Amidst the financial doom and gloom, the story has been largely missed - Yucca Mountain plan for nuclear waste dies. It explains that the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, has effectively killed the government's nuclear repository site in his backyard. John McCain, a proponent of the nuclear waste site, has declared the project no longer viable with the political opposition from the Democratic administration. Senator McCain has suggested that the government pay back the utility companies that have been paying future fees for storage at Yucca Mountain.
In case you have forgotten, the government planned on placing spent nuclear fuel rods and solidified high-level radioactive waste in caskets that would be buried deep underground. The Yucca Mountain Repository would consolidate the waste that is currently stored at 121 sites throughout the country. The repository was planned for a remote site inside the Nellis Air Force range, placing it about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada.
Perhaps it is just as well the idea has been shelved. In 2008, the DOE estimated that the amount of spent nuclear fuel would have exceeded Yucca Mountain's capacity by 2010. If we were to take all the spent fuel produced to date in the United States and stack it side-by-side, end-to-end, the fuel assemblies would cover an area about the size of a football field to a depth of about five yards. Still sounds like a workable problem though, doesn't it?
DOE should reassess its approach to designing and building spent nuclear fuel recycling facilities suggests some alternatives. The DOE has outlined a possible approach to recycling nuclear waste. Advanced processing plants would accept spent fuel from traditional and advanced reactors. They would separate reusable materials from remaining waste, with the recycled fuel provided to the advanced reactors. Geologic disposal would still be used for the residual waste. Conventional plants would continue to be fueled with fresh uranium as they currently are today.
Historically the United States has rejected waste processing for fear of nuclear proliferation. That risk was realized in 1974, when India tested a "peaceful nuclear explosive" from material obtained through commercial processing. However, the genie is out of the bottle, and because of political winds, the DOE will need to start developing an alternative plan. However, if people objected to an underground storage facility, how embracing will they be to a reprocessing facility in their backyard?
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