– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. –
YUCCA MOUNTAIN, Nevada (Reuters) - Will this barren mountain rising up to 4,950 feet from the Mojave desert look roughly the same in the year 1,002,008? That’s a million years into the future.
The question may sound bizarre but its answer is key to the future of a decades-old, controversial project to store America’s nuclear waste in the belly of Yucca Mountain, on the edge of a nuclear test site and 95 miles from Las Vegas. The narrow road from there winds through a desolate landscape of sparse vegetation — creosote scrub, cactus and gnarled Joshua trees.
“This is probably the world’s most intensely studied mountain,” says Michael Voegele, one of the senior engineers on the project, standing beside the “Yucca Mucker”, a 720-ton cylinder-shaped machine that has drilled a five-mile tunnel into the mountain. “And yet, there will be even more study.”
Indeed. In September, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) revised its original safety standards for what would be the world’s first deep underground nuclear mausoleum. Those standards were meant to protect the health of people living near Yucca Mountain for 10,000 years from the time the mountain is filled with 70,000 tons of radioactive nuclear waste.
Ten thousand years is roughly twice mankind’s recorded history. But a court in Washington ruled in 2004 that protection should reach farther into the future. The new standards “will protect public health and the environment for 1 million years,” according to the EPA. “The Yucca Mountain facility will open only if it meets EPA’s standards…”
The standards specify that for the first 10,000 years, future residents should not be exposed to more than 15 millirem of radioactivity per year. From year 10,001 to one million, the dose limit is now set at 100 millirem a year.
To put those limits into context: Princeton University estimates that the average American is exposed to 350 millirems per year, from sources that range from X-rays to food. Bananas, for example. (They contain potassium and a radioactive potassium isotope. Eating one or two a day adds up to the radioactivity of a chest x-ray a year).
So is a U.S. government agency engaging in scientific fantasy that sets impossible hurdles to building up nuclear power?
“Our fundamental problem is our strict adherence to this number which is given to us by the EPA,” Allison Macfarlane, one of America’s leading experts on the Yucca Mountain project told a panel on nuclear waste in Washington a few days after the U.S. election. (America’s energy mix and the country’s dependence on foreign oil were major campaign topics.)
MEANINGLESS COMPUTER SIMULATIONS
“This…number created these huge machinations of making incredibly complex computer models, simulations of what will happen at Yucca Mountain over time. And you know what? Those models are meaningless. We’ve set up this process where we want to say a million years from now we know that Yucca Mountain won’t give anyone a dose of more than 100 millirems a year. And we can’t know that. So we need to rethink that whole process of how we re-evaluate that site.”
Like many other experts, Macfarlane does not consider Yucca Mountain an ideal site for a nuclear cemetery. It is in a seismically active zone, complete with extinct volcanoes. Critics say an earthquake could damage the canisters in which nuclear waste will be kept and release highly toxic radioactive emissions.
Up on the mountain, that prospect is not rated probable. Says Voegele, pointing to large boulders that look as if they are balancing on the ridge: “There’s been no quake strong enough in the past 500,000 years to topple them over. Difficult to see how a quake could shake the mountain.”
At the dawn of the nuclear age, scientists discussed a range of options for the storage of the nuclear waste that began piling up from the military — much of the U.S. naval fleet is powered by nuclear reactors — and civilian power plants. They included burying the material in the ocean floor, placing it in polar ice sheets, and even blasting it into space.
No country has completely solved the problem but there is consensus that “deep geological disposal” is a better option than the present system of storing the waste in above-the-ground containers. In the U.S., radioactive waste is kept at 121 sites in 39 states, all awaiting eventual storage inside the mountain here.
Whether that will ever happen is not clear. Apart from technical considerations, Yucca Mountain faces fierce political opposition, not least from president-elect Barack Obama who has described the project as a multi-billion-dollar mistake and said no U.S. state should be “unfairly burdened with waste from other states.”
That came during the election campaign in a letter to a newspaper in Nevada, a fiercely contested state whose people are almost uniformly opposed to Yucca Mountain.
