Mired in Yucca Muck
Nuclear power is trendy again, but what about the waste?
Nine billion dollars and 24 years later, what's been produced at Yucca Mountain are two tunnels, a temporary research facility, and a heap of geological science, much of which aims to refute Nevadans' claims that Yucca is unfit because of fault lines in the area. "It's not a boondoggle," says Edward Sproat, who directs the program for the DOE. "But, yes, people should be upset about how long it's taken and how much money's been spent." Sproat, a former nuclear industry executive, took early retirement to head up Yucca a few months ago. "The reason I'm here is my own frustration," he says.
Sproat says Yucca will file for a nuclear license in 2008. That's a huge step, but he and others say Yucca already needs a massive overhaul before real construction begins. When the idea of a repository was conceived in the 1980s, policymakers assumed a cap of 70,000 metric tons of waste would suffice. "That's all changed," says Bill Greene, a DOE spokesman. "Now everything with Yucca Mountain is through the lens of expanding nuclear energy." Indeed, by the time Yucca is complete, under any projected timetable, enough waste will be waiting to fill it immediately. This year, the White House submitted legislation to prod the slow-moving project. It would raise the cap to as high as 120,000 metric tons, increase the DOE's access to a Nuclear Waste Fund financed by utilities-which pays for Yucca Mountain-and claim adjacent federal land for Yucca use. Domenici has introduced two bills of his own. One resembles the administration bill but with a major distinction; it would create ground-level storage on Yucca land until the repository is complete. Domenici's other bill takes a different approach; it would facilitate a fledgling, but crucial, nuclear fuel recycling program that might limit the amount of waste and-in the near term-consolidate nuclear waste at interim storage sites (likely existing nuclear plants) across the country. That would theoretically reduce government payments to utilities storing waste at plant sites-payments that resulted from litigation over Yucca delays.
Both face uncertain prospects. Some House members fear that directing resources to interim storage will undercut Yucca Mountain. Rep. Gene Green, a Texas Democrat, suggested that it's a "creative way" of killing Yucca, noting that Reid supports that measure; none of those interim sites would be in Nevada. Reid, who has pledged Yucca "is never going to open," supports interim storage in states that have plants but does not support interim storage in Nevada, fearing that once the waste is in Nevada, it will stay there.
Nuclear power enjoys increasingly bipartisan support-though plenty of Democrats, public interest groups, and environmentalists say the risk of radioactive fallout is still too great. Reid's stature as ranking member complicates Democratic attempts to advance an energy source they see as vital to the fight against global warming. If Democrats win the House or Senate in November, analysts say, the prospects for passing those bills-and accelerating Yucca's development-will dwindle, which they say could spell disaster for nuclear power. "You can't afford to kill Yucca Mountain," says Scott Peterson of the Nuclear Energy Institute. "It's the only long-term solution we have on our books."
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