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Nuclear Waste: Yucca Mountain’s Scrapped, So What Now?

    • One alternative to Yucca, and to reprocessing, is to burn up the spent fuel to start up a fleet of thorium powered nuclear reactors. These have the advantage of producing < 1% of the long lived waste of today's nuclear reactors. The liquid fluoride thorium reactor uses plentiful thorium, converting it to U-233 that reacts to make power. It only needs fissile material, such as the spent urantium fuel, to start up. An introduction to this is available at

    • Reprocessing does not work. Sellafield in the UK is closing as an economic and technical failure. La Hauge dumps radioactive waste into the English Channel and is not economic and requires massive subsidy.

      But more important the volume of the waste that reprocessing produces that requires a deep geological repository is greater than the original irradiated fuel volume. DOE sez reprocessing produces 6 times the volume of the original waste which is higher than Class C waste - which most technicians believe requiring deep geological storage.

      And of course there is a tremendous quantity of lower level wastes which are produced as well.

    • For a very nice set of arguments on why reprocessing does not work, see the Union of Concerned Scientists report from last year:

    • Spent nuclear fuel produces enough free, carbon-free energy to produce the annual U.S oil requirement from Alberta's oil sands.

      Albert's bitumen would be viable using this energy source at current oil prices.

      A recently published study by Australian, French, Canadian and U.S. scientists notes the unprecedented capacity of bitumen to sequester radioactive materials and much of Canada’s bitumen is found beneath a capping shale formation that would further preclude either hydrocarbons or radionuclides from migrating to the surface.

      Such a use is technically indistinguishable from geothermal energy, which is widely acknowledged to be an environmentally sound approach to generating energy.

      Solving the waste problem unleashes nuclear's potential, and this waste can be recycled a second time. In a hundred years, when the heat producing and most radioactive fission products have decayed.

      Reactors like Canada’s CANDU can burn pressurized water reactor fuel, the majority, as is.(no reprocssing required).

    • The above commenter is correct in saying that reprocessing in the UK has been a disaster and about to be halted. The UK uses zero grams of plutonium or uranium separated by reprocessing - that is what reprocessing backers call "recycling." The Japanese have not been able to start up their $20-billion reprocessing plant at Rokkasho. The Russian use 0 grams of their separated plutonium and thousands of tons of dirty uranium from reprocessing sit at reprocessing sites, waiting to be declared waste. The French program continues only because it's a 100% government (socialist) program. It's time to stop this costly reprocessing nonsense and focus on hardened on-site storage of spent fuel.

    • Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't spent nuclear fuel so contaminated with plutonium-240 (NOT Pu-239) that spent nuclear waste CANNOT be used to make weapons.

      When you go "Pu-240 + Wikipedia", they claim it's too prone to spontaneous fission to be used, and too close to Pu-239 to be separated. Isn't this the stuff we want terrorists to steal?

      Is the United States the only country in the world that hasn't leveled with its citizens about the facts surrounding the nuclear fuels uranium and thorium?

      Let's have a national one-hour television special that presents all the facts accurately about nuclear fuels so that people won’t think the government is hiding something.

      Yucca Mountain was a Nixon brainstorm during the Viet Nam War. Spent nuclear fuel should be re-recycled down to nothingness.

    • Jim Holm,
      Terrorists don't need nuclear waste to make bombs, they just have to spray it on to New york or Washington DC and turn them into another Prypyat (the ghost town next to Chernobyl).

      As for an alternative to Yucca Mountain, just build the storage facility on the Moon, seriously. It doesn't even have to be manned, if autonomous contruction machinery can be ferried there and remotely operated.
      US can make tidy sum of money shipping the waste from Earth to Moon (say, a billion dollar per launch?) for other countries too.

    • Current reprocessing adds at most a fraction of a cent/kW-hr to the cost of nuclear electricity. The discharges from LaHauge have a negligible impact on public health and the environment. That said, nobody is talking about using the decades-old reprocessing technologies used at those plants.

      Advanced reprocessing methods will reduce the long-term radiotoxicity of the waste, as well as the bulk of the high-level waste, but this is not the most important point. It will greatly reduce the level of heat generation from the waste. It is heat, not bulk, which limits the capacity of waste repositories.

