Contrary to rumors, Yucca Mountain is not dead. Certainly the Obama administration has put it on hold in order to satisfy Harry Reid, but how long is he going to be around? Whatever Reid once was in Nevada, he has become a creature of Washington, swallowing whole the liberal Democratic orthodoxy that within a few years the nation will be running on windmills and solar collectors. While his role in shutting down Yucca is well known, what flies below the radar is that Reid is also opposing every new coal plant in the state, including those with the most advanced technology.
So a change in administrations could bring Yucca back. After all, it’s only a hole in the ground. This week, the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners urged the Obama administration to reconsider its decision on Yucca. “Dismissal at this late stage, in the absence of any rational explanation or record-based findings to justify it, is an incredible waste of billions in rate-paying dollars spent on the licensing proceedings to date,” said the commissioners.
Notice it’s not taxpayer money. What is rarely acknowledged — especially among environmentalists, who are always yammering about the supposed “subsidies” nuclear receives — is that the entire Yucca effort has been financed entirely by the utilities — which is to say, their customers. Since 1983 every nuclear plant has paid a tenth-of-cent per kilowatt-hour assessment to finance the disposal of spent fuel. The fund has now collected $30 billion. The Department of Energy spent $10 billion digging a five-mile-long tunnel into the mountain that was completed in 1997. Still ahead is the task of drilling the honeycomb of side tunnels where the spent fuel will be reposited. That would eat up much of the remaining $20 billion. Now that the government is reneging on its Nuclear Waste Act responsibility to take spent fuel rods off the utilities’ hands, the companies want that money back. Exelon successfully sued the Department of Energy for a refund that could eventually reach $600 million. Other utilities are lining up in droves. Some people speculated that the Obama administration would never dare close Yucca because of the need to refund the $20 billion (as if an administration that regularly spends trillions would balk at such a paltry amount). What the administration has decided to do instead is to keep the whole effort hanging by a string so it can say it may yet fulfill its statutory obligations.
The real question, though, is whether Yucca is even necessary. Technically, there is no such thing as nuclear waste. The amount of material we’re talking about is vanishingly small. The spent fuel rods that come out of a reactor after five years of fissioning fits easily into a lead-and-concrete “dry cask” about the size of a gazebo. Last week NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko — a Reid appointee whose job it was to close down Yucca — said that dry cask storage could extend for over 100 years. All the spent fuel we have ever produced would fit on a football field to a height of ten feet.
And that’s without reprocessing. The reprocessing procedure — practiced all over the rest of the world — reduces the volume by 97 percent. By the time you’re finished, you end up with what the French have after using nuclear for 30 years to produce 75 percent of its electricity: All its waste stored beneath the floor of one room. As the French like to brag, “The amount of waste each French person produces in a lifetime would fit into a cigarette lighter.”
So why aren’t we reprocessing? Well, you have to realize that when it comes to nuclear technology, many Americans have become delusional. Go to the Council on Foreign Relation’s website and you will see yet another dreary video warning that the pursuit of reprocessing in this country may lead to “nuclear proliferation.” Wake up America! We are becoming a nuclear backwater. France and Japan are ten years ahead of us in nuclear technology and Russia, China, and South Korea are about to blow past as well. North Korea has extracted its own plutonium. Iran is enriching uranium. Yet the grand poobahs of the liberal establishment still think it’s 1945 and the U.S. has some nuclear secrets we can keep from the rest of the world.
Yucca Mountain is basically a repository for natural uranium — the non-fissionable kind you can find in your back yard. Ninety-five percent of a spent fuel rod is non-fissionable uranium, which essentially serves as packing material. Of the remaining 5 percent — the dangerous stuff — most can be recycled as useful material. The fissionable uranium (1 percent) and plutonium (1 percent) can be recycled as “mixed-oxide” fuel (MOX). Of the remaining isotopes, many are useful — even essential — in industry and medicine. Forty percent of all medical diagnostic procedures now involve a radioactive isotope. It is an $8 billion business, yet we must import all our isotopes from Canada because we’re afraid to deal with them here.
What Yucca Mountain should be, then, is a reprocessing center, like the one the French have built at La Hague. We probably need one on both the east and west coasts. (Barnwell, South Carolina is the other likely site.) The French will build it for us. They’ve got the experience. In fact, the first international shipment of MOX fuel just arrived back in Japan after being reprocessed at France’s Avignon fabrication facility. If we can’t do it ourselves, why not just let France handle the job?
Frankly, I think Yucca Mountain is a big waste of time. My nuclear compatriots, however, find this appalling. They cite the bureaucratic regimen that says the Nuclear Regulatory Commission must issue a “Waste Confidence Finding” before any new reactor construction can begin. This is all true but just another segment of the miles and miles of red tape we have wrapped around ourselves — plus another opportunity for anti-nuclear activists to “clog the toilet” by challenging any “waste confidence finding” the NRC may happen to reach.
What we have perfected in this county is an ability to talk endlessly about projects without ever doing anything. Yucca Mountain is just one example. The Chamber of Commerce has compiled a website called “Project/No Project,” which details hundreds of energy projects around the country that are being delayed by environmental opposition. The Sierra Club is on record opposing bicycle paths. Enthusiasts of windmills and solar collectors think they will be exempt form all this but they are not. The National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 has become the principle roadblock to starting alt-energy stimulus projects.
Personally, I’m hoping that the Tea Party and enterprising Republicans sweep to victory next November, brush aside all this bureaucratic foofaraw and put the nation back to work — before we all have to apply for welfare in China. Until then, Yucca Mountain will stand beside the new World Trade Center as yet another worthwhile project strangled in red tape.
– William Tucker is author of Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America’s Long Energy Odyssey.