The possibility that U.S. nuclear waste could be used in a radiological “dirty bomb” if not interred at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is not a compelling argument in favor of the always controversial project, experts said after a lawmaker from Texas cited the threat.
Republican Rep. Pete Olson late last month at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing called Yucca Mountain a “20-year story of raw politics – state versus state, Republican versus Republican, Democrat versus Democrat.”
The plan to bury tens of thousands of tons of spent nuclear reactor fuel and high-level waste 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas inched forward for decades before being canceled by the Obama administration. The Trump administration appears ready to resume the project, reigniting opposition from leaders in Nevada.
“I support Yucca Mountain for one simple reason: Yucca Mountain ensures that America’s more secure from attacks by terrorists with radioactive weapons,” Olson said, arguing that terrorists could attempt to obtain spent fuel now stored on-site at nuclear reactors in hopes of producing a dirty bomb.
Such a weapon, which would use conventional explosives to spread radioactive material, would be far easier to manufacture than an actual nuclear bomb.
However, Miles Pomper, a senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said by email “there is very little connection” between dirty bombs and Yucca Mountain.
“While any irradiated plutonium is in spent fuel in dry cask storage it’s pretty secure from terrorists given the casks weigh tons and plutonium in spent fuel inside would have to somehow be separated from spent fuel,” Pomper said. “This is not a compelling argument for Yucca Mountain although finding a repository somewhere is needed for many other reasons.”
Several other issue observers concurred that the dirty bomb concern is not a sufficiently credible argument for the project. Jack Spencer, vice president of the Heritage Foundation’s Institute for Economic Freedom and Opportunity, said by email that among the “million reasons to build Yucca Mountain,” protecting against dirty bombs is not one of them.
“American utilities have done an outstanding job of safely and securely storing nuclear waste in the absence of Yucca Mountain,” he said, pointing to the material’s storage in casks at heavily guarded sites. “Assuming that a terrorist could get to where the waste is stored, which I would say is highly, highly doubtful, actually getting their hands on the waste and fashioning it into a dirty bomb would be next to impossible for any number of reasons, the least of which is that the stuff is very radioactive and harmful to an unprotected human.”
“I would actually say that the argument is counterproductive because it depends on the narrative that nuclear waste is not being safely stored, which is not true and feeds into the misperception that all things nuclear are really dangerous. They are not,” Spencer said.
Olson’s office did not reply to a request for comment.
Congress in the 1987 decided on Yucca Mountain as the location for the Department of Energy to permanently store what is now roughly 75,000 metric tons of spent fuel currently at nuclear plants around the country – plus the additional 2,000 tons they produce each year.
The Obama DOE replaced the program in favor of “consent-based siting” for separate repositories for commercial and defense waste. Following a 2010 motion DOE filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to withdraw its Yucca license, Olson signed on to a lawmaker letter to then-Energy Secretary Steven Chu calling on the administration to halt actions toward dismantling Yucca operations at least until resolving the legal action involving withdrawal of the license.
Now, the Trump administration wants to restart the Energy Department’s application to license the project with the NRC in fiscal 2018. The White House proposed for the next fiscal year spending $120 million on both Yucca licensing activities and work on consolidated interim storage sites for power plant spent nuclear fuel. Meanwhile, the omnibus appropriations bill signed into law on May 5 provides no funding for Yucca for this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.
A number of municipalities in Texas have already expressed concern about the shipment of nuclear waste through their jurisdictions – though this has to date focused on proposed sites in West Texas and southeastern New Mexico that would hold the material until the permanent repository is ready. A map of major commercial rail lines in Texas published in February by the San Antonio Express-News indicated spent fuel from nuclear plants is likely to pass through Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio on its way to storage.
Olson’s district in southeastern Texas is approximately one hour away from the commercial South Texas Nuclear Generating Station, one of the sites from which DOE would ship radioactive materials to interim or permanent storage. An Amtrak national rail route also passes through this area and cuts through the middle of the state.
In March, the state of Texas filed a lawsuit against the Department of Energy and other federal agencies, demanding they move ahead with Yucca Mountain and highlighting the risk of radioactive waste currently stored at nuclear power plants in Texas and across the nation. The state of Nevada, the Nuclear Energy Institute, and a number of utilities have filed to intervene in opposition to some or all of Texas’ demands; the lawsuit is in mediation.
In its 2008 final supplemental environmental impact statement on Yucca, DOE said it examined the possibility of an act of sabotage either at Yucca or during the transport of spent nuclear fuel and has “required enhanced security measures to protect against these threats, and developed emergency planning requirements that would mitigate potential consequences.”
“Whether acts of sabotage or terrorism would occur, and the exact nature and location of the events or the magnitude of the consequences of such acts if they were to occur, is inherently uncertain―the possibilities are infinite,” according to the study.
The agency also noted that spent nuclear fuel shipping casks are designed to remain subcritical: “It is highly unlikely that a terrorist event would cause the contents of a shipping cask to achieve a nuclear criticality, even if the event disrupted the contents of the cask.”
