Friday, 05.30.08
Yucca Mountain High
Department of Energy
The word "mountain" has lovely connotations: icy streams, conifer forests, unblemished views of a snowy sierra, yodeling competitions. (OK, so not they're not all lovely.) Alas for Yucca Mountain, these images of alpine sweetness do not apply to it at all. If Yucca Mountain had a name that conveyed just how baking-hot, barren, forlorn, and lifeless it is -- perhaps "Yucca Death Vault" would do it justice -- more people might see the logic in the government's plan, now nearly thirty years old, to use it to store the nation's radioactive garbage. The mountain is dry, geologically appropriate, and far enough from human settlements to keep it secure in case of accident or attack. Nevadans and anti-nuke activists object and say that the risk of leaks, of terrorist attacks, and of unforeseen catastrophes is too great to allow Yucca Mountain to accept the waste. But the waste has to go somewhere, and Yucca Mountain is the right spot.
The alternative, first of all, is to keep the waste at the nuclear plants that produce it. Yucca Mountain is equipped to accept 77,000 tons of radioactive waste, which are currently distributed all over the country, often in areas near population centers. Few if any of the current nuclear plants could provide the security of a mountain in the middle of the country's most inhospitable and militarized desert.
Scientists, engineers, politicians, and lawyers have bickered for decades about whether Yucca is seismically inert enough to ensure millennia of safe storage. I don't blame skeptics for doubting. Storage beyond the scale of individual human lives, to say nothing of human history, is tricky and bound to pose risks, such as slow bleeds of radioactive waste into the ground or water. The good news is that the worst of the waste will have decayed significantly within centuries, and the scariest parts of what's left -- plutonium, which takes 24,000 years to decay by half -- can be kept out of deep storage and instead reprocessed to power more reactors (or build bombs, about which more below). Now that storage and fossil-fuel costs are skyrocketing, this sort of reprocessing will make increasing economic sense, thereby reducing the period during which Yucca Mountain would have to be certified secure.
Finally, the subject of bombs: The most ridiculous fears surround the possibility that someone would seize any stored plutonium and use it build a bomb. Let's assume a dramatic raid of Yucca Mountain actually did occur, and somehow the folks next door at Nellis Air Force Base were powerless to stop it. The terrorists would then have loads of fission fragments, plus a large quantity of the same material used to incinerate Nagasaki. That improbable outcome would not be good, but it wouldn't be terrible, because contrary to its reputation, plutonium is neither all that dangerous nor all that difficult to get. It's not available, as Dr. Emmett Brown predicted over half a century ago, "in every corner drugstore," but nuclear power plants routinely produce the stuff as a waste product, and at last count there were nuclear plants all over the world, mostly not in the U.S. The trick isn't getting the plutonium, but turning it into a bomb. (Enriched uranium is the opposite -- hard to find, easy to blow up.)
Yucca Mountain won't avert all catastrophes -- whether of the bang or the whimper variety. But it will be better than the status quo.
Rolling the diceJon Christensen explains the uncertainties involved in predicting the effects of the Yucca Mountain Project. |
The nuclear bogeymanRichard Muller argues the dangers of storing nuclear waste are greatly exaggerated. |
America's dumping groundSlate chronicles Nevada's long history as a destination for the country's physical and cultural waste. |
More lasting than bronze?In The Believer, Alexander Provan considered the Yucca Mountain controversy and pondered the site's possible fates, thousands of years from now in an unimaginable future. |
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Surely you are not suggesting that unattractiveness of the venue should be the criterion for storing spent fuel. The chief criterion should be ability to contain the spent fuel for the hundreds of thousands of years that it remains radioactive. Many isotopes with different half lives are contained in spent fuel including Neptunium 237 which has a half-life of 2 million years. Spent fuel is too radiactive to be moved for at least five years and security must be provided for all of the operating reacting reactors to protect this fuel and the reactors anyhow. Also, there are risks transporting spent fuel and ideally a repository should be located close to reactors. Most U. S. commercial reactors are located in the east.
Graeme Wood's comment goes after straw men and so, as we say in physics, isn't even wrong. Before I go on let me inform the reader that I am a consultant to Nevada.
I will only mention one problem. The simple fact is that the Department of Energy's calculations supporting its application for a Yucca Mountain license show that its compliance with federal radiation limits is entirely dependent on what they call drip shields protecting the waste packages from water. Just the name tells you there is lots of water. And it's moving lots faster than DOE estimated when it picked the site, so if the radioactive stuff gets out it will get to Amargossa Valley pretty fast as these things go. Without the drip shields, about 10,000 of them, about 60,000 tons of titanium and palladium, the leakage exceeds the federal standard by about a factor of ten. The trouble with this is that DOE says it isn't going to put in the enormously expensive drip shields for about a hundred years or more, which makes the whole thing a very doubtful proposition, not to speak of the difficulty of accomplishing this task in rock-strewn tunnels a 100 years from now using remotely operated equipment, or getting the requisite quantities of metal. If some government agency promises to spend $10 billion on a project a 100 years from now, is it reasonable to count on that? Yet DOE wants the drip shield's protection to count in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's licensing calculations, which is absurd. The problem gets back to the poor choice of site--no other country in the world is thinking of a site as poor as this one, especially in an "oxidizing environment," in effect, one in which corrosion is favored. Sometimes the scientific facts matter.
