By John Stang
The proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada could conceivably end up receiving 150,000 metric tons of radioactive waste by the second half of this century, according to a Nevada state government analysis of a proposed U.S. Senate bill intended to advance the disposal project.
The April 29 memo from Bob Halstead, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, is another salvo in the state’s decades-long fight against the planned Department of Energy disposal site. In this case, the target is legislation pending from Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wy.).
The discussion draft of the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2019, according to Halstead: would allow a mobile retrievable storage facility in Nevada; does not guarantee the nation’s nuclear waste would avoid Las Vegas while being sent to Yucca Mountain; and ignores adverse economic impacts if something goes wrong with the transportation and storage of the material.
Barrasso’s draft is effectively identical to 2017 legislation from Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) that got a strong push in the House but died in the Senate in the last Congress. It contains a set of measures to advance both temporary storage of the nation’s nuclear waste in a small number of locations and the final repository in Nevada.
The legislation remains in development, Sarah Durdaller, spokeswoman for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said this week. Barrasso chairs the panel. The bill is also expected to be introduced in the House.
During a May 1 committee hearing on the discussion draft of the bill, Barrasso pointed to the legislation as a “solution” to the longstanding impasse over disposal of the nation’s spent commercial nuclear reactor fuel and high-level radioactive waste from defense nuclear operations. He said the federal government faces more than $35 billion in liability payments for failing to meet its legal mandate to remove the used fuel from nuclear power plants.
“This number increases with every day Washington delays. We can’t walk away from the law of the land,” Barrasso said in his opening statement to the hearing. “We can’t start over and let another 40 years pass to solve this challenge.”
In the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, Congress directed the Department of Energy to begin taking waste for disposal by Jan. 31, 1998. In 1987, it amended the law to direct the waste solely to Yucca Mountain. The Energy Department has not yet accepted any of the material and does not have a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license for the Nevada repository.
The Trump administration is seeking about $150 million in fiscal 2020 to resume licensing work at DOE and the NRC for Yucca Mountain. Congress has rejected similar requests for fiscal 2018 and the current fiscal 2019
The Barrasso bill offers a set of amendments to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, including: authorizing the secretary of energy to enter into an agreement with a private entity for siting, construction, and operation of one or more “monitored retrievable storage” facility for nuclear waste; permanently withdrawing 147,000 acres of federal land in Nye County, Nev., for the Yucca project and transferring authority from the Interior Department to the Energy Department; and requiring the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to consider construction authorization for the repository within 30 months after the bill is enacted.
The measure would increase the limit of wastes at the repository from 70,000 metric tons to 110,000 metric tons. “If this change is permitted, Congress will almost certainly further revise upward or eliminate the capacity limit,” Halstead wrote in his memo to the state’s congressional delegation and Gov. Steve Sisolak (D).
The analysis estimated that the United States will create 150,000 metric tons of high-level radioactive waste and spent fuel by 2050. While a second repository closer to the East Coast had at one been considered in the disposal plan, Congress in 1987 limited the disposal approach to Yucca Mountain.
Halstead noted that the proposed bill does not forbid wastes from being transported by rail or highway through Las Vegas. “The bill does not require DOE to select routes to avoid Las Vegas; it says DOE “should consider’ such routes ‘to the extent practicable.’ There is no evidence in past DOE transportation studies that avoiding Las Vegas would be either practicable or practical. If it was easy, DOE would have already selected routes that would avoid Las Vegas,” the report said.
Two corporate teams have applied for NRC licenses for consolidated interim storage facilities in West Texas and southeastern New Mexico that could hold the spent fuel until the permanent repository is ready. Both operations hope to be up and running early in the next decade.
If the nation’s spent fuel is consolidated at the New Mexico and Texas sites, the most direct route to Yucca Mountain would be through Las Vegas, according to Halstead. The only way to avoid Las Vegas would be with a widely swinging route to significantly northeast of Yucca Mountain, then taking a long west route before moving south, he wrote.
The Barrasso bill “would increase the amount of radioactive waste that would be shipped across the country by over 57%, traveling by rail and road right through the heart of Las Vegas,” Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) wrote in a column published Thursday in the Las Vegas Sun. “That would mean multiple shipments of 110,000 metric tons of nuclear waste across the country and straight to Nevada, every week for more than 50 years. It’s hard to imagine that shipping over 5,000 truck casks of high-level nuclear waste over 50 years wouldn’t result in at least one radiological release somewhere in our country.”
Durdaller and Shimkus spokesman Jordan Haverly this week said actual transport routes have not been set. In separate emails, they noted that Barrasso’s proposed bill includes language making it ”a sense of Congress that DOE should consider routes that, to the extent practicable, avoid Las Vegas. “
Haverly pointed to a 2007 Electric Power Research Institute study that found a Yucca Mountain repository could safely hold four to nine times the original 70,000-metric-ton target — potentially up to 630,000 metric tons — of waste. Durdaller added: “The bill would still maintain the need for a second repository, but it would update the law to account for the delay that resulted from Nevada’s opposition to the project.”
On the mobile retrievable storage facility, both spokespeople wrote that Nevada cannot be forced to host a facility against its will.
The proposed bill promises Nevada $15 million in federal money annually before the first waste arrives at Yucca Mountain, a one-time payment of $400 million when the first shipment arrives, and yearly federal payments of $40 million afterward.
“The bill ignores Nevada’s long-standing position that no amount of monetary benefits can compensate for the coerced selection of an unsafe site. … If this bill moves forward, the entire subject of benefits payments will require further analysis,” Halstead wrote.
He also wrote that the bill ignores potential adverse economic impacts from contractors damaging the Yucca Mountain area, evacuations due to transportation accidents, and business losses due to transportation accidents.
On the economic impacts, Durdaller wrote: “Title IV of the discussion draft allows the state Nevada to enter into an agreement with the secretary of energy to address impacts if something goes wrong at Yucca Mountain or in the transportation of fuel and waste there. The discussion draft requires the secretary of energy to update the report under Section 175 of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to identify how to mitigate the following ‘potential impacts of locating a repository at the Yucca Mountain site’: public health, law enforcement, fire protection, medical care, transportation and management of accidents involving hi-level radioactive wastes.”