Obama’s encouragement of an attitude also known as Nimbyism (from Not in My Backyard) helped him beat his pro-Yucca, pro-nuclear energy Republican rival John McCain.
But the project, based on legislation dating back to 1982, can’t be stopped by presidential fiat. The U.S. Department of Energy submitted an application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in September to license Yucca Mountain. That process is expected to last three to four years and includes passing judgment on the one-million-year safety standard.
If all goes well, the facility will open in 2020 at the earliest, more than 20 years behind schedule — a blink of an eye on the geological time scale.
You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com.
(Do you have an idea for the Great Debate? Please send your submissions to debate@thomsonreuters.com.)
The new "Euro" reactor comes on line soon. It has been designed to burn waste plutonium along with depleted uranium. We as a nation would be wise to learn from the Europeans as to how this promising new technology develops. As with most matters of public policy, careful consideration rather than hasty action should prevail. The one topic that does however seem absent in most public discussion is conservation. It is evident that falling crude prices and other commodities are in indication of conservation. Unfortunately this is due in no small part to the pain of the current economic crisis.
Trackback
64 comments so far
Previous | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | Next
IN RESPONSE ‘disenchanted’ from November 20th, 2008,
12:35 pm GMT
In response to comment by ” but your no particle physicist”. In my above and outragous comment, I was speaking not only as a biologist in terms of the naiveté of so called experts to not see the broader time perspective of man’s sudden involvement in the environment in these last thousands of years, but also as a chemist with at least some presumed knowledge in contemporary particle physics and contact (as well as lead shields etc.) with peer review analysis of nuclear energy, fusion research, apparently a few years old - and thus the provocatative comment.
A skeptics view is useful, when hearing above that half-lives of spent fuel have suddenly shrunk from 20k years to a few hundred? Wow. My initial above response was to “burn waste uranium/plutonium” etc., questioning where that original element and radioactivity goes, certainly not to the back of the room, like presumptuous physicists. Personally, I am pro-nuke, because it is going to happen anyway, but to have nitwits worldwide organize it - as a best friend that while in the military cleared Chernobyl asked me in an only eyes raised question: how long do I have to live. Nuclear is inevitable.
Just show me a post here that is not ‘let us better purify what is essentially our trash’.
Our time frame is a few hundred years. Who is speaking witchcraft. Organize this festival, because time is less than the decade suggested in a post above. Nuclear was left out of our US leader-elect’s energy speech! What is needed here is obvious to all but the “particle physicists”. Sounds like voodoo (nuclear) trash partial recycling, in light of one (sulfurous) Chinese coal plant per day competition.
A lot of unorganized talk, very, very old with no solution, this storage issue, the direction of nuclear power. Because it is not organized, I suspect that nuclear power is going to be pressed into uncertain direction with energy resource depletion, decimation of economies etc.
How is Admiral Richtover the father of nuclear reactors. I thought, until this last incident recently with the US Navy, he was only the father of safe Navy reactors. Hmmmmm, so much to get wrong here.
Fast breeders and 5th generation reactors could be up and running within the decade. Idaho National Lab isn’t standing still. However, with clowns like H.Reid of Nevada at the con (refuses even oil shale research) and, yes, Milleninium Synfuels can work the stuff and deliver at ~$30.00 per barrel, nothing much beyond megawatts from wind/solar will get the nod in the new administration. Nuclear is the greenest option there is that can produce terrawatts. Nearly all the roadblocks to exploiting this power are in the realm of regulation that the new president could sweep away by signing his name.
If you are not familiar with the Green Freedom project at Los Alamos check it out. The Greens talk a good line but they are luddites at heart. I’m afraid there’ll be more shamanism than science coming down the pike. A recent `green’ documentary on power pooh-poohed nuclear as being too expensive (regulations) and would only last 50 years as the world would run out of uranium??? Guess those `experts’ never heard of the thorium fuel cycle, etc.