I am independent.
Briefly, I would suggest that the science has been tainted as much by a culture of fear in relation to anything nuclear as it has by the DOE's own blunders.
I was at Yucca Mountain some months ago and just published a lengthy article in The Believer about the feasibility of the project and the historical and cultural bases for the opposition to it which aims to understand and explain the issues discussed in these comments. The full text is available here:
Nuclear waste isn't really a long-term obligation. The idea that we should pretend it is, is of more recent origin than nuclear power itself; so for instance it doesn't appear in M. King Hubbert's 1956 paper, "Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels".
The fact that nuclear waste put into Yucca Mountain early this century will still be radioactive early next century is commonly used to deceive. The deception is in not comparing its radioactivity to the radioactivity that naturally exists in the rock at lesser depths.
The wreck of the Titanic provides an exaggerated illustration. It had fine dining, so it probably had saltshakers. They could leak. Why is no-one concerned that this will salt the ocean?
To 'independent' Suzanne and others. May I suggest you google 'victor gilinsky' and read some of what he has had to say, for example, before Congress.
To complain that 'the science is tainted' and thus dismiss it is throwing out baby with bathwater. The whole story, which the writer of this article unfortunately fails miserably even to hint at makes very interesting reading. Even reassuring.
I visited Yucca Mountain last June with a small group of students from Luther College where I teach. It is my understanding that we received one of the last last public tours that included a trip into the facility because Congress has now reduced the project's funding.
The author describes the location accurately, but he does not mention that groundwater rests 1,000 feet below the tunnel floor and that the open desert is a similar 1,000 feet above. He also does not mention the active seismic fault that runs right next to the facility nor the 297 scientific and technical problems flagged by the US General Accounting Office.
While most of the facility will house commercially produced spent nuclear fuel (which does contain small amounts of plutonium embedded in the fuel rods), the facility will also house some high level nuclear waste from nuclear reactors operated by the Department of Defense. It is possible that some of this waste will have higher concentrations of plutonium. He also does not mention that reprocessing creates its own toxic waste stream, which, while shorter lived, is more concentrated and toxic. What galls me is how easily the author can breeze by the fact that the Yucca Mountain waste will still be toxic for longer than the history of human civilization. As an ethicist, it is hard for me to whistle past this key fact.
As we departed the facility one of my students mentioned that the site would work well to produce power through concentrated solar technology. Indeed. There are now many CST projects appearing in the deserts of the Southwest. This technology is a more responsible means of boiling water to produce the steam that powers turbines to generate a portion of our nation's electricity. While it is true that CST only works while the sun shines, I would rather tackle the energy storage problems associated with this technology than the waste storage problems associated with nuclear reactors.
For Bob Tyson:
I have read the testimony of Victor Gilinsky and that of many other witnesses before congressional committees on all sides of the spent fuel disposal issue. This was available on thousands of sheets of microfiche. Some I have quoted in a recent book co-authored with my husband: Nuclear Waste Stalemate: Political and Scientific Controversies" by Robert Vandenbosch and Susanne E. Vandenbosch, University of Utah Press, 2007. We have tried to be objective in our selection of quotes and issues but will probably not completely satisfy all sides of a highly polarized issue. I am not opposed to going ahead with the license application for the Yucca Mountain repository and allowing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission make the decision either to license or not license the repository. My remark above was a call to focus on the most important requirement for a repository- the ability to isolate the spent fuel from the surroundings long enough so that it does not harm people.
To Jim Martin-Schramm, who says he "would rather tackle the energy storage problems associated with this technology [concentrated solar] than the waste storage problems associated with nuclear reactors." - Please feel free to tackle that problem. What exactly have YOU done on that so far?
It galls me when people identify their "preferred solutions" to technological problems without contributing anything to the solutions themselves.
And if you have personally made any advances in this area, please forgive me, sincerely.
John (post #1),
The risk associated with transporting the waste is negligible. This issue is a red herring.
For a very long time we've been living with routine hazardous chemical shipments, which represent a risk that is several orders of magnitude greater than that which will be posed by shipping nuclear waste to Yucca.
These chemical shipments are thousands of times more numerous, annually, that Yucca shipments ever will be. The stuff is shipped in paper-thin-walled tanks (compared to the extremely tough, thick-walled containers the spent fuel is shipped in). These chemicals are much more dispersible than spent fuel (liquids or gases, as opposed to a tiny volume of ceramic solid sealed within metal rods). Even an accident or attack that breaches a spent fuel cask will probably not cause any deaths, since the waste will not significantly disperse, and only a local cleanup effort will result. Not only are the chances of a chemical release vastly greater, but the consequences of such a release are also potentially greater than that of a spent fuel cask breach.
