[NukeNet] Yucca Mtn - Balance may shift for waste to stay put

[MoJo]

  Posted on Sun, Dec. 17, 2006              http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisobispotribune/16260286.htm
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Balance may shift for waste to stay put

By David Whitney
dwhitney at mcclatchydc.com

   
  WASHINGTON — A few years ago the idea seemed unthinkable: Highly radioactive waste should be stored above ground at nuclear power plants.
   
  The spent fuel needed to be stored underground, where it would take centuries to decay. Yucca Mountain, 100 miles from Las Vegas, was the place to build such a repository, Congress reaffirmed in 2002 by wide margins.
  But now, despite strong bipartisan support in Congress for Yucca Mountain, the unthinkable is being rethought — accelerated in part by the elections that propelled Democrats into power.
  The new majority leader of the Senate, Nevadan Harry Reid, pledged that Yucca Mountain will never open. Californian Barbara Boxer, the new chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, couldn’t agree more.
  Both think nuclear waste should stay right where it is — at the power plants — at least until better waste technology comes along.
  "There’s no rush to put it some place that’s dangerous," Boxer said.
  Work is already under way on above-ground storage facilities at some plants.
  Crews are building thick concrete casks at Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, storage that is meant to be temporary until Yucca Mountain opens. But company officials say the facilities could function on a longer term.
  More than 100 national and state environmental groups — including the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council — coalesced in September behind a set of principles that includes permanent storage of used fuel at the reactor sites.
  "The problem is the concept that the public wants the waste moved," said Michele Boyd, legislative director and nuclear expert at Public Citizen. "That’s a 20-year-old concept."
  Even the nuclear power industry is giving ground. It still wants Yucca Mountain opened but is willing to allow taxes that plant operators pay into a fund for that facility to be used for interim storage — a kind of euphemism for above-ground storage until casks can be reopened and old fuel assemblies reprocessed into new fuel.
  Nuclear Energy Institute President Frank L. Bowman told the Senate environment committee in September that surface-level interim storage can "instill public confidence in the waste management program."
  The Energy Department is eight years late in a federal mandate to open an underground repository. Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell recently estimated that it could be decades before Yucca Mountain opens.
  Storage for a century
  Shawn Cooper, a spokesman for Diablo Canyon owner Pacific Gas and Electric Co., said the utility is still hopeful Yucca Mountain will open some day.
   
  But as long as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses cask storage, the waste could be at Diablo Canyon well into the next century, safely venting heat from the decaying fuel into the brisk winds blowing off the Pacific Ocean.
  "It’s called temporary dry cask storage," he said, "but the canisters can hold the waste 100 years."
  Jill ZamEk, a leader of nuclear watchdog group San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace, was one of the signers of the environmentalists’ principles in September.
  Mothers for Peace is fighting to force a rearrangement of the dry casks so they would better survive a terrorist attack, and the Supreme Court soon will decide whether to hear that case.
  "We want the Diablo Canyon plant shut down," ZamEk said. But when it comes to the plant’s waste, she said, "the risk of transporting it is so great it needs to stay where it is."
  Rep. Lois Capps, D-Santa Barbara, whose district includes Diablo Canyon, also agrees that the waste should stay put, but with more security to protect it.
  "I believe that we should actually be beefing up security against potential terrorism and improving safety to prevent accidents at all nuclear facilities around the country," she said in a statement.
  Commercial nuclear power plants in the United States are guarded by paramilitary forces armed with semiautomatic assault weapons. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, these forces have been beefed up at all nuclear plants and extra security precautions have been put in place. These precautions include sensors to detect intruders and barriers to prevent truck bombs from getting close to the reactors. Once in operation, Diablo Canyon’s dry cask storage facility would be guarded in the same manner as the reactors.
  Debate over Yucca
  Among Sen. Boxer’s biggest concerns about Yucca Mountain is that it’s not as impermeable to water as initially thought. Sophisticated testing has shown that water percolates through its caverns and heads toward the Colorado River.
  "Sixteen million Californians drink from that river," Boxer said.
  Jon Summers, Sen. Reid’s spokesman, said the senator will do all he can to make sure Yucca never opens because the site is unsuitable. Summers said the senator has introduced legislation directing the Energy Department to take possession of the waste at the plants and to store it there.
  The bill drew a sharp rebuke in January from the nuclear energy industry, which said it would only further undercut Yucca Mountain — which of course is what Reid wants.
  This year, the bill went nowhere. The outgoing chairman of the Senate environment committee, James Inhofe, R-Okla., has favored Yucca Mountain.
  But Boxer will lead the committee when the bill is reintroduced next year — and she likes it, or something like it.
  Her preference leans to on-site storage, with the possibility of building regional or state gathering places for some of it — like that at Rancho Seco near Sacramento, where the reactor was closed in 1989.
  Although a skeptic, Boxer also favors research into reprocessing — something that the environmentalists still oppose.
  If a way to safely reprocess nuclear waste could be found, Boxer said, it would help on the waste issue, produce new fuel for reactors and "make me feel more positive about nuclear power" as a pollution-free alternative for lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
  The United States banned the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel into new fuel during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, who was concerned that reprocessing could be used to create nuclear weapons, like Iran is now suspected of doing. The ban on reprocessing remains in effect.
  The end of Yucca?
  Driving the industry’s shifting attitude about waste storage is growing interest in building a new generation of nuclear plants since enactment of an energy bill offering generous government subsidies.
  Since Congress began working on an energy bill, there have been nearly three dozen planned applications for new reactors. The bill was signed into law in August, touching off what Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., called a "nuclear renaissance."
  "I am a pragmatist," Boxer said. "The vast majority of the members on my committee support nuclear power, and so do the majority in the Senate. So my focus is on safety, security and research because I don’t think there is any question that we are going to be seeing new plants."
  Victor Gilinsky, who served on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as an appointee of Presidents Ford and Carter from 1975 to 1984, said what’s under way is a reshaping of the waste debate that will eventually spell the end of Yucca Mountain.
  Gilinsky, who now consults for Nevada against the repository, said he was on the NRC when it began debating underground storage, and it was never about safety.
  "It was intended as a PR device," he said.
  The commission faced lawsuits by environmentalists trying to stop plant licensing, and he said the lack of a waste disposal plan was seen as a vulnerability in the courtroom.
   
  "Now that they have a possibility of building new reactors, they don’t want to be chained to this," Gilinsky said of the nuclear industry. "They are working their way around to saying that surface storage of the waste is a workable solution."
  David Whitney covers Central Coast issues for The Tribune from the McClatchy Washington Bureau


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