Yucca Mountain Repository

The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, as designated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act amendments of 1987, is a proposed deep geological repository storage facility within Yucca Mountain for spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste in the United States. The site is on federal land adjacent to the Nevada Test Site in Nye County, Nevada, about northwest of the Las Vegas Valley.

The project was approved in 2002 by the 107th United States Congress, but the 112th Congress ended federal funding for the site via amendment to the Department of Defense and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, passed on April 14, 2011, during the Obama Administration. The project has encountered many difficulties and was highly contested by the public, the Western Shoshone peoples, and many politicians. The project also faces strong state and regional opposition. The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons.

This leaves the United States government (which disposes of its transuranic waste from nuclear weapons production below the surface at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico) and American nuclear power plants without any designated long-term storage for their high-level radioactive waste (spent fuel) stored on-site in steel and concrete casks ( dry cask storage) at 76 reactor sites in 34 states.

Under President Barack Obama, the Department of Energy (DOE) reviewed options other than Yucca Mountain for a high-level waste repository. The Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, established by the Secretary of Energy, released its final report in January 2012. It detailed an urgent need to find a site suitable for constructing a consolidated geological repository, stating that any future facility should be developed by a new independent organization with direct access to the Nuclear Waste Fund, which is not subject to political and financial control as the Cabinet-level DOE is. But the site met with strong opposition in Nevada, including from then-Senate leader Harry Reid.

Under President Donald Trump, the DOE ceased deep borehole and other non–Yucca Mountain waste disposition research activities. For FY18, the DOE requested $120 million and the NRC $30 million from Congress to continue licensing activities for the Yucca Mountain Repository. For FY19, the DOE again requested $120 million but the NRC increased its request to $47.7 million. Congress decided to provide no funding for the remainder of FY18. In May 2019, Representative John Shimkus reintroduced a bill in the House for the site, but the Appropriation Committee killed an amendment by Representative Mike Simpson to add $74 million in Yucca Mountain funding to a DOE appropriations bill. On May 20, 2020, Under Secretary of Energy Mark W. Menezes testified in front of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that Trump strongly opposes proceeding with Yucca Mountain Repository.

In May 2021, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said that Yucca Mountain would not be part of the Biden administration's plans for nuclear-waste disposal. She anticipated announcing the department's next steps "in the coming months".

Introduction

Spent nuclear fuel is the radioactive by-product of electricity generation at commercial nuclear power plants, and high-level radioactive waste is the by-product of reprocessing spent fuel to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons. In 1982, Congress established a national policy to solve the problem of nuclear waste disposal. This policy is a federal law called the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which made the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) responsible for finding a site, building, and operating an underground disposal facility called a geologic repository. The recommendation to use a geologic repository dates to 1957, when the National Academy of Sciences recommended that the best way to protect the environment and public health and safety is to dispose of the waste in rock deep underground.

The DOE began studying Yucca Mountain in 1978 to determine whether it would be suitable for the nation's first long-term geologic repository for over (150 million pounds) of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste as of 2015 stored at 121 sites around the nation. An estimated of the waste would be from America's military nuclear programs.

On December 19, 1984, the DOE selected ten locations in six states for consideration as potential repository sites, based on data collected for nearly ten years. The ten sites were studied and results of these preliminary studies were reported in 1985. Based on these reports, President Ronald Reagan approved three sites for intensive scientific study called site characterization. The three sites were Hanford, Washington; Deaf Smith County, Texas; and Yucca Mountain.

In 1987, Congress amended the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and directed DOE to study only Yucca Mountain, which is adjacent to the former nuclear test site. The Act provided that if during site characterization Yucca Mountain was found unsuitable, studies would stop immediately. This option expired when Reagan actually recommended the site.
On July 23, 2002, President George W. Bush signed House Joint Resolution 87, () allowing the DOE to take the next step in establishing a safe repository in which to store nuclear waste. The DOE was to begin accepting spent fuel at the Yucca Mountain Repository by January 31, 1998, but did not do so because of a series of delays due to legal challenges, concerns over how to transport nuclear waste to the facility, and political pressure resulting in underfunding of the construction.

On July 18, 2006, the DOE proposed March 31, 2017, as the date to open the facility and begin accepting waste based on full funding. On September 8, 2006, Bush nominated Ward (Edward) Sproat, a nuclear industry executive formerly of PECO energy in Pennsylvania, to lead the Yucca Mountain Project. Following the 2006 midterm Congressional elections, Harry Reid, a longtime opponent of the repository, became the Senate Majority Leader, putting him in a position to greatly affect the future of the project. Reid said he would continue to work to block completion of the project, and is quoted as having said, "Yucca Mountain is dead. It'll never happen."

