As The Debate Over Yucca Mountain Drags On, Nuclear Waste Still Lacks a Long-Term Home

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Illustration by Hadley Hooper

Nuclear waste has never had a permanent home, but the federal government thinks it may have found one in Yucca Mountain, a deserted site in a desolate part of Nevada. But Yucca Mountain has aroused opposition, in part because it’s located in a tectonically-active region that could someday be rocked by earthquakes and volcanoes. In the meantime, spent fuel is accumulating at the plants at which it’s being produced. In the session, “Long-term Waste Management: Yucca Mountain?”, two scientists offer their views on what to do about nuclear waste.

Allison MacFarlane, Associate Professor of Environmental Policy and Social Science
at George Mason University
Geological disposal of nuclear waste is the best option. It has two barriers to contain the radioactivity. One of those barriers are the rocks. The other is the engineering done to contain the waste.
 
So the question is this: Is Yucca Mountain a reasonable site? In the short term — 1,000 years — yes. In the long term — 10,000 years — maybe no. And now the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which sets the standard by which Yucca Mountain is to be judged, is pushing that standard out to one million years.
 
The problem is that right off the bat, Yucca Mountain violates two of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s criteria for siting a waste storage site. First, it is tectonically active. There are earthquakes happening there. And it’s volcanically active. That means there are two possibilities. One is an explosive volcanic eruption. That’s pretty highly unlikely. The other possibility is more concerning a situation in which you get magma that doesn’t reach the surface but does fill tunnels that have been excavated for nuclear waste. In that case, it would result in releasing waste into the environment.
 
The other violation is that Yucca Mountain is in an oxidizing, or corrosive, environment. If you were to take nuclear fuel and add water it would corrode. This means there are large uncertainties about what would happen to the storage canisters that hold it.
 
Then there is the issue of whether Yucca Mountain will provide enough storage. The statutory limit for Yucca Mountain is 70,000 metric tons. If you add up the waste that we have now, assume that no nuclear plants are built, give the current plans a 20-year extension, and add the waste from the nuclear weapons complex, you get 140,000 metric tons.
 
So my conclusion is this: Yucca Mountain may not be suitable for the long term. Most likely we will need more than Yucca Mountain. And, if we have a nuclear renaissance, we will certainly need more than Yucca Mountain. So I think we need a Plan B for nuclear storage in the United States. We need to think about interim storage sites and we need to think about alternative storage sites.
 
Allison Macfarlane, a geologist by training, is co-editor of Uncertainty Underground: Yucca Mountain and The Nation’s High Level Nuclear Waste (MIT Press).

Don Williams, Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus, Hope College
We use more electricity all the time. There isn’t any way to make electricity that doesn’t have a problem. I’m a proponent of nuclear power. I think it’s a brilliant way to make energy.
 
I’m going to remind you that nuclear fuel is a compact fuel source. A pellet of fuel is the size of a pencil eraser. A 1,000-megawatt nuclear plant produces nine cubic yards of waste each year. That will light one million homes. A coal-fired plant produces 15 pounds of sulfur dioxide, 20 pounds of ash, and 450 pounds of CO2. That’s not per year. That’s not per month. That’s not per day. That’s not per hour. That’s not per minute. That’s per second.
 
At the same time, nuclear waste is bad — it’s hot, it’s deadly. While half the radiation is gone (through decay) in ten years, that’s half of a very large number. Some of it will be radioactive forever.
 
Over the years, a number of storage solutions for nuclear waste have been proposed but ruled out, including deep sea burial, and shooting spent fuel into space. But we can’t even send our best astronauts into space in perfect safety.
 
So what are you going to do with it? Deep geological isolation is the choice of most nuclear nations. In the U.S., Yucca Mountain is the only geological site to be studied. I’ve stood on Yucca Mountain. It’s remote and dry. It’s federally owned. It’s on the edge of a nuclear test site. But Yucca mountain also lies in a volcanic region. People react to that. They say, “You’re going to put this stuff in an old volcano!”
 
These arguments about where to store it are very difficult. It’s going to take a lot of thought. I don’t have a conclusion about where to put it. But we had better solve this problem.
 
Don Williams has served as a consultant to the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management in the U.S. Department of Energy. He also served as chair of the Board of Governors of the Michigan Low-Level Radioactive Waste Authority.