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Just in time for Halloween, a real zombie. Having helped hammer nails in the coffin of the Yucca Mt., Nevada, project—for disposing high-level radioactive waste (uranium fuel rods) from nuclear reactors—I’m amazed at how the plan stays undead.
On Oct. 16, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a report declaring that computer models for the drilled cavern, inside the mountain 90 miles from Las Vegas, meet the commission’s ever-changing requirements.
Still pending are two more reports and a final NRC ruling on the site’s suitability. Future approval of the project, cancelled by the Obama Administration in 2009, also requires okays from the Environmental Protection Agency and the departments of Transportation and Energy (DOE). Of course, lawsuits by the state of Nevada and dozens of environmental groups would follow any decision to utilize this animated corpse.
In spite of 70 years of head scratching and beard pulling, neither science, industry, nor the government has found a cheap means of “disposing” the radioactive waste. On-site waste storage, in cooling pools and dry casks, is the nuclear industry’s current scheme.
In the DOE’s 1999 draft environmental impact statement for Yucca, the scientists said that leaving the wastes at our 72 reactor sites (and five military areas) in 39 states is just as safe as moving it thousands of miles toward Yucca Mt.—as long as it is repackaged every 100 years. There is no rush to target a dumpsite, except that nuclear waste producers want to open up space for fresh waste—so they can run their old reactors into the ground.

Yucca Mt. Project Cancelled for Hundreds of Reasons

With the help of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, science-based disqualifiers of the Yucca plan have been given the respect they deserve. But Republicans in nuclear-heavy states, hoping for a November take-over of the Senate, are pushing to revive the project.
In response to the NRC’s report, Joonhong Ahn, a nuclear engineering professor at the U. of Calif., Berkeley, said in an email to ScienceInsider.com, “…there are still numerous hurdles ahead,” noting that the NRC must rule on the DOE’s application.
“Numerous” indeed: the Government Accounting Office, Congress’ non-partisan investigative arm, has concluded that 293 unresolved scientific and engineering dilemmas plague the Yucca plan.
In slamming the NRC notice, Nevada officials made the same point. “The NRC licensing board has admitted more than 200 Nevada contentions challenging the safety and environmental impacts of the proposed repository, and Nevada is prepared to aggressively prosecute these challenges. It is not apparent that the [NRC report] specifically addressed these and other safety contentions,” state officials said.
Bob Halstead, executive director of Nevada’s Agency for Nuclear Projects, said, “For the NRC staff to publically release just this one volume of the 5-volume Safety Evaluation Report outside the proper context of an ongoing licensing proceeding, and in the absence of a complete SER, is unprecedented.”
“It creates a false impression that the safety review has been completed. It is difficult to see what reason there could be for such a release except to provide political support and encouragement for Yucca Mountain supporters in Congress and elsewhere,” Halstead said.
This false impression was preposterously exaggerated by Rep. John Shimkus, R-Mich., who told the New York Times Oct. 17, “…nuclear waste stored under that mountain… will be safe and secure for at least a million years.”

Waste Production Is Kept Alive by Yucca Supporters

Yucca Mt. wouldn’t begin to address the country’s vast nuclear waste problem. There are already about 70,000 tons of the deadly wastes stored at U.S. reactors. This volume would fill Yucca to capacity and force the start of a Dump No. 2 search.
Centralized disposal only solves one industry problem: it frees up space at its reactor sites for continued waste production.
Yucca Mt.’s “mobile Chernobyl” idea—and alternate plans for regional “interim” dump sites—increases the risks of radiation accidents and leaks among waste handlers and among people along transport routes. The DOE’s planning maps show the deadly waste passing through 40 states, 40 Indian reservations, and 100 major cities. In January 2008, Clark County, Nevada, planner and former state transportation analyst Fred Dilger caused an uproar when he told the Las Vegas Review Journal that if the waste trains go through Las Vegas, “All of the casinos on the west side of Las Vegas Boulevard would be bathed in gamma radiation.”
The shipments, using as-yet-untested waste casks, would expose between 138 and 161 million Americans to the risks of dangerous levels of radiation and to the consequences of inevitable truck, train, and barge accidents. Even the project’s Final Environmental Impact Statement predicts between 150 and 250 rail or truck crashes over the plan’s 25-year span—about 10 crashes every year for 25 years.
Now that’s an undying prospect scary enough for a million Halloweens.

–John LaForge works for Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin, and lives on the Plowshares Land Trust.