In the 2008 Omnibus Spending Bill, the Yucca Mountain Project's budget was reduced to $390 million. The project was able to reallocate resources and delay transportation expenditures to complete the License Application for submission on June 3, 2008. During his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to abandon the project. After his election, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told Obama he did not have the ability to do so. On April 23, 2009, Lindsey Graham and eight other senators introduced legislation to provide "rebates" from a $30 billion federally managed fund into which nuclear power plants had been paying, so as to refund all collected funds if Congress canceled the project.

In November 2013, in response to a lawsuit filed by the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners and the Nuclear Energy Institute, the US court of appeals ruled that nuclear utilities may stop paying into the nuclear waste recovery fund until either the DOE follows the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which designates Yucca Mountain as the repository, or Congress changes the law. The fee ended May 16, 2014.

Lacking an operating repository, the federal government initially paid utility companies somewhere between $300 and $500 million per year in compensation for failing to comply with the contract it signed to take the spent nuclear fuel by 1998. For the ten years after 2015 it is estimated to cost taxpayers $24 billion in payments from the Judgment Fund. The Judgment Fund is not subject to budget rules and allows Congress to ignore the nuclear waste issue since payments therefrom do not have any impact on yearly spending for other programs.

Facility

The purpose of the Yucca Mountain project is to comply with the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 and develop a national site for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste storage. The management and operating contractor as of April 1, 2009 for the project is USA Repository Services (USA-RS), a wholly owned subsidiary of URS Corporation (now part of AECOM) with supporting principal subcontractors Shaw Corporation (now part of McDermott International Inc.) and Areva Federal Services LLC (now Orano federal services business).

After the layoff of 800 employees on March 31, 2009, about 100 employees remained on the project until all technical staff were laid off by the end of FY 2010 due to zero funding in the 2011 budget for the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management. Sandia National Laboratories was responsible for post-closure analysis and ensuring compliance with the NWPA. The main tunnel of the Exploratory Studies Facility is U-shaped, long and wide.10 CFR 63

There are also several cathedral-like alcoves that branch from the main tunnel. Most of the scientific experiments were conducted in these alcoves. The emplacement drifts (smaller-diameter tunnels branching off the main tunnel) where waste would have been stored were not constructed since they required authorization from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The repository has a statutory limit of .

To store that much waste would have required of tunnels. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act further limits the capacity of the repository to of initial heavy metal in commercial spent fuel. The 104 U.S. commercial reactors currently operating will produce this quantity of spent fuel by 2014, assuming that the spent fuel rods are not reprocessed. Currently, the US has no civil reprocessing plant.

By 2008, Yucca Mountain was one of the most studied pieces of geology in the world; between geologic studies and materials science, the United States had invested US$9 billion on the project. This site studied by the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology (NBMG) differs substantially from other potential repositories due to the finding of natural analogues of nuclear material that are currently being studied. The DOE estimates that it has over 100 million U.S. gallons of highly radioactive waste and of spent fuel from the production of nuclear weapons and from research activities in temporary storage.

The cost of the facility is being paid for by a combination of a tax on each kilowatt hour of nuclear power and by the taxpayers for disposal of weapons and naval nuclear waste. Based on the 2001 cost estimate, about 73% is funded by consumers of nuclear-powered electricity and 27% by the taxpayers.

The Total System Life Cycle Cost Director Sproat presented to Congress on July 15, 2008, was $90 billion. This cost could not be compared to previous estimates since it included a repository capacity about twice as large as previously estimated over a much longer period of time (100 years vs. 30 years). Additionally, the cost of the project continued to escalate because of insufficient funding to most efficiently move forward and complete the project. By 2007, the DOE announced it was seeking to double the size of the Yucca Mountain repository to a capacity of , or 300 million pounds.

The tunnel boring machine (TBM) that excavated the main tunnel cost $13 million and was long when in operation. It now sits at its exit point at the South Portal (south entrance) of the facility. The short side tunnel alcoves were excavated using explosives.

Opposition

The DOE was scheduled to begin accepting spent fuel at the Yucca Mountain repository by . By 2010, years after this deadline, the future status of the repository at Yucca Mountain was still unknown due to ongoing litigation, and opposition by Harry Reid.

