No Yucca Mountain in My Backyard

30 more days to prepare for Yucca explains that the State of Nevada has been granted an extra 30 days to prepare challenges to the U.S. government plan for storing nuclear waste.  Yucca Mountain is about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas and perhaps more appropriately, about 50 miles northeast of Death Valley.  If you Google Earth to Yucca Mountain, Nevada, you will see that it is a desolate, mountainous region owned by the government next to the Nevada Test Site. 

Let's face it - we need power generation sites, but nobody wants one in their backyard unless they are making money from it.  Even fewer people want a waste repository in their backyard.  (However do note that Las Vegas has about 15% of its electricity generated by the Palo Verde nuclear power plant.) 

This not-in-my-backyard seems to be a problem confronting the U.S. government.  So what do we do with the nuclear waste that has been accumulating?  At the current time, the U.S. has been paying commercial electrical power facilities to store their nuclear waste in concrete casks on their own property.  Many of those sites will be running out of room and it also it is not the safest policy to have hundreds of facilities that could be attacked.

The strategy of using uranium once in a nuclear reactor and then disposing of the waste material is arguably most economical at this time.  There are other strategies such as nuclear reprocessing that can extract uranium and plutonium from the fission waste for either reduction of radioactivity or reuse in power generation facilities.  The rub with the latter is that this nuclear fuel could be subverted from the power generation facilities and immediately used to construct a nuclear weapon, something not possible with the conventional reactor fuel.  See the Wiki article on nuclear reprocessing for additional information. 

It seems we have kicked the can down the road long enough.  Delaying further will  have environmental and national security ramifications.  There is an environmental pattern with toxic metals such as lead that recycling is better in the long term.  Also, as I discussed yesterday, uranium could become scarce if the nations of the world switch to nuclear power.  I don't like the idea of burying something that is not dead - whether it is CO2 or nuclear waste.  However, that is both philosophy and life lessons, not necessarily something that can be unequivocally proven. 

Should we consider a government-owned and operated power facility similar to the Tennessee Valley Authority that would reprocess the spent waste and use it in government-protected nuclear reactors?