Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
7/17/2015
President Barack Obama late last week signed a presidential order creating a national monument in the Basin and Range area of southeastern Nevada, while potentially putting the future of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage site at further risk. The Basin and Range monument includes an area that would serve as the main rail access point in the delivery of nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain; with the land now untouchable, the Department of Energy may need to reconfigure some of its transportations plans, should it move forward with Yucca Mountain.
According to Obama, the area’s natural rugged landscape and history of inspiration motivated the signing of a presidential decree. “The pattern of basin, fault, and range that characterizes this region creates a dramatic topography that has inspired inhabitants for thousands of years,” Obama said in the decree. “The vast, rugged landscape redefines our notions of distance and space and brings into sharp focus the will and resolve of the people who have lived here. The unbroken expanse is an invaluable treasure for our Nation and will continue to serve as an irreplaceable resource for archaeologists, historians, and ecologists for generations to come.”
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), a longtime opponent of Yucca Mountain, has in recent years championed reserving the area as a national monument. Many have speculated, though, that Reid’s true motivation was to use the designation to kill a major transportation line to Yucca Mountain. Reid denied those intentions this week in an interview with a local Nevada radio station. “First of all, there’s not going to be Yucca Mountain so why would you build a railroad and if there were a Yucca Mountain, which there isn’t, the railroad would never be build anyways,” Reid said in an interview with KNPR. “That did not enter into my calculations at all.”
Nonetheless, the state of Nevada sees only positive fallout from this move in its fight against Yucca Mountain. From the state’s perspective, the designation effectively kills any use of the Caliente corridor, the rail route running east to west through the state. “Now all of sudden their repository has no railroad, and as the [administrative] judges said in May 2009, without transportation of waste, Yucca Mountain is just an expensive hole in a mountain,” Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects Executive Director Bob Halstead told RW Monitor this week. “This is a really big event from the standpoint of putting the final nail in the coffin of the Caliente rail.”
Halstead indicated the state is considering petitioning the federal Surface Transportation Board to dismiss DOE’s application for rail construction following this designation. “If their railroad is knocked out and they don’t have a workable back up plan, does that not allow us, should the NRC move forward the licensing proceeding, to move that DOE’s license application be dismissed?” Halstead said.
Pro-Yucca supporters in Nevada, though, do not see the monument as a Yucca death notice. “Picking this single route as the ‘final nail in the coffin’ is another ‘fairy tale’ by Nevada’s political delegation, Governor Brian Sandoval (R), Senator Reid and Nevada’s Agency for Nuclear Projects,” said US Nuclear Energy Foundation Director Gary Duarte in an op-ed appearing on the foundation’s website this week. “As with any intelligent planning, several rail transportation routes have been pre-planned by the DOE and this is ‘just one,’ and, if the choice, it would only require ‘minor’ alterations to sidestep the ‘monument land’ touted as the Yucca death star. This Obama national monument headline is just another unfounded obstacle setup by Senator Reid and his media minions. If we can educate Nevada’s grassroots on the facts of the Yucca Mountain study, the grassroots tide will sink the obstructionist politicians.”
For any railroad to move forward, DOE would need to recommit to Yucca Mountain, a notion unlikely to occur within this administration. The Department of Energy has maintained that Yucca Mountain remains “unworkable” for spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste storage due to the lack of consent for the repository in Nevada. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz has emphasized that the department’s strategy has not changed in the new Congress, which features Republican control of both houses. DOE still intends on moving forward with a consent-based pilot interim storage facility as the preferred strategy to satisfy the nation’s spent fuel issues.