Because of construction delays, a number of nuclear power plants in the United States have resorted to dry cask storage of waste on-site indefinitely in steel and concrete casks.

The project is widely opposed in Nevada and is a hotly debated national topic. A two-thirds majority of Nevadans feel it is unfair for their state to have to store nuclear waste when there are no nuclear power plants in Nevada. Many Nevadans' opposition stemmed from the so-called "Screw Nevada Bill," the 1987 legislation halting study of Hanford and Texas as potential sites for the waste before conclusions could be made. The county containing the proposed facility, Nye County, supports the repository's development, as do six adjoining counties. A 2015 survey of Nevadans found 55% agreeing that the state should be open to discussion of what benefits could be received.

One point of concern has been the standard of radiation emission in 10,000 to 1,000,000 years. On August 9, 2005, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a limit of 350 millirem per year for that period. In October 2007, the DOE issued a draft of the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement showing that for the first 10,000 years mean public dose would be 0.24 mrem/year and that thereafter the median public dose would be 0.98 mrem/year, both of which are substantially below the proposed EPA limit. For comparison, a hip X-ray results in a dose around 83 mrem and a CT head or chest scan results in around 1,110 mrem. Annually, in the United States, an individual's dose from background radiation is about 350 mrem, though some places get more than twice that.

On February 12, 2002, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham decided that this site was suitable to be the nation's nuclear repository. The governor of Nevada had 90 days to object and did so, but Congress overrode the objection. If the governor's objection had stood, the project would have been abandoned and a new site chosen. In August 2004, the repository became an election issue when Senator John Kerry said he would abandon the plans if elected.

In March 2005, the Energy and Interior departments revealed that several U.S. Geological Survey hydrologists had exchanged emails discussing possible falsification of quality assurance documents on water infiltration research. On February 17, 2006, the DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM) released a report confirming the technical soundness of infiltration modeling work performed by U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) employees. In March 2006, the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Majority Staff issued a 25-page white paper, "Yucca Mountain: The Most Studied Real Estate on the Planet." The conclusions were:

* Extensive studies consistently show Yucca Mountain to be a sound site for nuclear waste disposal
* The cost of not moving forward is extremely high
* Nuclear waste disposal capability is an environmental imperative
* Nuclear waste disposal capability supports national security
* Demand for new nuclear plants also demands disposal capability

On January 18, 2006, DOE OCRWM announced that it would designate Sandia National Laboratories as its lead laboratory to integrate repository science work for the Yucca Mountain Project. "We believe that establishing Sandia as our lead laboratory is an important step in our new path forward. The independent, expert review that the scientists at Sandia will perform will help ensure that the technical and scientific basis for the Yucca Mountain repository is without question," OCRWM's Acting Director Paul Golan said. "Sandia has unique experience in managing scientific investigations in support of a federally licensed geologic disposal facility, having served in that role as the scientific advisor to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico." Sandia began acting as the lead laboratory on October 1, 2006.

Because of questions raised by the State of Nevada and Congressional members about the quality of the science behind Yucca Mountain, the DOE announced on March 31, 2006, the selection of Oak Ridge Associated Universities/ Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (a not-for-profit consortium that includes 96 doctoral degree-granting institutions and 11 associate member universities) to provide expert reviews of scientific and technical work on the Yucca Mountain Project. DOE stated that the project "will be based on sound science. By bringing in Oak Ridge for review of technical work, DOE will seek to present a high level of expertise and credibility as they move the project forward ... This award gives DOE access to academic and research institutions to help DOE meet their mission and legal obligation to license, construct, and open Yucca Mountain as the nation's repository for spent nuclear fuel."

There was significant public and political opposition to the project in Nevada. An attempt was made to push ahead with it and override the opposition. But for large projects that would take decades to complete, there is every chance that sustained local opposition will prevail, and this happened with the Yucca Mountain project. Successful nuclear waste storage siting efforts in Scandinavia have involved local communities in the decision-making process and given them a veto at each stage, but this did not happen with Yucca Mountain. Local communities at potential storage and repository sites "should have early and continued involvement in the process, including funding that would allow them to retain technical experts".Rodney C. Ewing and Frank N. von Hippel. Nuclear Waste Management in the United States – Starting Over, ''Science'', Vol. 325, July 10, 2009, p. 152.

On March 5, 2009, Energy Secretary Steven Chu

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