I know that at this moment many of you have begun to feel a little queasy about the constant stream of forecasting pundits, the mindless patter about what Hillary wants, the guffawing critics of John McCain's lousy speechifying. You're feeling lost, adrift, unable to focus your attention on anything meaningful, at least for long. You are looking for something to care about. And so your mind naturally wanders to the next pressing debate swirling through American culture:
What the hell are we going to do about our high-level nuclear waste from civilian power plants?
Luckily, the U.S. Department of Energy has some news for you.
Just as it promised two months ago -- to the shock of anyone paying attention -- the DOE has filed an application for a license to begin construction on a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Completion of the storage cubbies in the five-mile-long tunnel will cost $70 billion and take another 12 years (the earliest opening date at the moment is sometime in 2020). When it's finished, the facility will relieve utilities in 39 states of 70,000 metric tons of spent fuel rods, accumulated over a half-century of civilian nuclear power.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission now has 90 days to decide whether the license application is complete enough to be docketed, and three years to approve it. Call me a cynic, but seriously doubt whether either process will hit any snags. I have it on good authority that the DOE's man in charge of civilian nuclear waste, Ward Sproat, considers it his mission to finish the Yucca paperwork before he leaves. And he's leaving very soon.
Once the license is in process, Yucca Mountain is going to be hard to stop. Today's news coverage gives the impression that the entire state of Nevada is against this. But several local governments -- the "affected" communities, many of them poor and rural -- are viewing the project as an opportunity to piggyback infrastructure projects on federally sponsored construction of a Yucca Mountain railroad. At a public meeting held in April, an official from Clark County, Nevada mentioned that it might be a good time to lay some fiber optic cable. As long as the ground's dug up, why not?
(By the way there will be more such meetings in the near future. If you've never been to one, they're worth checking out. Potemkin democracy at its best.)
The state of the planet being what it is -- and given coal's contribution not just to climate change but also to the mercury in our water and the acid in our rain -- I have a hard time opposing nuclear power these days. The industry has lots of problems, including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's already strained budget, which will see even deeper cuts this year. But from mining to milling to plant construction to generation, it emits only a tiny fraction of coal's carbon-dioxide load. (If you doubt that, I have spreadsheets. Consider yourself warned.)
As reluctant as I am to take an anti-nuclear position, however, Yucca Mountain is just wrong, wrong, wrong. Maybe because I visited the site in 2005, after a winter of record rainfall, the site didn't seem all that dry, meaning water could easily run through its porous rock, compromise any impervious storage plans and contaminate groundwater in some of Nevada's best farmland. Maybe it's because Yucca Mountain is on top of several active earthquake faults. And maybe it's also that the whole deal seems so wacky -- as Ralph Vartabedian notes in today's Los Angeles Times story:
The plan hinges on the use of titanium and palladium drip shields to
protect waste canisters buried underground from water flowing through
Yucca Mountain's porous rock. The Energy Department plans to install
about 11,000 drip shields, each weighing five tons, using robots 100 to
300 years in the future when the repository would be sealed.
Most of all, though, I've never seen any science that supports the notion that Yucca Mountain is a responsible place to store a whole country's nuclear waste. As it's just down the road from the Nevada Test Site, it's politically convenient, but that's about it.
Also, did I just hear John McCain say this morning that "nuclear power is cheap?" Where was Joe Lieberman to pull him aside and correct him? (Oh, that's right, getting buttonholed by Obama. I forgot.) Honestly, the man ought to keep his mouth shut until November and hope that the Democrats self-destruct, because that's the only hope he has.