      We will need at least one repository, such as Yucca Mtn., no matter what we do. With reprocessing, however, we will need only one repository, as opposed to several. We need not hurry into reprocessing, however. It would be no trouble at all to wait a few decades while we develop the technology.

      As for dirty bombs, the (largely unsecured) radioactive materials found in hospitals everywhere is far easier to get, and makes a vastly more effective dirty bomb material (since it is more dispersible and has a higher concentration of radioactivity). Nuclear power does not add appreciably to this risk.

    • re: JimHopf
      ==It is heat, not bulk, which limits the capacity of waste repositories.
      Nuclear waste without the U238 is basically just as "hot" as it was with it.
      As you just mentioned yourself, reprocessing doesn't really do anything but address bulk.
      And bulk isn't the limitation to storage.
      As for Japan, they don't do their own reprocessing. They send it to France.
      And UK is getting out of reprocessing ASAP.

    • This is an opportune time to re-evaluate America’s policy on managing commercial reactor fuel.

      Given the clear need for expansion of nuclear energy (more than 70% of U.S. carbon-free electricity production comes from nuclear power) , the Obama administration and Congress should revisit the decision to use a once-through fuel cycle and instead pursue uranium recycling as part of an integrated approach includes at-reactor storage, private sector or government-owned centralized storage, and continued development and licensing of a federal repository.

      Given the legal obligation that the government has to fulfill its responsibility under that law, the industry believes the NRC’s review of the Yucca Mountain license application should continue. In parallel, the administration should convene an independent panel of the best scientific, environmental, engineering and public policy leaders to fully investigate the critical issues and make a recommendation to President Obama and Congress on how best to proceed with managing used nuclear fuel.

      Centralized storage is a strategic bridge in the uranium fuel management process that would also provide storage for reactor fuel from power plants that have been shut down. The federal government should collaborate with the private sector and other countries on a research and development and demonstration program to recycle reactor fuel in a way that is safe, environmentally acceptable, enhances the worldwide nonproliferation regime and makes sense economically. Other countries are looking at recycling as part of their used nuclear fuel management program and the United States should be constructively engaged in this technology development.

      Through recycling, we can reclaim and reuse a significant amount of energy that remains in uranium fuel and reduce the heat, volume and toxicity of radioactive byproducts that ultimately will be placed in a repository.

    • Let me respond to the WSJ story with some other literary references, both more familiar: "Many years later, as it faced the firing squad" (Marquez), the Yucca Mountain Project announced that "Rumors of its death are greatly exaggerated" (Twain).

      Recognize, as the Obama administration does and Harry Reid does not, that the construction of a repository at Yucca Mountain is a matter of settled law, as codified in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA).

      One does not simply abandon it, kill it, de-fund it, or change the plan. In enacting the NWPA, the government essentially entered into a contract with the nuclear utilities to take possession of their spent nuclear fuel and store it in a geologic repository at Yucca Mountain. By statute, this was supposed to happen by 1998, and the utilities have been suing the pants off the government ever since for breach of contract (to the tune of hundreds of millions annually for costs incurred by the utilities for on-site storage).

      The utilities, through a levy on their customers, have paid over $20 billion into the Nuclear Waste Fund established by the NWPA. They have already paid, in other words, for a solution to the waste storage issue, and under current law that solution is storage at Yucca Mountain.

      What the president's budget statement signals is recognition of the legal and regulatory framework in which the issue was cast. The only way to legally resolve this issue is to change the law, which may prove an uphill battle in Congress (consider the bipartisan votes on Yucca in both chambers, and the support it has received under Democratic and Republican administrations).

      So, despite all the rhetoric and even the budget cuts, we always return to the same proposition: the legislatively mandated process of submitting a license application for a repository at Yucca Mountain will continue, as the law dictates it must.

    • Waste storage is not, and has never been a technical problem. I am a Scientist and the Union of Concerned Scientists doesn't deserve the name. It's depressing that we can't think logically about this. My prediction: the rest of the world, the EU, China, and India will show us what to do and then we will follow with some straightforward, simple storage system.

