid into the storage fee fund began to sue the federal government for the return of their money because the government had failed to build the promised repository. Billions of dollars were paid back a few of the operators from the fund which had grown to over thirty billion dollars.
The cooling pools of U.S. nuclear power reactors continue to fill up. Unless a lot of the spent fuel is moved somewhere, the pools will be totally full in a few years and the reactors will have to be shut down. Absent a geological repository, the only other option is to build concrete and steel “dry casks” to temporarily hold the spent fuel on site or at other locations. The construction of enough dry casks will not be cheap and the legal framework of the storage fund that the federal government collected prevents it from being used to construct dry casks.
This was the situation until the election of a new U.S. President in 2016. In the President’s propose federal budget for 2017, he included one hundred and twenty million dollars to continue safety studies for storing spent nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain. The money was not allocated by Congress to restart the project. In the President’s propose federal budget for 2017, he once again included one hundred and twenty million dollars for Yucca Mountain.
A congressional expert from Illinois says, “It’s criminal neglect that the last administration broke the law by not funding this project. Now our local communities like Zion are paying that price.” Illinois has more nuclear power reactors than any other state. There are eleven operating nuclear power reactors at six power plants. It is estimated that there are over seventy-six thousand tons of spent nuclear fuel in Illinois, most of which is stored onsite with the operating reactors. The expert believes that it is far past time to move forward at Yucca Mountain.
Many Nevada politicians are strongly resistant to restarting the Yucca Mountain project. One Nevada Senator has sponsored bills to stop the project, saying that it would be catastrophic for Nevada, and he would “make sure that this project doesn’t see the light of day.” A Republican Congressional Representative says that “Rather than pursue a realistic attempt to develop a substantive nuclear waste management program, this is a colossal waste of funding that goes directly against the will of Nevadans.”
Experts that support the project say that interim dry cask storage for a great deal of the spent fuel could be accomplished in five to ten years. They say that Yucca Mountain could be receiving spent nuclear fuel in fifteen to twenty years.
There are serious environmental problems at Yucca Mountain that involve unexpected mobility in the ground water in that area. It would probably be better to find a new location for the geological repository. Current estimates say that a new repository could be sited and constructed by 2050 which is only twelve years after the estimation for opening a repository at Yucca Mountain if the project is restarted. Interim storage would take the pressure off and leave plenty of time to build a safer repository at a new site.
Diagram of proposed Yucca Mountain repository:
