WASHINGTON, Aug. 9 (UPI) -- A central repository for toxic nuclear waste has been a plan in the United States for decades. After numerous deadlines, the Energy Department now says the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada won't open until 2017, which is debatable, as are concerns of what to do with the spent fuel in the meantime.
Yucca Mountain, or any warehouse for highly radioactive waste, needs approval by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Energy Department announced in July plans to submit an application for the site, located about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, by June 2008, along with a calendar of benchmarks for opening.
"Experience has shown that the schedule for Yucca is a slippery thing," said Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., during an Aug. 3 hearing of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, which he chairs. A 2010 opening was set by the Energy Department in 1993; that changed to 2017 last year.
Domenici said he supports the Yucca Mountain concept, but worries about a continually lagging project that has kept nuclear waste in a temporary storage state and cost money. Utilities and consumers have paid into the Nuclear Waste Fund since 1982, money dedicated to a central repository to be opened in 1998.
"My concern is that the new timetable does not include any margin for any further project delays by the DOE, its contractors, or legal action by the State of Nevada, all of which would cause DOE to miss these new deadlines," Domenici said at the hearing.
Edward Sproat, director of the department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, told the committee the new timeline is "the best achievable schedule."
"I'm not saying that was the most probable schedule," Sproat said.
The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 put the burden of nuclear waste on the federal government. Two years later, the National Academy of Sciences recommended isolating it in a deep geological area and the search was on, with further parameters set by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982. That act, in part, called for two repositories -- to create parity among the NIMBY -- or not in my backyard -- crowd.
But when Yucca Mountain was chosen by Congress in 1987 as the sole repository to store highly radioactive nuclear materials in a controlled environment -- for tens of thousands of years until it loses toxicity, the NRC says -- it began a continuum of legal challenges still ongoing.
This includes lawsuits filed by Nevada and a veto by its governor over the site selection, to no avail, as well as lawsuits filed by nuclear-producing states and the nuclear industry after the Energy Department missed the 1998 deadline to start taking in waste. A U.S. Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C., Tuesday rejected a petition by Nevada to review the Energy Department's latest environmental assessment as well as a plan for transporting waste to Yucca Mountain. Transporting the waste safely is a flashpoint for critics of the central site proposal.
The NRC estimates 54,000 metric tons of spent fuel is being stored at 76 sites around the country -- 65 of which are operating reactors. Two-thousand metric tons of waste is created annually, which means there will be enough to fill Yucca Mountain in eight years.
That's at current levels of production, but high energy prices and reliance on foreign oil has rejuvenated the pro-nuclear energy folks who haven't seen a new reactor built approved since 1978 and come online since 1996, a trend whose reversal would increase the amount of radioactive waste needing to be stored.
The Energy Department wants the storage cap moved from 70,000 metric tons to the 120,000 metric tons a recent department environmental assessment says it can hold.
Domenici says he agrees Yucca Mountain's storage cap needs to be raised -- while criticizing the Energy Department's schedule -- and wants an interim storage plan set up as well as a whole-hearted effort at nuclear waste recycling, which could increase the power generated from nuclear as well as reduce the amount of toxic waste.
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., says Yucca Mountain should be forgotten and until a permanent alternative is determined, the nuclear waste should be kept, cooled and protected at the nuclear reactor that produced it.
The NRC is getting ready for a safety review of Yucca Mountain in anticipation of the Energy Department's application.
Although the NRC says it will complete its review within the legally mandated three years following submission, Martin Virgilio, NRC's deputy executive director for materials, research, state and compliance programs, expressed concern at the Aug. 3 hearing about a Bush administration-backed bill that would force it to complete the inspection within one year -- with a six-month extension if needed.
Citing "statutory obligations to protect public health and safety," Virgilio wrote in testimony to the recent Senate energy committee hearing: "Our main concern here is that the NRC be given sufficient time to conduct a comprehensive review of DOE's applications."
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