    • It will be interesting to see what happens to the NWPA - obviously they will have to change the law. I suppose that money will be put back into the hands of the nuclear utilities, or used by the government to implement recycling of fuel. I'd be happy to see the NWPA money used to implement recycling, and/or used by the nuclear generation utilities to implement dry cask storage for all the on-site storage capacity for their fuel that they need.

      It's worth remembering that we're not abandoning Yucca Mountain, we're not "wasting" billions of dollars - the Obama government is not going to backfill it with concrete and burn all the research data.

      We're just putting Yucca Mountain on the back burner for a little while, that's all. If, in 10 years, we decide that Yucca Mountain wasn't such a bad idea after all, we can always go straight back to it where we left off.

      I think that's not actually all that bad, because it gives us time to step back, breathe, and realise that taking this used LWR fuel, which is 96% unchanged uranium, declaring it to be so-called "waste", and throwing it in Yucca really is a little stupid.

      Off the top of my head I can't remember how deep the Yucca tunnels are, but perhaps the facility will be useful for particle physics experiments (neutrino physics, dark matter detection and the like) just like the WIPP site in New Mexico.

      As much as I fully support sensible recycling of nuclear fuel, and I hate to see good material "wasted", I think, yes, we do need a geological repository.

      Even with the efficient use of uranium and actinides, and the extraction of useful fission products, I think we're going to be producing medium-lifetime radioactive fission products (such as Cs-137, Tc-99, Sr-90, or what-have-you) at a rate which will exceed their consumption for useful applications, and therefore, we will have surplus material that will probably be best going to deep geological storage. Add in the transuranic-contaminated waste from the Cold War and the weapons facilities, and industrial and scientific radioactive waste, and yes, it really doesn't hurt to have a deep geological repository such as Yucca mountain.

    • I think we should try to figure out how to send nuclear waste to the sun. Or, maybe we should create a mini sun. Or, maybe we should store it on the moon. Or, maybe we just shoudn't use nuclear energy.

    • Re:comments by Luke & Aaron. As someone who has been in the tunnels, I can tell you that in many places,it is raining and the constant indoor rain was one of the reasons that it was closed. Also it is surrounded by artificial(geological) suppressed water, in fact studies have shown that Yucca Mountain was once under water and stands a good chance of being there again(up to 800 feet above the repository level). Being the third most active earthquakes area in the U.S., next to the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, home to about 1,000 nuclear tests, puts it on pretty shaky ground (pun intended). As far as sending the waste to the Moon, folks seem to forget the two failed mission in which all aboard were killed, talk about a dirty bomb with worldwide implications. But Aaron was total correct in saying maybe we just shouldn't use nuclear energy. Last and most important the land is not owned by the government, but belongs to the Western Shoshone Nation (Newe People) under the treaty of Ruby Valley of 1863, which was and is a treaty of peace and friendship, not a treaty of being defeated by war.

    • I hope the nuclear industry keeps dreaming that environmentalists are supporting new nuclear reactors--because nothing could be further from the truth....but at least their dreams might divert them...

      The reality is that there is not a single environmental group in the US that supports new nuclear reactors--none. The only divergence is on the depth of opposition, with a few groups remaining mildly opposed while the vast majority of environmental organizations--national, regional and local--are even more adamantly opposed to new nukes than they were in the past....

      check, for example, the statement on NIRS' website ( about opposition to nuclear power as a "solution" to the climate crisis. More than 600 groups have signed it, more than 400 from the US.

      Nuclear power is a failed, obsolete technology. For the 21st century, we need to move on to the solar, wind, energy efficiency, smart grid and distributed energy technologies that are going to power our future--without carbon emissions and without radioactive waste.

    • I really do not know which tunnel gregor has been. What he said about the raining and the reason why the tunnel was closed is simply not fact. All the documents regarding Yucca Mountain study are publicly available for scrutiny. It is fine to shut down Yucca Mountain Project for political reasons, but please do not do that in the name of science. Let NRC scientists do an independent evaluation. They are more qualified to talk about science than politicians. As Americans, lets all put our national interests ahead of personal interests and give some respect to science.

