Slow Train to Yucca Mountain

Nevada's opposition to Yucca Mountain must be viewed from the perspective of other activities that create potential long term hazards. In particular, Nevada's gold mining industry as caused environmental damage with deep open pit mines that will cause vastly larger hazards than Yucca ever could, and it is revealing that neither Nevada nor antinuclear organizations either make this comparison or fight to end the this mining. The most recent DOE analysis of Yucca Mountain's most likely long term performance show that the potential doses to people over the next million years will be less than 1% of their natural background exposure, a value that easily complies with the EPA safety standard. If the Nuclear Regulatory Commission finds that the DOE predictions are technically and scientifically sound, then it will issue a license. The article is misleading in saying that the repository would be full any time soon, since this is due to a statutory limit that could be easily changed. The actual capacity of the site for spent fuel is much larger, and if that fuel were recycled and the heavy elements transmuted in reactors, the capacity would become vastly larger. The article also never mentions that the cost of the repository is fully funded by fees paid by electricity consumers, and thus nuclear's waste costs are fully internalized in contrast to fossil fuels. Our most important goal now is to move forward with the license application submission and NRC review, and to allow the NRC to reach its independent scientific and technical assessment of whether the application demonstrates compliance with the EPA safety requirements.

This article has serious factual problems that call the author's credibility into question. 1. Spent fuel is enriched uranium, not depleted uranium. 2. The sentence that alleges "DOE insists Yucca Mountain was never supposed to be a geologic repository" is simply false. It's a mountain, and all scientific safety studies rely on geology as well as engineering (as required by law). Finally, the only two people quoted are longtime anti-nuclear activists with little, if any, scientific credibility. Why nothing from the DOE, or at least someone with scientific qualifications? I believe your readers are skeptical, if nothing else. These questions should give them pause, and hopefully send them looking for facts.

Judith - If you would bear with me for a moment, perhaps I can clear up a couple of misunderstandings here.

First of all, depleted uranium is not synonymous with uranium-238. A quantity of uranium is considered to be "depleted" only when the ratio of U-235 to U-238 is less than that of natural uranium (i.e., U-235/U-238 is less than 0.0072). Even weapons-grade uranium has a substantial amount of U-238 in it (up to 10% or more), but one wouldn't refer to it as "depleted uranium" -- that would be ridiculous.

Next, U-238 is converted to plutonium in substantial quantities only in reactors that are specially designed for that purpose. Reprocessing is not the process of turning U-238 into plutonium; it is the process of separating the plutonium and the uranium from the other materials (fission and decay products) coming out of a reactor. Today, in places like France, the plutonium is used to generate more electricity in their reactors by turning it into a type of fuel called MOX. The uranium is stored and could be used as fuel sometime in the future.

Although depleted uranium is not simply U-238, you have greatly underestimated the length of time that it remains "deadly." Uranium is a heavy metal, and so like some other heavy metals -- such as mercury or lead -- it is chemically toxic (in sufficient quantities in the body) essentially forever. Uranium 238's half-life of over four billion years, while impressively long, is not a reasonable measure of how long the material is hazardous; rather it indicates that U-238's level radioactivity is very very very low. U-238's radiological hazards are vanishingly small; its chemical hazards are on par with something like lead.

Finally, just because the DOE has decided to use a combination of natural and engineered barriers as the basis for its licensing plan for Yucca Mountain, that does not disqualify it from being called a "geological repository." It would be called by this term in any country in the world. After all, if the storage casks are the only factor that matters, why put them deep underground at all?

Pluto Boy

You are in outer space, my friend.

Per never said that gold was radioactive. What he said was "...Nevada's gold mining industry has caused environmental damage with deep open pit mines that will cause vastly larger hazards than Yucca ever could..." Environmental damage includes such things as loss of wildlife habitat, stream damage, leaching of heavy metals, etc.

Secondly, you sound opposed to recycling used nuclear fuel. Are you against recycling in general or just nuclear fuel? Recycling nuclear fuel can reclaim 90% of the used material. This reduces the waste volume and provides another source for powering nuclear power plants.

One thing we are doing you might appreciate. We are recycling nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union to produce fuel for nuclear power plants. Now, a BIG caution here. The concentration of "bomb grade" uranium and plutonium (hey...your name is in there Pluto Boy!) is much much higher than that used for nuclear power. The fuel we use to make electricity cannot blow up like a bomb.

Most of what I read about Yucca Mountain and other nuclear waste repositories implies that the waste will be left there forever, as in geologic time. There's probably nowhere on earth that is immune from disruptive changes in water table or geology if one looks ahead far enough. We should look at waste repositories as a means to buy time until we find another strategy to deal with nuclear waste. Yucca Mountain looks one way if we look ahead many thousand or millions of years, and it looks like something different, like a good safe way to store waste, if we look ahead for some decades or hundreds of years. In that time, we'll either find a new way to store waste, blast it into space, or most likely reuse it. Isn't this the most likely thing that will happen, especially when we consider that it's already being done elsewhere?
Yucca Mountain may not be flawless, but it's paid for and already built. Nuclear power may not be flawless, by any means, but as we consider climate change from use of fossil fuel and environmental degradation brought on by mining for it, isn't it our most innocuous alternative? If lack of a waste repository is impeding development of our most innocuous alternative, shouldn't we get real about what needs to be done?

Please read, Power to Save the World which is a book by a former adamant protesting journalist and mother who grew up near the testing sites. It explains that the military has a storage facility within the salt deposits near Los Alamos. It is very safe and could hold all of our commercial waste past and future.

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