LLAW’s All Things Nuclear #708, Wednesday, (07/31/2024)
LLAW’s All Things Nuclear #708, Wednesday, (07/31/2024)
“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity”
The US Energy Department dug an horizontal 25-foot-diameter tunnel under Yucca Mountain to determine its suitability as a geologic repository for the nation's commercial spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. The project has stalled since the Obama administration attempted to withdraw the license application of the Yucca Mountain project in 2010. (Credit: US Energy Department, via Flickr)
LLAW’s NUCLEAR ISSUES & COMMENTS, Wednesday, (07/31/2024)
This is a story I know very well from its grass roots in the early 1980s, and, please, do not blame former President Obama for the long, long, long, delay that has lasted right up until some tomorrow someday. Yucca Mountain in Nevada was never and never will be (unless we are incredibly ignorant and stupid), for many reasons, not the least of which is that it would have been built on a geologic fault zone, a fact that Congress has spent more than 40 years trying to ignore, and the last I knew, they still are. But Yucca Mountain will never pass muster, and geologists and other earth science professionals have known that since the very beginning.
It was in the summer or fall of 1982 or ‘83, a year or two after I’d resigned from my employer in the nuclear industry, and had just recently, in 1980, started up a new minerals exploration company that absolutely would never include uranium (the radioactive fuel for all nuclear power plants) exploration, research, and development when I was approached by well-known Wyoming entrepreneur, explaining that he had insider confidential information that Nevada’s Yucca Mountain would be the federal government’s choice of the three sites being considered, who wanted my kind of help to claim ownership of all the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land at and surrounding the Yucca Mountain site, which would soon be highly mineralized property containing untold millions or billions of dollars in reusable nuclear waste, such as plutonium, cesium, and other radioactive residue of that land near Area 51 and Las Vegas. The gentleman had dozens of large surveyed geologic Ozalid blue-print maps where he and his exploration crew had laid out dozens of mining claims that needed to be filed as soon as possible, and that he wanted to create a new corporation and sell stock to finance the entire scheme . . .
Needless to say, I was not interested, and I told him that the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage project would never be constructed because the whole concept of the project was impossible to be used as a nuclear waste repository facility because Yucca Mountain itself was a part of a huge fault scarp system and would be subject to not only long-term earthquakes but volcanism as well, and that such ground would never be approved by the U.S. government. Other serious issues came along later as described in the article below.
But, unfortunately, the sad story that follows exposes the ignorance of politicians and some governmental agencies, particularly in Congress and the Energy Department, explaining candidly how and why our nuclear waste still resides in water reservoirs and concrete vaults at all those nuclear power plant sites where the nuclear waste originated. ~llaw
Why US nuclear waste policy got stalled. And what to do about it.
By Victor Gilinsky | July 31, 2024
The US Energy Department dug an horizontal 25-foot-diameter tunnel under Yucca Mountain to determine its suitability as a geologic repository for the nation's commercial spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. The project has stalled since the Obama administration attempted to withdraw the license application of the Yucca Mountain project in 2010. (See the image above to see the huge tunneling machine.)
It is often said—somewhat accusingly—that it isn’t technical issues that stand in the way of siting a US geologic repository for highly radioactive waste, but political and social ones. In fact, the issues are inextricably connected. The root of the US failure lies in the original motive of the nuclear establishment in siting such an underground repository. It was not to protect public safety, but to protect continued licensing of nuclear power plants from attack in the courts on grounds that there were no provisions for dealing with the plants’ highly radioactive waste.
The disdain for public safety and the rush to open a repository infected the design process and fostered slapdash decisions. These ultimately sank the technical case for the repository at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. And while in the end the project was shelved by a political act, behind it were Energy Department and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) actions that left a deep residue of public distrust, so deep that there isn’t likely to be a US geologic repository, ever.
The contrast with successful waste repository projects in Sweden and Finland is clear. Their regulatory standards were much tighter than those applied by the NRC, the sites were chosen carefully from a scientific point of view, and the designs strictly focused on public safety. It is not surprising that the Scandinavian authorities were able to gain the confidence of their public, and not just because they took pains to consult the public—which the Energy Department did not. They presented a good case for a sound underground facility.
Waste become a problem. A deep-underground waste repository wasn’t always the preferred solution for dealing with US high-level waste. Before 1975, when the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was split into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Energy and Research and Development Administration (ERDA, the forerunner of the Energy Department), the AEC planned to store such waste in an above-ground, so-called “engineered” facility. The new NRC chairman, Bill Anders, a former AEC commissioner, had been spooked by the success of a court challenge to the AEC’s fast breeder project on grounds the commission hadn’t considered the long-term impact of the breeder reactor waste. He was afraid the same argument might stop licensing of conventional power reactors, then (optimistically) projected to soon dominate US electricity generation.
Anders convinced Bob Seamans, the ERDA administrator, to drop the waste storage policy he inherited and adopt deep geological disposal. In 1975, as I was one of the original NRC commissioners, Anders happily told me: “When we put the first fuel assembly underground we can declare victory.” It turned out to be more complicated than that.