    • Here we go again, another DOE megamillion dollar project shot down by politians. Many, many years go I was at Lyons, Kansas, when ERDA's (forerunner of DOE)head of waste management touted an abandoned salt mine at the ultimate answer to the problem. Within a month when the Kansas congressional delegation learned of the plan, and fact that there were significant technical issues, the ultimante disposal plan was scrapped. There is however a simple an practical plan for containing the waste--secured storage in an above ground, massive concrete structures.

    • Maybe they are going to ship it to Asia sites for fees like all the other stuff like used computer junk.

    • Re:Comment by Eric about the rain, I did not mean they closed a tunnel,there is only one u-shaped tunnel, with many alcoves, but the falling/dripping water is why the DOE proposed "Rain shields for the waste containers, made out of titanium" this was one of the factors, which lead to the close of the Yucca Mountain Project, not a tunnel. This is but one of the 229 reasons that the State of Nevada explained in their reasoning that Yucca Mountain was unfit. The original plans called for the repository to protect the bio-sphere (the earth)from any radiation leakage for one million years and if water can percolate into the tunnel, radiation can escape. Yes, I am using science. Also I have been involved in Yucca Mountain for the last 20 years.

    • So instead of one storage site we have 100.

    • Gregor: How have you been "involved" in Yucca for 20 years??? If you were, you'd know that the "original" plan was for 10,000 years -- not 1,000,000 years.

      The only "rain" inside the tunnels was from planned seepage tests performed in the testing alcoves. However, after a rather large rainfall ~2 years ago, there was some leakage into the access tunnel near the opening -- meaning at a shallow depth of earth above the tunnel ceiling and NOT anywhere near where waste packages would be placed.

      Also, if you knew anything about seismic activity, what is felt at the surface is more severe than what is experianced at the depth of the repository.

      Further, if you've been to Yucca Mountain, you'd see the varnish covered rocks (due to natural exposure to the elements) that have not been disturbed for Millions of years!!! Does that sound like a seismically active area to you?

    • Gregor: One more thing... The State's 229 contentions are laughable and amount to whinning -- "we don't want it so don't let it happen"!!! There are only a few (a handful) that might be accepted into the hearing process by the ASLB.

    • Having done comparative analysis between the land use of nuclear vs. wind energy, it has become clear to me nuclear is the only reliable, substantive replacement for coal burning. With the right programs for new reactors and other infrastructure, nuclear power could cut coal, NG and gasoline combustion each by half in 20 years, and at a dispatchable generation cost a fifth that of wind. gram for gram of atmospheric CO2 emission in the sprawl catagory, nuclear wins hands down, requiring less that one two-thousandth the sprawl of wind power.

    • Don't kid yourself. Yucca Mountain was intended to be a disposal facility, not a storage facility. The NRC imposed a 50-year retrievability period for newly emplaced waste, but after that the waste would have been allowed to be irretrievable.

    • I stand corrected about the 1,000,000 miles.

      This spells a major victory for Yucca Mountain - located “in the heart of the Western Shoshone Nation” - and to all opponents of the dump site, who’ve continually warned about the danger it would pose to all life in the region.

      All it would take is one earthquake.

      Over the past 20 years there have been more than 600 recorded seismic events that registered over 2.5 on the Richter scale, all of which occurred within a 50-mile radius of the site - the largest being the 1992 Little Skull Mountain earthquake which registered 5.6 and caused damage to the DOE’s Yucca Mountain project office( of over 1 million dollars). Another nearby earthquake occurred 10 years later, measuring 4.2.

      The DOE originally claimed the area would only see one earthquake about “every 10,000 years.”

      But the EPA radiation standards for standards for Yucca Mountain- For the first 10,000 years after nuclear waste is buried at Yucca, the federal agency set a standard of 15 additional millirem of annual radiation exposure -- the equivalent of a chest X-ray.

      For thousands of years after that, and for up to one million years, the amount of allowable additional radiation exposure would be 100 millirem annually. this could only be achieved by moved the border where reading were taken 25 miles for the Dump (One on the two major roadways north to South Hwy 95 is located in this25 mile area). Radiation as we know is 4 times less for each foot away from the original source, so to comply they moved the border the 25 miles away, so how hot is it at the Dump?