This nation is replete with energy sources. National Security alone would dictate our removing ourselves from the global fuel game where we continue to be sucked dry. The Greens had better get a grip and realize that it is either increase our nuclear power capacity and burn the waste, or be prepared to have the Green River Formation hashed and trashed.
Ron Bengtson’s website turned me off immediately. To use a well-known hoax to open the support of their thesis speaks very poorly for their at least their research skills. See the Urban Legends Reference Pages’ “Does Not Compute” article at http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/com puter.asp
In theory, fission is a fine source of energy. Unfortunately, in reality, reliable-enough planning, construction, operation and oversight of the previous is simply not possible, because we humans are error-fraught beings.
I headed the design of the first US Independent Spent Fuel Facility, which was the prelude to Yucca Mountain. Commonly called a dry cask facility, it received spent fuel from almost filled storage pools, and stored it in a remote location in massive gas filled (dry) metallic casks, which had solid metallic walls and “lids”, in the order of 1 ft thick. Each cask weighed well over 100 tons, and required massive costume designed movers. People who compare a cask to a 55 gal oil drum are ignorant.
Depending on the time in pool, perhaps 5-10 years, the loaded casks’ surface was perhaps a constant 120 deg F., warm to the touch. The dosage was modest, when needed you could climb on them all week, a rare occurrence. The facility was an above ground grave yard. I can not write about the security features. When stored in Yucca Mountain, a dry tunnel system, the safe storage age was indeterminately long, centuries or millennia, even if buried in an earthquake. These time duration exceed engineering experience but are brief to geologists. They sited Yucca Mountain. In the scale of risk assessment, the dangers to people, even workers, are far smaller than smoking, or driving. A main reason that the casks are not buried, is that if the US, like most advanced nations, pursues reprocessing, the spent fuel will be far more valuable than the stored material at Fort Knox.
The science and engineering far exceed the competency of our political leaders; who have not advanced an day since the repository law was pasted in 1981, defining the process that lead to Yucca Mountain. By law, it was to open in 1998, and all electric user has paid tens of billions for its construction. The key issue is states rights overriding a federal law. Nevada has no more right to stop the storage of spent fuel inside Yucca Mountain than to segregate her schools. Also in play is a hatred of institutions, a fear of corrupt US corporations killing our children for profit. A logical rebuttal is the levee system and governance in New Orleans which killed 1,300 citizens, and destroyed a major city, due to unfathomable incompetency and epic venial behavior by the failure of government, at every level. The caliber of these political hacks must never control nuclear processes.
Yucca Mountain will be a grave; caring people have been successfully making graves for 10,000 years. But during that time frame, no nation has rejected advances in technology and survived. Any nation which does not utilize nuclear energy will not long survive. The question, posed by Eisenhower is this: either we will learn to use atomic power for peace, or it will annihilate us in war. Yucca Mountain and atomic bombs will define our future.
As long as we have to bury the nuclear waste, we should be using it to power a nuclear battery. Radioactive materials can generate electricity directly in nuclear batteries as used in space satellites for decades. If we could use the waste to create a useful byproduct, then it generates the income to support its own maintenance. Otherwise there is the risk that it gets forgotten in a few hundred years.
Everything we do has a price and a negative attribute. Nothing we do as humans is good for the environment. What we all must do is decide what is worth doing and then stop using irrational arguments to undo those decisions. We want to live in cities and use electricity and therefore some areas of the country are going to be spoiled so that other areas are more inhabitable. Kissing Yucca Mt. goodbye sounds like a good idea and a good area to sacrifice…especially compared to the asphalt that we pour around our malls so that we can by house loads of cheap Chinese goods. Does anyone care about the impact their materialistic gluttony has on the Chinese people and soil? No of course not we are all racists when the products are cheap. Let the Chinese people ingest horrible chemicals. I jsut wish everyone would learn to make compromises and stop wanting a perfect world. This is sheer hipocracy and counterproductive. Let’s do nuclear right and be reasonable…and lets kiss the Yucca Mountain area good bye, jsuta s we have the lovelier urban areas on the beautiful coasts. It is what it is stop wasting our precious money…and stop killing the Chinese citizens…and move forward with Yucca Mountain. Grow up America. I am a former petroleum geologist selling software now.
