Yucca Mountain: A pragmatic solution to storing nuclear waste
Stuart Rojstaczer, Sunday, August 4, 2002
San Francisco Chronicle
Imagine that you proposed marriage and your beloved replied yes, but on one condition: The marriage would have to be guaranteed free of problems on Earth and in the world beyond. Even a fool in love would see the impossibility of wedding bells given this hurdle.
Last month, the U.S. Senate voted on an issue where the conditions for approval ostensibly required maintenance-free bliss for an eternity: storage of nuclear waste inside Nevada's Yucca Mountain. The waste, composed primarily of spent fuel rods from commercial nuclear power plants, needs, at a minimum, to be isolated for 10,000 years, by which time many of the dangerous radionuclides it contains will have decayed.
The senators realized what everyone in the business of nuclear waste storage knows: No one can guarantee safe storage of this material anywhere on Earth over the time span required. This is admittedly depressing. We have created dangerous materials, yet we cannot fully ensure their safety. But we cannot throw our hands up and do nothing. We as a society need to store this material as safely as possible.
Thankfully, the Senate was not looking for guarantees of perfection in its decision to approve storage of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. In its approval, the Senate used something not often seen in political circles: plain old common sense. The Senate decided that the advantages of storing waste in a centralized facility outweigh the disadvantages. And the disadvantages are considerable: Currently, spent nuclear fuel rods are stored on-site at power plants. These facilities were never intended to hold this waste for as long as they have. Draw a 30-mile radius around each of these 70-plus storage facilities and you've encircled a large percentage of the nation's population, including portions of the New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los-Angeles/San Diego metropolitan areas.
But the battle about where to store waste did not end on the Senate floor last month. Over the next several years, environmental groups and the state of Nevada will file lawsuits to block storage at the Yucxca Mountain site. The U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission must provide final approval subject to the exposure guidelines established by the EPA. If the NRC and the courts try to apply the standard of guaranteed safety for a virtual eternity, then Yucca Mountain will undoubtedly fail to be approved. Hopefully, future regulatory and legal decisions will be as pragmatic as the one made by Congress.
Yucca Mountain is not a perfect place to store waste. But there is no perfect place. It's inevitable that problems will occur no matter where the waste is stored. The most likely problem at Yucca Mountain is groundwater contamination. Sometime over the long life of the facility, rainwater will corrode the waste canisters and dissolve radionuclides. The radioactive water will reach the water table and contaminate nearby and perhaps distant water supplies.
When will this contamination occur? Will the concentration of the dissolved radionuclides be dangerous to our descendants? Unfortunately, science cannot answer these questions. Predicting the fate of groundwater contamination over time spans of thousands to tens of thousands of years is a lot like trying to predict the weather several years in advance.
If a perfect solution is impossible, what should be our criteria for a rational choice for storing radioactive waste? While we cannot predict the state of the world 10,000 years from now, at a minimum, we need to expect that we can keep this waste out of harm's way for a few centuries.
This is where Yucca Mountain comes in. Many have noted its imperfections, but given that billions of dollars have been spent on investigating this site, it's inevitable that flaws would be found. None of them has been a showstopper.
The facility will be in contact with more rainwater than originally thought, but the amount of water is a fraction of that found in most of the United States. There are earthquake-producing faults in the region, but the possibility that these earthquakes will impinge on the security of the facility is remote. Volcanoes have erupted in geologic time, but none are active today.
Some have claimed that transporting the wastes to Yucca Mountain is a "mobile Chernobyl" waiting to happen. This notion is a canard. Unlike liquid and gaseous toxic chemicals, routinely transported in railroad tank cars through the towns and cities of our country, the spent fuel rods are metallic solids that will be moved in crash-hardened railroad cars.
Moving beyond the flaws, there are obvious advantages. Yucca Mountain is 90 miles away from a major population center. It adjoins the existing high security Nevada Test Site, and can be protected from terrorists. The mountain is stable, assuring that we will be able to monitor, and if necessary retrieve,the waste for decades to a century after its emplacement.
Yucca Mountain is, in fact, a compromise between a centralized surface storage facility advocated by some and an irretrievable geologic disposal at great depth preferred by others. This is a unique facility and there will likely be problems that come to light perhaps only decades into its operation. The design of the Yucca Mountain site allows for continuous monitoring and maintenance; should we store waste there, we need to be vigilant about both.
Many have argued that we should not use Yucca Mountain and wait in the hope that some day a technological solution will arise that guarantees eternal safe storage of waste. This is wishful thinking. We have been looking for magic pills to solve the waste problem for 50 years. None have been forthcoming.
Decades of science and politics have led this country to Yucca Mountain. Science and engineering have provided partial assurances as to the safety of this site. Additional research and time will not, however, yield a guaranteed solution. In an imperfect world, Yucca Mountain is a reasonable answer.
Stuart Rojstaczer is a professor at Duke University and visiting scholar at Stanford University. He has worked on issues of water supply and contamination, primarily in the West, for more than 20 years.