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In DC, a Sea Change on Dump Plan
Obama’s opposition reshapes the conversation on nuclear energy
WASHINGTON - Ever since President Barack Obama promised to significantly scale back the Yucca Mountain budget this year, the question has been a simple one: Now what?
Yucca Mountain is located about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. (photo: U.S. Department of Energy) Sometimes the question comes as a genuine line of inquiry about the future of nuclear waste. At other times it is loaded with incredulity.
Either way, Obama's proposal has caused a phenomenal shift in thinking that would have seemed unbelievable just a few months ago.
Gone are the repeated arguments that federal law requires construction of a nuclear waste storage dump at Yucca Mountain and the extended debates over science and safety. Yes, lawsuits seeking to hold the government accountable for its promise to handle the waste are continuing and many Yucca Mountain supporters say they will fight on. But with Obama saying Yucca Mountain will not be developed on his watch, those long-standing issues seem of less importance.
On Wednesday a Senate energy committee hearing on nuclear power offered a window onto the new day that has arrived in Washington.
"If Yucca Mountain were taken off-line, what's Plan B?" said Sen. Mark Udall, the Colorado Democrat.
At the witness table, Dale Klein, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, offered the solution that has been before Congress for years. The waste will stay where it now sits, Klein explained. Spent nuclear fuel pellets will be stored safely in containers at utility companies' nuclear power sites across the nation for the next 100 years or more.
"Dry cast storage is Plan B," Klein said.
Moments later Sen. John McCain, the former Republican presidential candidate, asked the same question. McCain is a Yucca Mountain project supporter who has been reluctant to let Obama win this battle.
"What are you counting on for an alternative?" McCain said, apparently aware of the answer.
"For the interim, dry cast storage," Klein said.
"Dry cast storage," McCain repeated, incredulous. "Spent nuclear fuel sitting in pools at power plants all over America - is that what you're talking about?"
But even McCain, perhaps the most prominent Yucca Mountain supporter on the Hill, could see the writing on the wall. He fast-forwarded to his point.
"Any national security expert - amateur - would tell you: You need one place to store it, and that's not going to happen now because the administration has declared that."
The way the conversation turned was a public reminder that elections matter. Just a few years ago the Bush administration was trying to bolster Yucca Mountain. Bush championed a nuclear energy resurgence as a means of obtaining carbon-free energy.
But the story line in Washington suddenly changed - as if a rail yard worker flipped a switch and the train jumped to a new track.
Obama and Sen. Harry Reid, the majority leader, are seen by many as an essentially unstoppable alliance in killing the Yucca Mountain plan.
On paper, many past supporters of Yucca remain strong backers, despite the project's fiscal, political and scientific setbacks.
Yet as one Yucca supporter put it Wednesday, it has been no secret where the Yucca debate is going. Even the utility companies had started decoupling the waste issue from efforts to spur a nuclear renaissance, saying they no longer factored Yucca Mountain into their plans to develop new plants.
Klein said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is considering extending on-site storage to as much as 120 years.
"Yucca has been an interesting sort of thing to be out there," Sen. Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican, said this month. "Hopefully there's another solution they're focused on that allows us to use the waste in an appropriate way versus putting it in concrete."
What the Obama administration plans to do with the spent fuel in the long term remains an unanswered question that makes everyone involved uneasy.
Will a willing host community be chosen for a centralized waste storage site? Will the nation embark on a mission to recycle the waste as other countries do, even though many scientists believe the technology remains decades from being financially viable?
The nuclear industry and its supporters most want an assurance that nuclear revival remains on track. At stake are billions of dollars in federal support.
Karen Harbert, president and chief executive of the Institute for 21st Century Energy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, issued a statement Wednesday saying that "while the Institute supports storing waste at Yucca Mountain as required by law ... the operation of Yucca Mountain is in no way a technical or regulatory prerequisite to the growth of nuclear energy in America."
Obama's administration is convening an industry-supported committee to consider disposal options. Reid and Republican Sen. John Ensign have a similar proposal in a bill before Congress.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, expressed her frustration Wednesday at the new order.
