Harry Reid, who is set to retire in January, will exit the U.S. Senate as arguably the most powerful party leader in the chamber since Lyndon B. Johnson. And with his departure comes a new political landscape concerning the future of Yucca Mountain in his state of Nevada.
Reid has made the fight against using Yucca Mountain a cornerstone of his 30-year tenure in the Senate, and he insists his imminent exit will not spark the repository’s revival in 2017. As he put it this spring, “There’s nothing out there now.” But House Republicans have been setting the table to take up Yucca again, and officials in Nevada are gearing up for a license application restart. The state’s Board of Examiners, which includes the governor, the state attorney general, and the secretary of state, in July approved $2.5 million in legal backing through September 2017 for the anti-Yucca battle.
“The pro-Yucca forces see an opportunity with Senator Reid’s retirement to push (repository plans) again,” Bob Halstead, executive director of Nevada’s anti-Yucca Mountain Agency for Nuclear Projects, said in a recent interview, adding that Nevada is prepared to fight this out in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing proceeding, as well as in federal court.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and panel member John Shimkus (R-Ill.) urged Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz in March to “expeditiously” restart the Yucca Mountain licensing process with the NRC. The duo also sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that month, requesting a congressional audit to see what financial resources are available to the NRC should the licensing process restart.
Reid’s likely successor as Senate minority or majority leader, depending on the outcome of the November election, is Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has publicly declared his opposition to the Yucca Mountain project. However, the site is not in his proverbial backyard.
Reid, through “sheer political will,” was able to forestall progress on Yucca Mountain, said Ed Davis, former president and CEO of the American Nuclear Energy Council, which was the industry’s legislative and governmental arm before the formation of the Nuclear Energy Institute. But the political environment will soon return to something more normal, he said, “the politics that you would expect.” Combined with the fact that the federal government has invested so much time and money into the project, it cannot be ignored, he said.
Davis helped lead industry efforts in passing the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which, through an amendment five years later, would designate Yucca Mountain as the sole site for a national repository for high-level nuclear waste and spent fuel. “I think Yucca Mountain is so far down the road, so far developed,” Davis said. “It has an incredible amount of pedigree that has gone with it, and investment by the federal government. I just don’t see the federal government walking away from it. I don’t think they can politically or functionally now, very invested.”
“We think it would be better for Nevada and the country if DOE and the Congress walked away from Yucca Mountain,” Halstead countered. “It appears that the pro-Yucca forces are both intellectually and emotionally so invested in the Yucca Mountain idea that common sense will not let them walk away.”
The Situation Today
The Department of Energy filed its Yucca Mountain license application with NRC in 2008, but requested to withdraw the application only two years later, describing the project as unworkable, given that the department does not hold the proper land and water rights to proceed. The commission suspended the adjudicatory proceeding in 2011, the year the Obama administration canceled the repository in favor of a Blue Ribbon Commission and “consent-based” approach for long-term nuclear waste storage. That process envisions operation of a pilot storage facility by 2021; one or more larger, interim facilities by 2025; and finally at least one permanent geologic repository by 2048. DOE in January kicked off a series of public meetings around the country to gather input from stakeholders in outlining the consent-based process.
The federal government has spent about $15 billion on Yucca Mountain since 1987, when the Nuclear Waste Policy Act was amended and established Nevada as the only site to be considered for a national repository. NRC has spent about $12 million of Nuclear Waste Fund money on Yucca licensing activities since 2013, when the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the agency to resume the Yucca Mountain license review using previously appropriated funds.
Shimkus, at a congressional hearing in July, said he fully expects Yucca to receive its operations license from the NRC, while asking his colleagues how Congress should proceed when that approval is issued. When asked what other plans Upton and Shimkus have for pushing the repository plans, a committee aide said earlier this month that the panel will continue oversight efforts, “which will help inform a comprehensive solution to nuclear waste management policy.”
Halstead said Shimkus’ comments were “totally misinformed,” pointing to the 10 peer-reviewed conference papers his agency has delivered to explain the transportation issues surrounding the project. But Halstead said Nevada’s objections to transportation impacts from the repository, particularly through Las Vegas, are not the biggest issues. He said the license application will fail due to engineering issues concerning groundwater corrosion at the site. DOE has proposed using titanium drip shields and other infrastructure to address the issue. The fatal flaws in the application have to do with what Nevada argues is an inadequate “hot repository” concept, the drip shields, and groundwater impact analysis. In 2008 the Yucca Mountain license application drew 320 legal and technical contentions, including issues raised by the state of Nevada and Clark County, the most populated county in the state.
“I don’t think the Yucca Mountain proponents understand the incredible burden of proof that DOE must carry in order to get a construction authorization from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” Halstead said.
Davis pointed to the NRC release in May of its final supplement to the Department of Energy’s Yucca Mountain environmental impact statement, which determined that the impact to groundwater from any potential spent nuclear fuel leaks and high-level nuclear waste would be “small.” He also noted the nuclear waste that has accumulated in 30 American states as a result of DOE’s failure to follow the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and take title to the waste.
“Those states are eventually going to have to have a place to put it, and representatives in those states are going to want to see a place to put it. They want to have an answer,” Davis said.
Waste Control Specialists and Holtec International have raised their hands in an effort to privatize consolidated interim storage of spent fuel in, respectively, Texas and New Mexico. WCS has submitted its NRC license application to store 40,000 metric tons of nuclear waste near the Texas-New Mexico border, while Holtec expects to file its own application this fall for a 70,000-metric-ton capacity interim storage facility near Carlsbad.
An estimated 74,000 metric tons of commercial spent fuel have accumulated at about 100 American reactor sites around the country. There has been growing pressure, from the public and their congressional representatives, to find a permanent resting place for this material, far away from the places where they live.
Davis said consent-based siting sounds good in theory, but “in practice, I don’t know how it’s going to be implemented until someone puts pen to paper and puts some processes down. I think until then, it’s more a slogan and a hope than anything else.”
He also stressed that a permanent repository and interim storage are not functional equivalents. Texas and New Mexico would only be able to provide temporary relief with 40- to 60-year licenses. The nation needs Yucca Mountain, but interim storage would be a welcome part of the equation, he said, adding that it doesn’t need to be an either-or scenario.
Lake Barrett, DOE’s former acting director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, said the House’s views on Yucca Mountain won’t change much in the upcoming year, but the landscape in the Senate could shift.
“I can see the makings of a decision to move forward,” Barrett said. “There’s needs across the country for forward progress.”
