Author: James Conca / Source: Forbes
The Trump administration and Congress seem to be trying to raise Yucca Mountain from the dead.
Yucca Mountain is the site of a proposed high-level nuclear waste repository in Nevada that was halted in 2010.The site has always been political, from its initial choice to its recent death.
The problem this time is that most of our high-level nuclear waste is no longer high-level. And most scientists agree we shouldn’t dispose of spent nuclear fuel until we reuse it in our new reactors that are designed to burn it.
So there really isn’t much to go into Yucca Mountain anymore.
Besides, the highly-fractured, variably saturated, dual-porosity volcanic tuff at Yucca Mountain with highly oxidizing groundwater, was the wrong rock to begin with, causing the cost to skyrocket and the technical hurdles to keep mounting.
Anti-nuclear activists have used Yucca Mt. to oppose the new generation of nuclear power plants by saying we have no place to put the waste. But we know how to do this and we know where to put it.
Unfortunately, everyone has focused on the political and legal aspects without understanding the science. And we know what happens when Human Law runs into Natural Law – Natural Law wins every time. Otherwise, we’d just make hurricanes illegal.
There are four categories of nuclear waste in America: spent nuclear fuel, high-level waste, transuranic waste and low-level waste.
The first three require deep geologic disposal. SNF is solid used fuel from reactors, HLW is mostly wet peanut-butter-like gunk, and TRU is a mixture of solid, debris and gunk. SNF and HLW were destined for Yucca Mt, decided in the 1980s. Since 1970, however, most of the high-level waste has changed to transuranic, and SNF needs to be kept for future reactors, so the whole point of Yucca Mt is pretty well moot.There are four categories of nuclear waste in America (see figure). In order of descending radioactivity, they are spent nuclear fuel (SNF), high-level waste (HLW), transuranic waste (TRU) and low-level waste (LLW). HLW and TRU are almost all defense waste, generated from making nuclear weapons.
SNF is solid used fuel from commercial reactors, HLW is mostly wet peanut-butter-like gunk, and TRU is a mixture of solid, debris and gunk. By law, these three require deep geologic disposal.
We built a deep geologic repository for TRU waste, called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), in the massive Permian-age salts in New Mexico near Carlsbad. WIPP has operated extremely well since 1999, having had only one minor incident in 2014 that caused no environmental, health or any other effects. WIPP was back up and running in March.
All TRU is supposed to go to WIPP. In addition, there are six waste sites around the country for LLW that have also been operating well for many years.
SNF and HLW were destined for Yucca Mt, a decision made 30 years ago by the best scientists in Congress.
However, everything has changed since 1970. We removed most of the hot stuff from the HLW tanks (137Cs/90Sr), and the rest has radioactively-decayed to TRU and is no longer high-level. All those high-level tanks up at Hanford are now filled with TRU waste, and many other tanks there, particularly the leakers, were already filled with TRU….
The post A Nuclear Waste: Why Congress Shouldn’t Bother Reviving Yucca Mountain appeared first on FeedBox.