Yucca Mountain Must Stay on Track As Nuclear Waste Site

Yucca Mountain Must Stay on Track As Nuclear Waste Site; Washington, Other States, Need Safe Disposal

Jul 15 - News Tribune, The

We'll be up-front about our home-state interest in seeing a nuclear waste repository opened - safely - in Nevada's Yucca Mountain.

Without that repository, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation will be stuck, probably for decades and perhaps for generations, with intensely radioactive spent fuel from the nuclear power plant located there, as well as large quantities of radioactive byproducts of Cold War-era plutonium production.

But this problem is hardly unique to Washington. Spent fuel and high-level radioactive wastes have piled up at 129 different sites in 39 states. Oregon, for example, still has an accumulation of radioactive fuel rods on the site of the defunct Trojan nuclear plant, west of Portland on the Columbia River. Illinois has 11 operating nuclear plants and one that's been shut down - all of which have spent fuel that needs under-ground disposal.

This is a truly national problem, which is why Congress must address a recent court decision that could potentially prevent its solution.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia was largely helpful last week, because it rejected most of the State of Nevada's legal objections to the long-planned repository at Yucca Mountain. But it threw a wrench into the works by ruling that 10,000 years is too short a time - under a vague federal statute - to certify the repository's safety. Congress can remedy the problem by clarifying the law.

That 10,000-year yardstick needs some perspective. Critics typically point to the long half-lives - hundreds of thousands of years in some cases - of certain radioactive isotopes found in reactor wastes. But the most intensely radioactive elements have relatively short half-lives; they release more energy because they are breaking up so quickly.

This means that the radio-activity of any given fuel assembly falls off quickly in the initial years; the radioactivity remaining after 10,000 years is a tiny fraction of what it was at first. Nor would the repository suddenly begin bleeding radioisotopes at that point. Multiple engineering barriers, combined with the 1,000-foot depth of burial and the scarcity of water in the Nevada desert, would likely keep radioactivity in check indefinitely.

The problem with obsessing about hypothetical risks a half- million years from now is that one ignores the far greater and more immediate risks of not burying the waste. Spent fuel and nuclear weapons byproducts are presently scattered around the country in surface storage sites that are far less secure and far more threatening to the environment than deep burial in an arid desert. Much of the nation's reactor waste is presently stored near rivers and other large bodies of water.

The Department of Energy has spent $9 billion studying Yucca Mountain over the last quarter century; in all that time, no one has suggested a better place for the waste. Congress should make certain that last week's ruling doesn't leave the nation without any options at all.

For far more extensive news on the energy/power visit: http://www.energycentral.com .