Vol. 3, No. 2
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November 15, 2005
Nevada's Online State News Journal
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CRIMINAL DEFENSE |
COPYWRITING
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Yucca Restructuring, Again, Or, Back To The Future DOE Style
by Bob Loux
It is no surprise that Nevada officials reacted with skepticism to the U.S. Department of Energy’s October 25th announcement of a fundamental change in the design for a Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository system. For those of us who have been associated with the DOE repository program for the two decades or more, DOE restructurings, reassessments, and reorganizations are nothing new. Ideas come and go, the organizational chart changes, the game of organizational ‘musical chairs’ starts and stops, but the fundamental problems and flaws with Yucca Mountain are never dealt with. And for good reason. To do so would mean admitting that Yucca is a bad site for a geologic repository for high-level radioactive waste.
October’s announcement of the next best DOE idea is no exception. Paul Golan, the DOE Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management’s current acting director, revealed that DOE was moving ahead to hire a contractor to implement a plan to operate the Yucca Mountain repository as a “clean” or non-contaminated facility. Golan proposes to do this by eliminating spent fuel handling facilities at the repository and using only “standardized” canisters where radioactive waste would be loaded into the containers at the point of origin (i.e., at nuclear power plants), and then stored, transported and disposed of without having to reopen the packaging.
Problem is, this “new idea” has been floated before – back in 1992 as the “Multiple Purpose Canister (MPC) initiative – and it was rejected then as being too costly and too logistically difficult to implement. To be fair, the proposal made some sense 13 years ago, when most utilities were still storing spent fuel in water filled pools where it could be moved, relatively easily, into sealed canisters and from there into MPCs for dry storage, transport and disposal. Today, however, a significant percentage of nuclear utility companies are already storing spent fuel in dry storage installations using a variety of sealed storage systems, none of which are compatible with Golan “standardized” canister idea.
What’s really going on here is a desperate attempt by DOE to cover up just how scientifically, legally, and morally bankrupt the Yucca Mountain program is. Things are so bad that DOE has had to resort to the fiction of a major restructuring of the repository system design this late in the game - at a time when the Department is supposed to be in last phase of preparing its license application to NRC, something that DOE has now been forced to place on indefinite hold.
It is instructive to note that all this is taking place in the context of an emerging major – some would say quantum – shift in Congress’ approach to federal nuclear waste policy. The 2006 Energy and Water Appropriation Act, for the first time, combined deep cuts in the Yucca project with new appropriations for building reprocessing capabilities. Rumors are persistent that a landmark agreement is in the works between two key legislators – Nevada’s Senator Harry Reid and New Mexico’s Senator Pete Dominici, that would fundamentally revamp national nuclear waste policy, focusing on reprocessing, waste reduction, and interim storage while deemphasizing Yucca Mountain.
At the very least, the changes Mr. Golan is proposing will add many months and perhaps years to the timetable for submittal of DOE’s Yucca Mountain license application and will likely require new environmental documentation both for the repository and for the proposed HLW transportation system.
The bottom line: Yucca Mountain is still Yucca Mountain. You can try to dress it up with all sorts of diversionary restructurings, but the site remains a porous, fractured and entirely unsuitable repository location that cannot pass muster in the NRC licensing arena.
There is, nevertheless, a certain irony in watching the array of Yucca Mountain “fixes” over the years come full circle. In honor of this new, “new” approach, perhaps it would be appropriate, for now, to rename Yucca, the ‘Golan Heights’.
(Mr. Loux is the Director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects)
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