What happens if Yucca Mountain never opens?
Times-News Editorial Board
July 7, 2010
Twin Falls Times-News
Sometime in the next 20 years, the United States will - or won’t - make a series of decisions that will solve the nation's long-term radioactive waste storage problem.
We Idahoans have long assumed that solution would be the opening of a facility like Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert outside Las Vegas, where the Department of Energy had planned to stow America's deadliest garbage in perpetuity.
But the future of Yucca Mountain is very much in question. President Obama's DOE doesn't want it and - largely because of pressure from U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. - is doing its best to scuttle the project.
That's becoming less likely both because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has slowed down the process of decommissioning and because electoral prospects look brighter for Republicans, who generally support opening Yucca Mountain.
So what does that mean to Idaho?
Just this: The Idaho National Laboratory sits atop the sprawling Eastern Snake River Plain Aquifer, which is a primary source of water for nearly half a million people who live downstream.
The Idaho Cleanup Project - mandated in a 1995 agreement between the DOE and former Gov. Phil Batt - has stabilized the most dangerous waste. Much of it is being moved or will be moved to the Waste IsolationPlant Project in New Mexico, but the spent fuel will remain stored in dry form in INL until Yucca Mountain opens - or until the country comes up with another solution.
Under the Batt deal, the spent fuel must be leave Idaho by 2035. If there's anyplace to send it.
The DOE long since concluded there's no other feasible geological storage facility except Yucca Mountain, so if Yucca never opens the spent fuel will stay where it is - at INL, or DOE facilities and at commercial nuclear power plants around the country - awaiting waste disposal technology that hasn't been invented yet.
But we're talking about a 25-year-window between now at 2035. With the nation's nuclear industry slowly stirring back to life, billions of dollars will be spent over the next two decades on waste disposal technology.
The DOE of the Clinton and Bush administrations left a legacy of mistrust on INL cleanup by their foot-dragging, haggling over the details of commitments it had already made, and threats of countersuits. But as far as INL cleanup is concerned, the atmospherics improved under the current secretary of energy, Steven Chu, and his predecessor, Samuel Bodman.
Waste reprocessing at INL has decreased the threat to the Magic Valley's water. But Idaho - and future governors and congressmen and senators - can't afford to be complacent.
Idahoans have no control over what ultimately happens at Yucca Mountain. But we can insist that by whatever means, the federal government keeps its promises to us.
Originally posted at http://www.magicvalley.com/news/opinion/editorial/article_6a565a69-8ec7-5d67-99a3-2ad6c53e03a6.html
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