President Obama's debt to Nevada and Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) looks like it has just been paid: it appears that the proposed repository for the USA's commercial nuclear waste, Yucca Mountain, is all but done. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said that storing high-level waste (HLW) at the site is no longer an option. Although the site is not 100% dead, it is on its last legs, although supporters are not ready to concede defeat.
Should Yucca Mountain never open, not many people will shed tears, and that includes me.
I must confess that in my youth (mid to late 1980s) I worked for both the Department of Energy on Nevada Test Site (NTS) 'weapons stuff' and for the state of Nevada on its Yucca Mountain oversight program while at the Desert Research Institute. If that wasn't a conflict of interest, I don't know what was, but neither agency minded that I supposedly had split loyalties (I should note that the DoE NTS weapons program was separate from the DoE Yucca Mountain program). In both instances, my tasks consisted of delineating flow in the regional carbonate aquifer that flowed beneath the NTS and Yucca Mountain. In both cases the issue was radionculide migration from either weapons tests or leaking waste canisters.
Permit me an aside here. In a recent article about the Nevada Test Site, someone was quoted as saying that the USA tests nuclear bombs there. That's not true; nuclear 'devices' are tested, not nuclear 'bombs'. As I was so rudely corrected by a physicist at a talk over 30 years ago at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, it's only a 'bomb' when it falls from the sky as a weapon. That was my first introduction to 'nuclearspeak'.
When the Yucca Mountain site was the sole site selected for characterization in 1987, Nevada had little political clout. Congress and DoE saw no reason not to take advantage of this, and foisted the site on the people of Nevada. Why not? After all, these people lived in a desert, and had 'consented' to let the government explode nuclear bombs - ooops, devices - on its soil for many years. The MX Missile program - remember those nuclear-tipped missiles running around on racetracks to fool the Soviets - had been slated for good ol' Nevada. So what's a little commercial nuclear waste? Those guys'll take it. Better Nevada than some place that really counted.
Here is what one of my colleagues (also a former Nevada resident) recently wrote me:
I could never support the position that disposal at Yucca Mountain was the best option. That latter point was not based on any great understanding of the merits and demerits of the site; rather it was based on what I believed was a national stampede by eastern and southern congressmen and senators to dump their pressing problems onto someone else. The site chosen could have been anywhere in Nevada and those from the south would have championed it. It’s just desert, right? Strom Thurmond championed Yucca Mountain and that was cause enough for suspicion.
But Nevada's resistance had been underestimated, and as its political clout increased and DoE's missteps hit the press, the site's viability declined. So it now looks like it won't see the light of day, or the glow of radioactive waste.
Another reason for the resistance to the HLW repository program among some was the fear that if a " successful" repository site was found and opened, it would provide an impetus for more nuclear power plants. I learned that all too well when I gave a talk on HLW waste disposal options before the La Jolla chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) in 1989. After my talk, I was socializing and speaking with a few of the attendees (my wife-to-be referred to them as 'Gucci liberals'). I made the point that we needed to find a place to store the HLW safely, instead of keeping the stuff on-site at each power plant. Referring to on-site storage, I said, "Is that what you want?" "Yes!" they replied in unison. Duhhh...That's when it struck me that was what they wanted, and they never wanted to find any site, Yucca Mountain or elsewhere.
To illustrate what a mess DOE has made of the USA's search for a HLW repository, let me relate a story. When I got out of graduate school in 1976 I interviewed with the forerunner to the U.S. Department of Energy (I believe it was still called the Atomic Energy Commission) to work on the characterization of nuclear waste repositories, mainly Yucca Mountain. At one point in our conversation the interviewer laughed and said how I would be out of a job in 1988, when the site characterization would end so construction could start for the 1998 opening. Uh-huh.
So what have we learned from all this? From a hydrogeologist's perspective, we learned a heckuva a lot about unsaturated fracture flow and low-permeability rocks. As one of my colleagues said, DoE was hydrogeology's National Science Foundation (NSF) for many years (not that DoE wanted to be).
We also learned how not to conduct a site characterization, and how not to get the public on board.
Or let's hope we've learned.
The Yucca Mountain snafu is a poster child for government ineptitude. This would never happen in Campanastan - heads would roll.
If you want to read a post with a more technical orientation, here's one of mine from December 2007.
'We learn nothing from history except that we learn nothing from history." -- Cicero
Comments