We have all seen movies where they thought that they had killed the monster when suddenly it pops up again. It was generally believed that the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Repository in Nevada had been permanently cancelled and, to abuse the metaphor, it was dead. Now it seems that reports of its death may have been premature. Recently a federal appeals court has decided to resurrect the beast.
The Yucca Mountain site was chosen by Congress in the early 80s as the location for a permanent deep geological repository to house the spent fuel from the nation’s nuclear reactors. The State of Nevada and its elected representatives were strongly opposed to the decision. Harry Reid, the Nevada Senator who became the Senate Majority Leader fought against the project and managed to prevent the appropriation of some of the required funding. When Obama was running for the presidency, he promised to cancel the project which he did soon after he was elected. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission halted work on a review of the site after Obama cancelled the project. Eleven million dollars allocated for the study was never spent. Work began to find another site for a deep geological repository but it was estimated that no such site would be operating before 2048.
On August 13, 2013 the Federal Appeals court for the District of Columbia ruled 2 to 1 that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission exceeded its authority when it stopped work on the review of the Yucca Mountain site in response to the orders of the Obama administration. The case was brought by the States of Washington and South Carolina which have military nuclear waste that they intended to send to Yucca Mountain. The majority opinion was based on the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution. Judge Kavenaugh said that allowing the executive branch and agencies such as the NRC to disregard federal law would be a violation of that separation. He ordered the NRC to proceed to spend the remaining eleven million dollars on continuing the halted site review. The dissenting judge said that the site review would be a waste of money because eleven million dollars would not be sufficient to reach a conclusion of whether or not the site would be a safe place to store spent nuclear fuel. Harry Reid said that the court’s decision was meaningless.
The NRC had gone to a great deal of effort to carry out the review including the construction of a special courtroom in Nevada and a special computer link back to NRC Headquarters in Washington, D.C. to facilitate access to thousands of documents regarding the project. The courtroom has been dismantled and the computer link has been taken down. The NRC completed most of the work on the first stage of the project focusing on a Safety Evaluation Report. One volume of the projected five volumes of the Safety Report has been completed and published. The other four volumes were issued as technical reports with no official conclusions. It might be possible for the NRC to use the remaining eleven million dollars to complete and publish the full Safety Evaluation Report but the Safety Evaluation is only one part of the review process.
The current head of the NRC is a geologist who had strong reservations about the suitability of the Yucca Mountain site before the project was cancelled. Congress is currently debating legislation to facilitate the search for another repository site. The Department of Energy withdrew its application for a license to construct the repository soon after Obama cancelled the project. Although Yucca Mountain has temporarily been given a new lease on life, I am afraid that it will soon be dead once and for all.