The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act set up procedures for choosing sites for geologic repositories. The Energy Department was to select potential sites and design a facility that the NRC would review and decide on a license. The department came up with a list of candidate sites from which President Ronald Reagan chose three: in Texas, Washington, and Nevada. In 1987, Congress narrowed the list to Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. The inside-baseball explanation was that the House speaker, Jim Wright, was from Texas, so that was out, and the Democratic majority leader, Tom Foley, was from Washington, so that was out, too.
Perhaps that was too cynical.
Yucca Mountain appeared to be the cheapest site to develop as drilling would be horizontal, from ground level into the mountain, as opposed to drilling down. Unfortunately, it was a very bad site in terms of resisting corrosion of metal waste canisters. It has an oxidizing (rust promoting) chemical environment when the opposite, a reducing environment, was wanted. And the more the Energy Department learned about the site, the worse it looked.
To find a place to store spent nuclear fuel, Congress needs to stop trying to revive Yucca Mountain
Selecting a bad site. Yucca Mountain was initially advertised as being very dry. It turned out there was lots more water in the mountain than the Department expected. When I became a consultant for the state of Nevada in 2001, I went down into a test chamber in the heart of the mountain and was surprised by the amount of water dripping on my head. Moreover, rainwater flowed down through the mountain and out to the site boundary much faster than the Energy Department had estimated, at least 10 times faster. It became clear the waste canisters would corrode much more rapidly than forecast and radioactive leakage beyond the site boundary would exceed even the lax standards imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency and adopted by the NRC.
Instead of admitting it had picked a bad site and returning to Congress for instructions on investigating another candidate, as it was required to do by law, the Energy Department invented an ersatz solution to compensate for the inadequate geology: a “drip shield.” Each of the 11,000 waste canisters in the many miles of tunnels would be covered by a 5-ton titanium alloy “mailbox” to shield it from the corrosive water flowing through the Mountain. With these in place, calculations showed that the canister and drip shield combination complied with the EPA and NRC licensing requirements.
In effect, the department was shifting to reliance on metal “engineered barriers,” when the whole point of a using a deep underground repository was to gain the advantage of geologic barriers. If you were going to rely primarily on the metal package, why still bother to put the canisters deep underground?
But there was a catch to this, too, one might even say a fraud was involved.
A flawed licensing process. While the Energy Department wanted credit for the 11,000 drip shields in the NRC review of its license application, it didn’t intend to install them with the waste canisters. For one thing, the cost of the needed 55,000 tons of titanium alloy was substantial, and putting in drip shields would have complicated the waste installation process and required new, as yet undesigned, equipment. Instead, the Energy Department’s plan “postponed” drip shield installation until the repository closed for good, in 100-300 years. But by then it would be impossible to install drip shields over the waste canisters: The internal underground transportation system would not be functioning, and rockfall would anyhow make passage impossible. Asked how the NRC could possibly accept this fantastical commitment, I remember an Energy Department official responding that “the NRC may not question the promise of a sister agency.”
The Energy Department refused to run any computer analyses on how the repository would perform if the drip shields didn’t get installed. Nevada managed to do this and found that, without drip shields, the repository failed the licensing requirement for radioactive leakage from the site. And the failure came early, in around a thousand years after repository closure. The NRC staff should have thrown out the department’s license application at the pre-qualification stage in 2008, but accepted it, rationalizing the Energy Department would address the drip shield issue in the upcoming hearing.
Congress takes aim at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission: ‘It’s déjà vu all over again’
NRC staff participates in all agency licensing hearings. Since at that point staffers had already reviewed the application favorably, they supported the license applicant. In the Yucca Mountain case, the staff outdid itself in its support of the Energy Department. The state of Nevada proposed over 200 issues for litigation before the NRC Licensing Board of three administrative judges; the Energy Department urged the Board to reject every single one of them and the NRC staff agreed in almost every instance. Judge Alan Rosenthal was so shocked at the NRC staffers’ bias that he reprimanded them for being “spear carriers” for the Energy Department. The licensing board rejected the NRC staff position and accepted more than 200 issues for litigation.
Stop the stalemate. The Yucca Mountain project was stalled indefinitely by the Obama administration before any substantive licensing hearing took place. It was not irrelevant that Nevada Senator Harry Reid was the Democratic majority leader, and his former assistant was NRC chairman. But the technical failures were a vital part of the background leading to this decision.
The 2012 report of a “Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future” recommended a “consent-based approach” to managing nuclear waste. The Energy Department got religion and formed an Office of Consent-Based Siting, whose website explains that consent-based siting “prioritizes the participation and needs of people and communities and seeks their willing and informed consent to accept a project in their community.” But the department still didn’t get it. It’s not making a show of consulting the public that gains trust. You need a good technical plan to start with and demonstrated competence and sense of responsibility to carry it out, as was the case in the Scandinavian countries. In my judgment, it’s too late for the Energy Department. I don’t think any state would ever trust the Energy Department to build and operate a nuclear waste repository.
