Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository too small

The rising cost of oil — notwithstanding the latest decline in price owing to the financial crisis — and growing worries about the environment have spurred a renewed interest in nuclear power. Nuclear power, however, comes with its own problems, chief among them the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation and the question of dealing with the large amount of nuclear waste created by the generation of power.

For the last two decades, many in the United States said that collecting the nuclear waste from all the active U.S. nuclear reactors and placing it in deep caves in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain would be the best solution. Except that USA Today reports that the Energy Department will tell Congress in the coming weeks it should begin looking for a second permanent site to bury nuclear waste, or approve a large expansion of the proposed waste repository at Yucca Mountain. Edward Sproat, head of DOE’s civilian nuclear waste program, said last week that the 77,000-ton limit Congress put on the capacity of the proposed Yucca waste dump will fall far short of what will be needed and has to be expanded, or another dump built elsewhere in the country.

In any event, it is not clear what the future holds for the Yucca Mountain project. President-elect Obama has said he does not believe the desert site ninety miles northwest of Las Vegas is suitable for keeping highly radioactive used reactor fuel up to a million years and believes other options should be explored.

Sproat said DOE will send a report to Congress in the coming weeks maintaining that the Yucca site will need to be expanded. He said within two years the amount of waste produced by the country’s 104 nuclear power plants plus defense waste will exceed 77,000 tons. Yucca Mountain is not projected to be opened before 2020 at the earliest. “We’ve done enough testing around the site to know that we can make it bigger,” Sproat told reporters. He said Congress will have to remove the capacity limit now in place. If the limit is not removed, said Sproat, the report will urge Congress to give the department authority to begin looking for and evaluating a second nuclear waste repository elsewhere in the country. The law currently prohibits any such search, Sproat said.

An alternative could be a temporary above-ground repository, possibly on a federal site. Sproat said the report, which has been completed, will say either expand Yucca Mountain, begin the process of finding a second repository, or “don’t do anything and let this whole thing just sit for another 10 to 20 years and see what happens.” He said the department would prefer the go-ahead for a larger Yucca site. “We do think there is room for additional storage at Yucca. How much, we’re not clear on,” said Sproat.