    • LOS ANGELES, Feb 17 (Reuters) - The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved a rule for allowable radiation levels at the proposed nuclear waste site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada for up to 1 million years, the NRC announced on Tuesday.


      The NRC kept the EPA's rule of limiting the dose of radiation to 15 millirem for the first 10,000 years after disposal. Now, the NRC has adopted the EPA's limit of 100 millirem from 10,001 years to 1 million years.

    • It looks like gregor is making stuff up. We have to wonder what the seismic deign of his house is. If you are dead and buried after an earthquake, radiation is the least of your worries. Of course DOE designs the facility to withstand seismic events.
      Also gregor is not correctly applying the inverse square law. Double the distance from the source of radiation and the dose decreases by a factor of 4. Shielding must be taken into account. We currently safely operating navy reactors on ships. It only takes a few feet of water to provide shielding.

      The source of exposure is not radiation from the mountain. Several ice age intervals (hundred of thousands of years) from uranium will leach out of the mountain and possible end up in a well. Just like it does now in nature. You can hold uranium in hour hand because your skin provides shielding but should not take it intrally.

      For those like gregor concerned about radiation, you may want to stop eating bananas since they are radioactive too.

    • Folks you can try to poke as many holes as you want in my comments. Yes I was incorrect about 10,000 years (but remember that the English channel is only 5,000 years old) vs one million years in initial DEIS, but as quoted
      in Slate magazine: One million years is a long time. A million years ago, Homo erectus (who looked like this, not this) was getting ready to invent the hand axe and discover fire. Yet 1 million years is the length of time that the Bush administration was preparing to guarantee (apparently to our successor hominid species) the safe storage of spent nuclear fuel rods inside Nevada's Yucca Mountain, in a waste facility whose approval had been making its way through three branches of government for a comparatively brief 32 years. The goal was to start dumping this high-level nuclear waste inside Yucca Mountain in 2020. Here is how the Bush Department of Energy forecast the year 1,002,020 A.D. in a safety report issued this past June when it submitted an application for Yucca Mountain's approval to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission URL:

      If my inverse square law is also incorrect why don't the build a water shield around the Dump? Why did they extent the original boundaries out to a distance of 25 miles? This was done so the the EPA radiation doses could fall with in the guide lines.

      But the fact still stand that the government does not own the land on with the Suppository is to be built and the present President does not want Yucca Mountain because it fails to live up to good science. You can nit pick all you want. BUT YUCCA MOUNTAIN IS DEAD.

    • Also from the Slate article as quoted above- Which is why I talk one million years is:

      This constituted remarkable long-term planning for an administration that refused to provide 10-year budget projections. It was imposed from without. Originally, Yucca Mountain required "only" a 10,000-year safety guarantee, but in 2004 a federal court insisted on a million-year standard, citing concerns in a 1995 study by the National Academy of Sciences that the nuclear waste would take much longer than 10,000 years to reach maximum exposure levels. The NAS had said a reasonably accurate assessment could be made of the site's geology over the next million years. (After that, not so much!) The Environmental Protection Agency duly issued its first-ever million-year regulation, setting a maximum legal limit for release of radioactive materials at 15 millirem per year for the first 10,000 years and 100 millirem for the next 990,000.

      This is why I talk one million years, many things changed since the "Screw Nevada Bill" of 1978 was passed. including rain shields, radiation protection. We need an alternative power source than nuclear, period.

    • I am so glad that Yucca Mountain has been halted. It is ridiculous to me that we continue to have nuclear power. It is obvious that there is problem with the spent fuel and I am astonished that we continue to make more. I think it is quite fitting that people and communities that use nuclear power must deal with the radiation. If they just ship it off to Yucca Mountain they are not solving the problem. Are we really an "out of sight, out of mind" society? Nuclear power is not the answer to our energy crisis. Are we so stupid that we are fighting about where to put this dangerous byproduct? We should be finding a way to quite making it. It is so obvious that there is no solution on where to store radiation. Why are we making more??? Talk about leaving a problem for the next generation.