Sir
Regardless of the emotional debate, when you examine the uncertainty of the waste management issue is it a logical outcome to conclude that near-surface storage of this material is an unsatisfactory outcome. The value of the 1,000,000 year expectation is not the number itself but a reflection of the uncertainty. Regardless of the study and the experts involved, it is not possible to achieve this outcome and it is unrealistic to think so. What is required is to move the debate to transforming the waste into something else and/or completely removing it from the biosphere.
I completely agree with what Atri said regarding setting guidelines that are possible to meet. There is just no way anybody expect any reasonable level of prediction to happen in a million-year timeframe.
Moreover, I think that the Yucca mountain solution is neccessary because without it, all that waste is piling up (as we speak) in locations that are MUCH less safe and secure. Doesn’t it make sense to put the waste in a location that is definetely safe (albeit HOW safe is left up to argument at this point) then at sites that we KNOW are not nearly as safe.
The computer simulation done for Yucca Mountain is like the computer simulations done for the financial industry for their kooky financial tools. The morons who are doing this simulation for million or a 10,000-year period should be marked for brain transplant.
Now, coming to a real solution to the spent fuel waste problem and Yucca Mountain—
Spent nuclear fuels contain valuable resources, such as 97% of the original Uranium and varying percentages of plutonium and other actinides. These resources will be recovered and reused by a future generation. This being the future, why not makes it easy for them to recover and use these resources in exchange for the trillions of dollars of debt being passed on to them.
Store 70, 000 tons of spent fuel in the holes already dug. Make sure the hole is designed in such a way that after about 100 to 300 years, they can be recovered – oldest one first. By that time, radioactivity levels of the spent fuel will have decreased to less than 1% of the original activity at the time of placement.
These spent fuels can be easily reprocessed and the resources reused. Wastes resulting from these reprocessing can be easily managed for the long term.
It is not necessary to have a hole like Yucca Mountain for the above scenario. Since we already have one why not use it. The above scenario can be easily simulated and modeled. Hope some sensible National Leader will lead us to this!
After a few minutes rolling around the floor laughing at this absurd “one million year” time-frame, I did decide to post a thought.
To make any projection of the future, it is absolutely essential to also take account of the exponential increase in technology that occurs. Even if we chose “1000 years”, a cursory guess would suggest that, by that time, we would be able to dig up the problem and reprocess it accordingly.
Plutonium is of course raw material for an a bomb, also very toxic chemically and dangerous to work with. Things would have to be done exactly right to work with this material for energy generation. We can’t just trust industry but would need effective skeptical watchdogs to be fully involved to use it. But I agree that fully containing nuclear waste for a million years is an unrealistic goal. Tanks are leaking at the Hanford plant in eastern Washington from WW 2 A bomb waste from only 50 years ago. Lets clean that up to restore confidence in the competence of the nuclear industry.
Regina Minniss writes, “I don’t want to ask, “What’s wrong with solar and wind?” because I already know the answer. “Nothing”.”
Really? Solar and wind are very diffuse, weak energy sources. We have both at my utility, and they have their places, but they’re not enough for baseload generation, certainly not for a large population center (Phoenix, New York, Chicago - take your pick). We generate almost 4000 MWe of power on about 400 acres at the nuclear plant where I’ve worked for 25+ years. You’d need 1600 square miles of solar collectors to garner enough energy to match it - with devastating environmental impact - the land underneath can no longer support wildlife. No light, no plants, no food chain. And you only get your power when the sun is shining. The shortcomings of windpower are left as an exercise for the student.
Anubis writes, “The new “Euro” reactor comes on line soon. It has been designed to burn waste plutonium along with depleted uranium. We as a nation would be wise to learn from the Europeans as to how this promising new technology develops.”
