There is a long list of reasons why Yucca Mountain is an unsuitable site for a nuclear waste repository, 65 miles from populated areas of Clark County, Nevada.
Somewhere near the top of this list is the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) plan to dig nearly 50 miles of emplacement drifts (tunnels) in fractured volcanic rock above the water table for the disposal of spent nuclear fuel. This arrangement will fail. By its design and the nature of the geologic setting, the metal containers of highly radioactive spent fuel assemblies would eventually corrode and inevitably leak dangerous radionuclides into the groundwater. From there, long-lived radionuclides would be transported by rapidly flowing groundwater in an aquifer that serves a wide variety of purposes, including providing water for dairy farms and alfalfa growers and tribal areas in and near Death Valley, California[BM1] . Surface facilities at the Yucca Mountain site in Nye County would include a 100-foot-tall building for receiving and unpacking spent-fuel assemblies after they would be delivered to the site. Called the Canister Receipt and Closure Facility, this is where the intensely radioactive spent fuel canisters would be removed from shipping casks and transferred to overpacks for aging and disposal. This and other buildings would be vulnerable to potential military aircraft crashes from the adjacent Nevada Test and Training Range. That is where operations vital to fighter-pilot training and coordination with other national security assets are routinely conducted by Nellis and Creech Air Force bases. The DOE’s repository design and operations plan as spelled out in its 2008 license application submitted to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission will not fix what is wrong with the Yucca Mountain project. There are a number of reasons why the plan flunks the safety test. First, the Department of Energy has proposed a “hot” repository design intended to keep underground temperatures above the boiling point of water for about 1,000 years. This by itself cannot prevent groundwater contamination and may exacerbate it by changing the groundwater flow regime and chemistry[BM2] . It also creates major problems[BM3] for waste acceptance and for safety during transportation, packaging and emplacement. The Department of Energy’s plan calls for installing 11,500 titanium “drip shields.” It calls for installing one over each waste package a century later. [BM4] The installation process also relies on unproven technologies. The scenario also places the burden on future generations to commit the substantial titanium materials, money and resources required to implement drip-shield construction and emplacement in an aging repository only accessible by remote operations. Every aspect of the repository operations plan and facilities design would need to be revisited, with major physical complications for licensing in this locale. The Department of Energy also assumed that 90 percent of the incoming commercial spent fuel would be delivered in large casks (weighing up to 125 tons), making rail access critical. In 1986, the Department of Energy’s environmental studies showed that Yucca Mountain was the worst repository site for construction of rail access. Then the situation got worse. In 2008, the Department of Energy selected an unworkable route for the proposed new railroad from Caliente, in eastern Nevada, to Yucca Mountain by skirting the edge of the Nevada Test and Training Range. At 300-plus miles, it would be longer than the distance between Washington, D.C. and New York City, crossing eight mountain ranges, and costing $2.7 billion or more. Put simply, the Department of Energy’s proposal for a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada cannot solve the nation’s nuclear waste disposal needs. Spent nuclear fuel stored at U.S power reactors exceeds 86,000 metric tons uranium. By 2050, the amount of spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive wastes requiring disposal will exceed 150,000 metric tons. Currently, the law imposes a 70,000-metric-ton limit at Yucca Mountain. (Congress has abandoned the plan for a second repository.) If additional waste were to be emplaced at this site, the repository design would need to be reworked extensively. We are already over the limit today and 2,000 metric tons is being generated annually. The sensible solution is to terminate Yucca Mountain and begin a new repository selection process.
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AuthorFred C. Dilger, PhD ArchivesCategories |