    • When can the nuclear industry expect the refund of decades worth of mandatory storage fees that paid for Yucca Mountain? Reprocessing and permanent on-site storage=problem solved.

    • The nuclear waste is already in existence, so I don't think the argument that we shouldn't do anything really makes sense. If you want a true alternative to the base load that nuclear provides, then there is one which is coal. I think people should try to speak about this with some scientific knowledge. Wind and Solar cannot provide base-load power. Hydro does a decent job, but obviously it requires an ideal location. By saying you don't want nuclear, you are essentially saying you want coal. The new designs for nuclear power have redundant systems, and features that make it extremely safe. On top of the fact that the old nuclear plants have been running safely for years. I believe we should maximize our use of wind, solar, and hydro, but it is a fact that it will never cover the base-load demand that nuclear can, and coal and oil currently provide the majority of.

    • Radioactivity doesn't only exist in nuclear power plants. There are naturally radioactive materials, and even radioactive gas called radon which can become a problem in homes. It would be completely safe for you to stand outside of a nuclear power plant, and the radioactivity would probably be the same at your house miles away. The real danger is leaving nuclear waste out in multiple locations for multiple companies to manage. If there was already an alternative available, this decision might make sense, but how is it safer to have this sitting at plants which really are closer to populated areas.

    • @Casey,

      So what are you going to power the nation on if not nuclear? For your majority of baseline power you need something that is reliable and consistent that will provide the majority of your power. Solar and wind power are good supplemental power sources but they be relied upon to provide all the power on their own. There isn't enough geothermal power available to do the job either. Hydroelectric is a good, reliable power source for baseline power but the US is already the second largest hydro-electric power producer, we've already put up all the dams we can where it would be worth spit.

      That pretty much leaves you with coal, oil, and nuclear power. You will be exposed to more radioactivity from the release of radioactive elements in coal than you will /ever/ be exposed to from a nuclear power plant. Not to mention all the other toxins that coal and oil release. Meanwhile nuclear power just produces solid waste that is easy to manage and dispose of. It is then put on disposal rail car, which have been tested reliable in a plethora of conditions including explosions and being hit by other trains, and then taken to a facility to be disposed of. Also even if somehow, someway, one of the rail cars did rupture, the waste isn't the glowing green goo of doom you see in movies, it's solid pellets that wouldn't harm you unless you sat on it for a week.

      I totally understand the whole Not In My Back Yard mentality, but let's be frank. Everything has risk, and you /must/ provide power for the millions of people in the country. Without that reliable power people heating and cooling homes and ensuring water pumping and filtering stations function people will /die/. People are constantly complaining about oil and coal plants, rightly so, but at the same time have been brainwashed all their lives against clean new alternatives like nuclear. Nuclear power isn't more prevalent in this country not because it's not a better solution, but fear mongering from groups like Greenpeace have used law to drive it into the ground until it isn't possible. So we stick with coal and oil, and lip service is paid about how coal and oil are dirty sources of power, but we can't get off it because they've taken the only viable alternative off the table, and so as a result more oil and coal plants get built.

      So enjoy being forced to build all these solar and wind power plants, just don't be confused when the number of coal and oil power plants doesn't drop.

    • It is idiotic not to consider the nuclear power option. No oil, no gas (too much carbon, but that is another hoax). Lets cut down trees and put solar power farms in like in Florida. Lets put in visually offensive wind mills....Kennedy didnt want them in his back yard. Get a life folks, we need to solve this problem, and there are costs for each of them.

    • Coal and gas power plants will drop, but it will becaue of CAP and TRADE

    • I just attended tghe NRC Atomic Safety Licensing Board Panel today. Yucca Mountain is on track in licensing dispite the misinformed assumption that the project is scrapped. See all the activity in the NRC ASLBP at: My organization, theNnatitive Community Action Council is a party with standing in the proceedings. If Obama doesn't kill the project, a few Indians will. We own the site and that is our contention accepted by the NRC in the proceedings.


    • i am doing a debate at school on this. Does anyone have some ideas.

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