No, this is not another post about what engineers and psychologists call the "Yuck Factor" - reclaiming waste water, converting it to drinking water, and getting people to accept it.
But it
is about the proposed Yucca Mountain Repository and the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) - Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management's (OCRWM) inept attempt to find a place to store the 7o,000 or so metric tons of high-level commerical nuclear waste (HLW) from the nation's nuclear power plants. The stuff is now being stored underwater on each plant's site, hardly a safe place for it. And yes, it's "Yucc-y" all right.
Yucca Mountain is located about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, on the western boundary of the Nevada Test Site (NTS), in Nye County. The NTS is the DoE facility that has been used for atmospheric and underground nuclear weapons testing since the early 1950s.
To illustrate what a mess DOE has made of the USA's search for a HLW repository, let me relate a story. When I got out of graduate school in 1976 I interviewed with the forerunner to the U.S. Department of Energy (I believe it was still called the Atomic Energy Commission) to work on the characterization of nuclear waste repositories, mainly Yucca Mountain. At one point in our conversation the interviewer laughed and said how I would be out of a job in 1988, when the site characterization would end so construction could start for the 1998 opening. Uh-huh.
The best estimate I've heard is that the Yucca Mountain Repository (YMR) will open in March 2017. If I were a betting man I would not put money on that date.
I am not going to go into a great deal of detail here. I used to be involved in Yucca Mountain and the Nevada Test Site, but that was almost 20 years ago. Disclosure notice: while I was at the Desert Research Institute (DRI) I worked for both the DoE-NTS and the State of Nevada's YMR Program.
I have maintained more than a passing interest in YMR issues, however, and a recent story in the Las Vegas Review-Journal (RJ) once again piqued my curiosity. The story reported how DoE had spent $13m to replace data tainted by the infamous USGS e-mail exchanges, in which USGS hydrologists intimated they were falsifying QA (quality assurance) records as they developed an infiltration model.
Infiltration of water at the surface of Yucca Mountain and downward migration to the repository horizon 1000 feet below are critical issues, as the water could facilitate migration of radwaste out of the repository and into the underlying regional ground water system.
The RJ article said the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an independent group that reports directly to Congress, said the new infiltration model developed by DoE and Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) “did not consider all available data, was not calibrated with other site information and did not consider likely significant evaporation."
Rep. Jon Porter (R-NV) said “it is obvious” DOE tried to “shortcut” research in order to stay on schedule.
Looks like it is back to the drawing board.
From my perspective, here's where DoE went wrong:
- It drastically understimated the resistance of Nevada. It figured that since Nevada had little political clout and had tolerated nuclear weapons testing since the early 1950s, what's a little radwaste when you've let the government explode nukes just northwest of your largest city? Initially, the LV business community cautiously welcomed the YMR (jobs and growth) but no longer. They have all the growth they can handle. The state's resistance has grown with time and stiffened greatly since 1987, when Congress decided to stop repository studies in Texas and Washington and focus on Yucca Mountain, an event known locally as the "Screw Nevada Act".
- DoE outsmarted itself by choosing Yucca Mountain. It figured a topographically high site would be good - higher above the regional ground water system. Normally that'd be a very good assumption, but DoE did not count on having to deal with unsaturated fracture flow and mass transport, probably the most intractable problem in ground water hydrology. Unsaturated flow - tough enough; fracture flow - ditto. The two together - fahgeddaboutit! What DoE should have done is follow USGS scientist Isaac J. "Ike" Winograd's 1974 advice (article in Eos) and use an alluvial-fill basin as the repository site. Few people knew more about the hydrogeology of the region than Ike did.
- The seismicity and volcanism hazards were underestimated.
But one thing is for sure: because of DoE-OCRWM, we have learned an immense amount about the hydrogeology of low-permeability environments and unstaurated fracture flow. One of my colleagues has said that DoE has been "hydrogeology's NSF" (National Science Foundation). Not that it wanted to be, of course.
One reason we are having such difficulty in locating a HLW site is the great diversity of potential locations we have in the USA: deep sedimentary basins, bedded salt, low-permeability rocks, shield areas, arid regions, etc. In a place like Sweden, where you have nothing but the Fenno-Scandia shield and its intrusive igneous and metamorphic rocks, you make do with what you have and engineer the site accordingly.
If you are interested in learning more, the RJ's YMR archives are here. Wikipedia also has some information, as does the OCRWM WWW site.
Nevada has had a love-hate relationship with things nuclear. 
The license plate shown never made it beyond the design stage. The Clark County (Las Vegas area) seal of the 1950s was designed around a mushroom cloud. I remember friends in the Reno area telling me how they viewed announced atmospheric nuclear tests in the 1950s and made an "event" out of it. Yes, they could see the flash of light from a few hundred miles away.
Ironically, Nye County, where the Nevada Test Site and YMR are located, vaguely resembles a mushroom cloud. Maybe someone at the old Atomic Energy Commission had a sense of humor.
One thing you can't blame DoE for is the post-9/11 concern over terrorists hijacking waste shipments to the YMR, although people have been concerned over the possibility of traffic accidents and hijackings since the search for a national HLW site began.
Another reason for the extreme resistance to the HLW repository program among some is the fear that if a " successful" repository site is found and opened, it will provide an impetus for more nuclear power plants. I learned that all too well when I gave a talk on HLW waste disposal options before the La Jolla chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) in 1989. After my talk, I was socializing and speaking with a few of the attendees (my wife-to-be, in attendance, referred to them as "Gucci liberals"). I made the point that we needed to find a place to store the HLW safely, instead of keeping the stuff on-site at each power plant. Referring to on-site storage, I said, "Is that what you want?" "Yes!" they replied in unison.
The upshot: the wait for a HLW repository will just be a bit longer.
Anyone care to bet on when? With Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) opposed to it, I think I will pass.
"You can have it fast, cheap, or well-made, but only two at any one time." -- Anonymous
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