Yucca Mountain, deemed safe, still faces long road ahead
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Yucca Mountain, deemed safe, still faces long road ahead
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lmost four years after the Obama administration shut down the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository project, a new report released in October 2014 by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has put Yucca Mountain in the news again. The report is Volume 3 of the five-volume safety evaluation report required for the NRC’s license application review for the geological repository. This volume, which addresses safety after permanent closure, concludes that the repository will meet regulatory requirements after it is permanently closed. In essence, the NRC expects that the repository, because of the multiple natural and engineered barriers it employs, should be able to withstand human intrusion and isolate high-level radioactive waste from the environment for up to a million years. Volume 3 is based on a thorough, sound technical assessment and is a win for science, said Rodney McCullum, director of used fuel programs at the Nuclear
Engineering Institute, a nuclear industry lobbying group in the United States. However, according to Rod Ewing,* a professor in the School of Earth Sciences at Stanford University, the release of the report is just the first step in an elaborate licensing process, and “how this will move forward is a political question.” That’s because next steps in the licensing process will require two important things. One is NRC funding for continuation of the licensing process, which the US Congress will have to appropriate. The other is an organization at the US Department of Energy (DOE) that will have to be put in place to carry through the licensing process. “Those are huge ‘ifs,’” McCullum said. The United States has already spent 20 years and nearly $15 billion developing the Yucca Mountain repository. The issue has been embroiled in political controversy since Congress chose the site in 1987 in an amendment to the 1982 Nuclear Waste Repository Act. In 2008,
Entrance to Yucca Mountain under construction (Nov. 2007). Photo: Nuclear Regulatory Commission. *
Rod Ewing is expressing his personal views, not those of the US Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, which he chairs.
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MRS BULLETIN
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VOLUME 40 • JANUARY 2015
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www.mrs.org/bulletin
the DOE submitted a license application to the NRC to construct the repository. But the DOE withdrew its application and Congress terminated funding for the NRC’s application review in 2010. This led states and utilities storing spent fuel to sue the NRC. In August 2013, the federal court of appeals for the DC Circuit ordered the NRC to resume the licensing process using any available funds. The latest report is a result of that court order. Its publication does not mean that the NRC will authorize construction of the repository, but it nudges the licensing process forward. “It gives half a green light,” McCullum said. Next will come detailed, time-consuming hearings by the Atomic Safety Licensing Board (ASLB) on contentions raised by parties that are affected by the repository. Nearly 300 s
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