Yucca Mountain is not the best place for nuclear waste | Guest Opinion | Tri-City Herald

Reversing yet again his stance on the project, President Donald Trump dumped the nuclear waste repository planned at the Nevada Test Site in a tweet last week in an attempt to win Nevada in the 2020 election — a state he narrowly lost in 2016.

The White House confirmed that the Administration will not include any funding for Yucca Mountain when it submits its 2021 budget this week. This is in contrast to Trump’s last three budgets that contained about $120 million each to restart the licensing of Yucca Mountain.

But don’t expect cheers from Nevada over Trump’s tweet. They just don’t trust this Administration.

Nevada has never liked the fact that the federal government has tried to force Yucca Mountain down their throats for 33 years, when Texas and Washington State, led by Speaker Jim Wright and House Majority Lead Tom Foley, outmaneuvered Nevada in the House.

Nevadans still refer to the 1987 Amendment to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act as the “Screw Nevada Bill.”

The immediate upshot of this latest flip flop is the future of about 75,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel sitting at about 60 sites across the country, like the 1,000 tons or so at Richland’s own Columbia Generating Station.

What everyone wants is an actual science-based plan for the future — something they can depend on, and something they can plan for.

A certain future is also necessary for nuclear power to expand in order to successfully address global warming.

Unfortunately, such certainty will have to wait until America once again cares about science and the truth. We scientists know the best places to put this waste and we’ve been trying to get it there for 60 years.

Unfortunately, the repository rock at Yucca Mountain, chosen as a result of politics in 1987, is not that place. The rock at Yucca Mountain is a highly fractured, dual porosity, variably-saturated volcanic rock having oxidizing groundwater that sits on the edge of the Las Vegas Shear Zone.

Nothing in this last sentence should sound reassuring.

Because of these properties, the plan for Yucca Mountain requires seven engineered barriers to even attempt to work as planned, and that will cost about ten times more than it would otherwise, and that number keeps going up. We will never have enough money for this choice, and Congress will never allocate $300 billion extra for something that should cost $30 billion.

The best we can do in the next 20 years is to build a centralized interim storage facility where all this waste can go for the next 50 years or so while we get our act together and dispose of it in the right place, along with our bomb waste like the stuff in the Hanford tanks.

And there are only a few choices:

▪  Put it in massive salt, like the salt in New Mexico where our only operating nuclear repository for nuclear bomb waste is located; after all, it was chosen, designed and built based completely on science for all nuclear waste from any source.

▪  Put it in deep boreholes in the crust, deep enough that nothing in it can get out for millions of years.

Interim storage could also hold this waste until we could burn it in future specialized fast reactors like the one being designed by TerraPower, Bill Gates’ nuclear group in Bellevue, WA.

That would get ten times more energy out of the same waste. Then put that waste, which is radioactive for a much shorter time, into salt or deep boreholes.

Otherwise, all of the waste will stay right where it is, in dry cask storage at each site, which itself is fine for 100 years, but not what we really want.

We don't have the money or the time to waste on nonsense and empty campaign promises.