This technology is not new. It was invented here. I studied it 36 years ago as an nuclear engineering student at K-State. Plutonium recycle was also the topic of several professional conferences I attended after graduating.
The problem isn’t technical, it’s political. Storing spent fuel at Yucca Mountain makes it readily retrievable for the plutonium recycle program we should have started 30+ years ago. The same people who are opposed to Yucca Mountain killed that option off first. Maybe when we have rolling brownouts or blackouts nationwide, the politicians will get a clue.
To Regina Minniss: Use of wind and solar (or not) is not the issue. Even if we shutdown all 104 nuclear reactors tomorrow (and lose 1/5th of US electric generation) we need to do something with the >50,000 tons of spent fuel. Moreover, if there had never been a commercial nuclear power industry– and burned more fossil fuel– there would still be a need for a repository at Yucca or somewhere else to safely dispose of >10,000 tons of defense and other high-level radioactive waste.
We need nuclear AND wind AND solar And hydro AND…etc.
I don’t want to ask, “What’s wrong with solar and wind?” because I already know the answer. “Nothing”.
A workable solution for storing spent fuel rods is explained in detail on the American Energy Independence website.
http://www.AmericanEnergyIndependence.co m/nuclearwaste.aspx
Fascinating read. I work for a company that does quantitative risk assessment for chemical weapons disposal. The risk-assessment piece is near and dear to my heart. Risk assessment is a tremendous tool that will get you the answers for multitude of scenarios determined by the stakeholders. The key is to identify those scenarios that are realistic and plausible. Much more important is setting up a measurable and achievable benchmark against with you can compare your results. The numbers quoted here are ludicrous. Planning horizon is 1 million years—that is in no way close to reality. You cannot possibly plan for anything that far out. Secondly, the radiation thresholds;–someone’s blowing smoke from somewhere! With that level of control, it is a non-starter. What’s going to happen is that the simulation tools will be “tweaked” to meet the numbers–it will not represent reality; will not provide any insight to mitigation measures that can/should be taken to reduce the plausible risk numbers (if simulations were run correctly) to a realistic threshold.
I will argue that blaming the simulations is not the answer. Challenging the “think-tanks” who came up with this, almost stupid, thresholds is a start-point.
I have a question about the Nuclear Non-Proliferation’s act and how it affects breeder reactors. I was under the impression that these reactors, which use depleted feul, where outlawed under that treaty which is why the US stopped all nuclear waste recycling projects. I also want to know what Las Vegas will be like in a million years. It seems to me, due to the geographical location of Las Vegas, it is at a much greater risk to failure than storing nuclear waste in a mountain. I mean, who’s idea was it to build a populated city in the middle of a desert?
On another note, hey David Hurst, way to have absolutely no technical knowledge in something and call it ‘witchcraft’. You may be a bioligist, but your no particle physicist. However, you do make some very optimistic, doom and gloom statements. You truely are a patriotic American.
The nuclear waste disposal problem is literally millions of times smaller than the fossil fuel waste disposal problem. All of the high-level power reactor waste ever created would fit inside one large building. In contrast every year we’re creating more than one thousand cubic miles of CO2 gas in excess of that which can be absorbed by natural processes. Better fuel-use cycles can essentially eliminate the nuclear waste problem, making it no more dangerous than was the original ore after a few decades of storage.
We can no longer afford the luxury of antinuke dilettantism and hysteria. Humanity needs every non-fossil energy source ASAP.
Read a lot of good pro nuke posts that make a great deal of sense. Sadly the real solution comes down to, HOW do we fund the lobbyists with as much money as coal and oil pour into DC, RNC-DNC and state capitals? Once we solve that real issue, the money and corrupted powers in the middle of it all, we might be able to actually solve the problems.
Until either that happens or the USA citizens obtain a much higher comprehensive level on energy, to even try to discuss the basics and facts, nothing is going to change, The money does not want to hear anything like “Nuke”..when we have “oil, gas and coal”. same for most green power, it is not going to happen until USA commoners education on such things can seriously question, rationally consider and deflect the spin ministers.