The lack of a repository doesn’t seem to worry nuclear enthusiasts anymore, probably because it doesn’t threaten what reactor licensing there is. Recent legislation—the ADVANCE Act—to accelerate approval of new nuclear technologies does not mention nuclear waste at all. The focus is on subsidizing new reactor projects and “streamlining” licensing.
The United States, however, does need a better system for storing highly radioactive used fuel than the current situation of keeping it at over 80 storage locations in 36 states. A difficulty is that current law requires that, before the Energy Department can go forward with a surface storage facility to consolidate the used fuel, it has to have already selected a new geologic repository site, which isn’t happening. This restriction was inserted into the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to prevent the government from siting a “temporary” storage facility and then giving up on an underground repository for permanent disposal of the waste. Now, because of this restriction, the United States has neither centralized storage nor a repository, and the waste keeps piling up. Relaxing the provision in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act that has prevented temporary consolidated storage has to be the starting point of a sensible nuclear waste policy.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 7 categories, with the latest (#7) being a Friday weekly roundup of IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) global nuclear news stories. Also included is a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives. The feature categories provide articles and information about ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links with headlines concerning the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are three Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in this evening’s Post.)
IAEA Weekly News (Friday’s only)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS, Wednesday, (07/31/2024)
All Things Nuclear
NEWS
Debating Global South Reactions to Russian Nuclear Threats - CSIS
CSIS
... things like nuclear ... But these documents have publicly condemned nuclear saber-rattling and all instances leading to potential nuclear escalation.
New law expands nuclear power, but some question potential safety hazards
NewsCenter1
Supporters said energy demand is expected to grow over the next decade as electric vehicles, data centers and AI-related operations all search for a ...
This wasn't an oil spill or nuclear failure - The Martha's Vineyard Times
The Martha's Vineyard Times
There is no comparison of the above with the oil well blowouts or nuclear plant failures we have seen around the world. ... All About Pets, All-Island ...
Nuclear Power
NEWS
New law expands nuclear power, but some question potential safety hazards - WGIL
WGIL
The nuclear power industry recently received a boost with a bill that allows expansion, but not everyone is on board. President Joe Biden signed ...
Singapore signs agreement with US to deepen understanding of nuclear reactors, safety
The Straits Times
The move will help Singapore make a more informed decision on nuclear power as a clean energy source, said the authorities, who stressed that no ...
Why US nuclear waste policy got stalled. And what to do about it.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Before 1975, when the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was split into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Energy and Research and Development ...
Nuclear Power Emergencies
NEWS
Classification, Assessment and Prognosis During Nuclear Power Plant Emergencies | IAEA
International Atomic Energy Agency
Ordering Locally. Please use the following links for an up-to-date list of IAEA distributors: Distributors of IAEA Publications.
Iran reportedly convenes emergency meeting after killing of Hamas leader | News.az
News.az
Future of nuclear energy in Kazakhstan: What will the referendum decide?
What can you do with a master's degree in emergency management? - EMS1
EMS1
As disasters can strike at any time or location, every field requires some form of an emergency response team. From airports and nuclear power plants ...
Nuclear War
NEWS
The United States, North Korea and Nuclear War - Modern Diplomacy
Modern Diplomacy
Among the world's nuclear trouble spots, North Korea is the most plainly time-urgent. In managing this threat, North Korean “denuclearization” ...
Putin often cites Russia's 'nuclear doctrine' governing the use of atomic weapons. But what is it?
AP.org
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, President Vladimir Putin and other Kremlin voices have frequently threatened the West with its nuclear.
Russian military begins 3rd round ofls to train troops in tactical nuclear weapons
AP News
The Russian Defense Ministry said the drills will feature units of the central and southern military districts armed with Iskander short-range ...
Nuclear War Threats
NEWS
US must expand nuclear arsenal in face of Russia, China threat | Fox News
Fox News
The strategy of deterrence was established during the Cold War between Washington and Moscow due to the threat of mutually assured destruction should ...
What is in Putin's 'nuclear doctrine' that could trigger a Russian attack? | The Independent
The Independent
On Day 1 of the war, President Vladimir Putin said “whoever tries to impede us, let alone create threats for our country and its people, ...
Amid Western threats, Russia starts third stage of tactical nuclear drills - Firstpost
Firstpost
Amid Western threats, Russia starts third stage of tactical nuclear drills ... Russia has begun the third stage of drills to practise the deployment of
Yellowstone Caldera
NEWS
After Biscuit Basin explosion, Yellowstone will look into tracking hydrothermal booms
Gillette News Record
But well before the blast captured the attention of the internet, scientists with the park, universities and the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory were ...
After Biscuit Basin explosion, Yellowstone will look into tracking hydrothermal booms | State
Wyoming Tribune Eagle
Save. Tags. Geothermal Areas Of Yellowstone · Yellowstone Caldera · Geyser · Volcano · Infrasound · Yellowstone National Park · Hydrothermal Explosion ...
Yellowstone Biscuit Basin explosion may have created a new geyser - Live Science
Live Science
Geologists at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO) estimated the height of the plume by examining photos posted on social media. They also ...Nuclear PowerNEWS