The historical record also shows that the risks of nuclear waste shipment are negligible compared to those of other hazardous materials. Whereas chemical spills/releases have often occur (often resulting in evacuations), a release of radioactive material has never happened. In Europe, they have shipped an amount of waste equal to the total amount slated for Yucca mountain, w/o a single radiological release. No one has ever died, been harmed, or had to be evacuated due to a radioactive material shipment.
Concerning stealing spent fuel, this is the most difficult means anyone has ever thought of for obtaining fissile material. Stealing a 125-ton shipping cask (or taking out the intensely radioactive spent fuel) and slipping away with it despite the security and monitoring of the shipments is completely implausible. And even if you could do that, you'd wind up with something (spent fuel) that is more difficult to turn into weapons-grade material than simple uranium ore, which lies in the ground under almost all countries/regions. It is far simpler to just dig up uranium ore and enrich it (which is what Iran is doing, for example). On top of all that, it is unclear than an effective weapon can even be made from spent fuel, due to the bad plutonium isotope distribution.
Nobody will ever attempt such a stupid ploy for obtaining bomb material, since virtually all other approaches are far easier and more effective. Spent fuel shipments are not a proliferation concern.
The aesthetics of the mountain are not (and should not be) a factor in the selection decisions.
However, the fact that the site is very unpopulated and remote, is arid with a low water table, and is in the middle of a large federally controlled military zone certainly is relevent. It should also be noted that the ground water flowing under Yucca does not connect with any major aquifers or water supplies. It flows to a spot directly under death valley and dries up.
Also relevent is the fact that this is the same place where they've literally detonated hundreds of nuclear bombs underground. I'd love to see the scientific analyses which prove, beyond any doubt, that no radioactive material will ever leak into the ground water as a result of these underground tests. It should be clear to anyone that any long-term risks associated with the repository will be absolutely negligible compared to the risks/effects from those tests.
The whole "issue" with Yucca is that there is a tiny (one in a thousand) chance that a handful of people, tens/hundreds of thousands of years in the future, might recieve annual exposures that are still within the range of natural background (levels for which no health effects have ever been observed). The fact that people consider this a significant "environmental concern" is absurd and insulting, especially given that fossil fuels (for which nuclear is the primary, most effective alternative) cause 25,000 deaths every single year, and may radically alter the world's climate. We're avoiding/holding up nuclear over this??!!
The risks associated with nuclear power will always be negligible compared to those of fossil fuels, no matter what we end up doing with the waste and no matter where it is buried. Even the (buried) solid waste streams from fossil fuels (as well as the waste streams from most other industries) represent a greater long-term risk than those posed by Yucca Mtn. Wastes from other industries are buried in millions of times the volume, with very little analysis, care, or containment (engineered or geologic). The waste forms are much more dispersible and harder to contain. Many toxic constituents last as long or longer than nuclear waste (they do not decay away).
Nuclear waste being unique in terms of long-term risk is a myth. Nuclear waste, and Western nuclear power plants, have never hurt or killed anyone (over a 40-year history), and it is very unlikely that they ever will.
Richard Meserve, testifying before Congress, stated that the greatest risks associated with transporting spent fuel are ordinary traffic accidents and terrorist attacks.
For G. R. L. Cowan:
The National Academy of Sciences recommended that radiation standards for the proposed Yucca Mountain repository should be applicable for hundreds of thousands of years. The DC Court of Appeals agreed and rejected the 10,000 year standard proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency in a suit brought by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the State of Nevada.
The more important terrorism risk with nuclear waste transportation is of blowing open a cask and releasing its contents. The US has just provided at least hundreds of potential terrorists with Terrorism University advanced hands-on courses in Iraq, where they have been honing their explosive and incendiary weapons skills on just such increasingly successful attacks on the best-armored US military vehicles. Imagine the impact of even a minimally successful attack on a nuclear waste cask, say, in St Louis or Denver? The US public has, after the 9/11 attacks, finally begun to wake up about the huge dangers of hazmat poison gas cargoes through our major target cities (there is a new but weak rail routing law and sham Bush Admin routing regs), so the learning curve about planned Yucca Mountain shipments should be shorter.
CSXT Railroad recently declared in the federal docket that since 9/11, the US public has reconsidered what is an acceptable risk:
�The support of the public, and of many policy makers, has greatly eroded since 9/11. Now the railroads are harshly criticized for transporting these [TIH, or � Toxic by Inhalation� poison gas cargoes] �Our company�s reputation has been assailed�[and] vilified in the media. TIH cannot simply continue to move by railroad indefinitely�Even if the potential for ruinous liability were somehow erased, the widespread social disapproval of TIH transport by rail would remain.� http://dmses.dot.gov/docimages/pdf101/456287_web.pdf
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I'm all for storing it at Yucca Mtn.
My questions are:
How do you get it there?
How do you keep the population safe in the areas through which you must transport it?
Doesn't the transport process pose the greatest risk to having it abducted by terrorists?
Posted by John | May 31, 2008 11:25 AM