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Yucca Mountain Meltdown
By Bruce | January 17, 2008
As the presidential race continues it’s chaotic, side-winding path to the White House — Saturday, the Nevada caucus — one serious issue has not even been discussed at any length: What to do about nuclear energy and the dilemma of high-level radioactive waste.
In a sad case of horrific irony, some of the upper-echelon Las Vegas casinos will host the Nevada caucus-gatherings, dealing a dicey analogy that human kind is gambling the future on a technology so unsafe it can kill practically forever. And mired in the mix is Yucca Mountain, just 90 miles northwest of the Strip, which was supposed to be America’s answer to a growing and growing and growing stockpile of mega-hazardous spent nuclear fuel.
Yucca Mountain is to hold 77,000 tons of nuclear waste that has been building up in 39 states. The site was originally scheduled to go online in 1998, but that was moved back to 2010. Then 2017. And now the site may not even be ready for a required application deadline this June.
The so-called “nuclear suppository” has encountered budget problems as a year-end spending bill moving through the US House and Senate would slash $104 million from fiscal-year 2008′s budget — $390 million, down from $490 million last year. Nearly $11 billion has already been spent on Yucca Mountain with total cost of the project reaching upwards to $58 billion. Last week, 63 workers for Bechtel SAIC, the project’s managing contractor, were laid off and work on a exploratory tunnel scaled back.
“You hate to see billions of dollars having already spent on a mistake… Yucca, I think, was a misconceived project.”
– Barack Obama
During Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate, all three top runners paid the usual lip service to the question of nuclear power. Barack Obama is supposedly open-minded to the issue. He’d said prior to the debate about Yucca Mountain: “You hate to see billions of dollars having already been spent on a mistake. … Yucca, I think, was a misconceived project.” While during the debate, he said his vote for the 2005 energy bill was due to it being “the single largest investment in clean energy — solar, wind, biodiesel — that we had ever seen.”
Hillary Clinton, however, voted against the measure. She couched her remarks in all-political terms: “…written by lobbyists” and “championed by Dick Cheney” that was filled with “giveaways to the oil and gas industries.”
And the perennial number-three in the race, John Edwards, is the only one to voice some concern. During the debate: “I am against building more nuclear power plants because I don’t think we have a safe way to dispose of the waste…I think they’re dangerous. They’re great terrorist targets and they’re extraordinarily expensive.”
Do not make any mistake about it: Nuclear energy will never be handled properly by the hands of mankind.
Nuclear fission was achieved in the mid-1930s — a controlled nuclear chain-reaction which creates heat, in turn used to boil water, produce steam and drive a turbine — and by December 1942 the first man-made reactor began operation, the Chicago Pile-1, which subsequently became part of the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb boys.
In fact, all the early nuclear research was for the US military.
A report by the Paley Commission in 1952 for President Harry Truman offered a “relatively pessimistic” outlook on nuclear power and instead recommended “aggressive research in the whole field of solar energy.”
However, that was swept away by President Dwight Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” speech a year later that put the US and the world on a path to an uncontrollable energy source.
A year later, Obninsk in the old USSR went online as the world’s first nuclear power plant, putting out 5 megawatts of power. Two years later, the first commercial plant started operation, Calder Hall, at Sellafield, England.
Fast forward nearly half a century and we face the problem that apparently no one had thought about earlier — what to do with all the spent nuclear fuel coming from the 439 nuclear plants worldwide, including 50 in the US.
In 1982, Congress established the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, based on what most scientists worldwide agreed is the best way to dispose of nuclear waste — store it until it can’t kill.
The Act made the U.S. Department of Energy responsible for finding a site, building, and operating an underground disposal facility called a “geologic repository.”
In 1983, the DOE selected nine locations in six states based on data collected for nearly a decade. The nine sites were studied and results of these preliminary studies were reported in 1985.
Two years later, Congress amended the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and directed the DOE to study only Yucca Mountain.
On July 9, 2002, the U.S. Senate cast the final legislative vote approving the site and three weeks later President George W. Bush signed House Joint Resolution 87, allowing the DOE to take the next step — continue building the damn thing.
And why Yucca Mountain? From www.sacredland.org:
Yucca Mountain is located within the Western Shoshone Nation and has long been a place of powerful spiritual energy for the Shoshone and the Paiute. To the Western Shoshone it is Snake Mountain, a place with rock prayer rings that transmit prayers to the Great Spirit and messages back to the people. Shoshone spiritual leader Corbin Harney tells of a traditional story that Snake Mountain will one day be awakened and split open, spewing out poison.
This prophecy may predict the potential disaster of volcanic activity and nuclear waste leakage. Shoshone ancestors are buried in the mountain and the water in the area is sacred, as it is with many desert peoples.
The 60 million acres of Western Shoshone territory in Nevada, Idaho, Utah, and California, which includes Yucca Mountain, was never deeded to the U.S. government.
According to the 1863 Ruby Valley Treaty that the Shoshone signed with the government, most of the area now used by the U.S. military for nuclear weapons testing and the proposed waste storage site was explicitly recognized as Shoshone land. However, the U.S. government now claims 80-90% of it, meaning that the Shoshone are unable to control what happens on their ancestral land.
Although there’s continuous attempts at financial compensation to the Shoshone for Yucca Mountain, they won’t move on it because most see it as a way to circumvent aboriginal land title and open the door to more nuclear waste dumping and testing. Just another updated version of how Native Americans have gotten (and are still getting) the shaft.
US commercial nuclear power plants produce about 2,000 tons of high level waste per year, which is stored on each plant’s site. Although Yucca Mountain is geared to accept 77,000 tons, there will be an additional 42,000 tons ready for shipment by 2035. Everyone knows the spent fuel has to go somewhere and the only plan is a feeble, highly-dangerous scheme to truck it via public highways and rail lines across 43 states.
Spent nuclear fuel — radioactive waste — is lethal for 10,000 years and dangerous for 250,000 years.
Another fine mess humankind has found itself.
A main issue in this presidential race should be nuclear power and how to end it; taking careful aim at the most feasible and logical way to take care of the horrifying radioactive material already accumulated. And not through politics as usual, sweeping noted agenda items under the old proverbial rug scant weeks after election day or playing rough in front of the home crowd, like Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, instrumental in the recent spending bill in Congress, cutting-back funds for Yucca Mountain. Although offering no alternative, Reid’s statement earlier this week unintentionally captured the imagery of a future consumed with lethal gases bleeding into the atmosphere:
“I am proud that I was successful in cutting $104.5 million from Yucca’s budget. It is clear that the Yucca Mountain project is a dying beast and I hope that this cut in funding will help drive the final nail into its coffin.”
The nail and the coffin. A sense of Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl on a more personal level. This spent nuclear fuel problem I became somewhat-intimately aware of a few years ago while working as a reporter for a bi-weekly on California’s Central Coast. The Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant expanded its spent fuel facilities — though the move was contested in court by several activist groups, including Grandmothers for Peace, a chapter within my newspaper’s coverage area — and began to store the waste in huge casks cabled down to a hardened, concrete pad. The stuff was then supposed to be later trucked to Yucca Mountain.
A small, nearly insignificant band-aid on a deep, gashing wound.
Nuclear power should be eliminated now.
Not only for the Shoshone and their Yucca Mountain, but for everyone everywhere.
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