"So far, this administration has sought to kill Yucca Mountain as a long-term repository for spent nuclear fuel without yet providing alternatives," she said. Where nuclear stands with the administration, she said, "is a bit of a mystery to me."
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18 Comments so far
Show AllHauling nuclear waste anywhere creates even more waste and waste sites of different levels/degrees.
It's costly because of that built in waste chain and of course don't expect any Republicans or that many Democrats to see that problem as part of the answer... which is to STOP CREATING MORE!
Although the nuclear industry has successfully lobbied for trillions of dollars of enhanced corporate welfare, they are now watching those trillions being handed over to the financial industry robber barons. To add insult to injury, Nevada is no longer the least populated state (like it was when the Yucca Mtn. project started 50 years ago)so the citizens of Vegas now have enough political clout to control Yucca.
Even if a destitute state agrees to take the nuclear waste, the new projects will not start without boatloads of government subsidies.
I will admit, however, that nuclear waste disposal produces many secure jobs. One of my former employers that has contracts at Hanford WA and Rocky Flats CO told me that if I came back to work for them, the disposal work will go on for at least 5,000 years. Now thats job security.
We have been building nuclear power plants for years without having a viable storage plan. And what plan could be viable for waste that has to be cared for for thousands of years? Now suddenly the Republicans are criticizing the administration for not having a plan? They should have thought of that before they built the reactors!
To be informed on the problems with nuclear power (and storage is certainly only one of many):
unbiased assessment:
http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/nuclear_power/nuclear-power-in-a-warming-world.pdf
nuclear plant problems map:
Union of Concerned Scientists map of U.S. nuclear facilities: http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/reactor-map/embedded-flash-map.html
authoritative analysis:
Craig A. Severance, 2008, Business Risks and Costs of New Nuclear Power
http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/nuclear-costs-2009.pdf
historical background: Ernest J. Sternglass, 1981, SECRET FALLOUT, LOW-LEVEL RADIATION FROM HIROSHIMA TO THREE MILE ISLAND.
UCS analysis: http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/nuclear_power/nuclear-power-in-a-warming-world.pdf
UCS map of nuclear power plant problems: http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/reactor-map/embedded-flash-map.html
Amory Lovins: http://tinyurl.com/forgetnuclear or http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid467.php
Lester Brown: http://tinyurl.com/brownnuclear or http://www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2008/Update78.htm
Public Citizen summary (Nader’s ‘Critical Mass’ work):
http://www.citizen.org/cmep/energy_enviro_nuclear/nuclear_power_plants/
http://www.citizen.org/documents/FatalFlawsSummary.pdf
http://www.citizen.org/cmep/energy_enviro_nuclear/nuclear_power_plants/articles.cfm?ID=13447
Then there are the concerns of the late Walter Russell, who predicted the ozone hole problem and was quite a rennaisance man, whom Tesla said was 1,000 years ahead of his time: www.philosophy.org (See 'Atomic Suicide?' which he authored). If he was right there are greater dangers than presently pointed out by anti-nuclear people.
"The nuclear industry and its supporters most want an assurance that nuclear revival remains on track. At stake are billions of dollars in federal support."
If wind and solar energy had billions of dollars in federal support, our energy problems would be solved.
Exactly
The answer will be technology. Matching recycled fuels with new generation reactors that can burn them and leave only relativley short lived elements such as Strontium 90. The Argonne National Lab and associated universities are working on this. So are the Russians, French and Japanese. Even so, the "decades away" part is probably true. From recent stories, existing recycling facilities in the US are too old and dirty to start up again, and only give the fuel a second pass - still leaving a lot of long term highly radioactive waste to be disposed.
The administration is implying the same thing. They are going to sit on the waste until it can be safely recycled, and they have decided this is not a reason to halt construction of new plants.
(There is no truth to the rumor that PA Gov. Rendell wants to bury it under Penn State's Beaver Stadium so it will be warm enough to host the first Eagles/Steelers Superbowl.)
"They are going to sit on the waste until it can be safely recycled"
It's almost inevitable that a sufficient rate of taxation can fund development of a "cost effective" nuke recycling process after two, five or ten decades. But that's not the point. O'Bama will fail to note the benefits of instead diverting those resources into the people's enlightenment and empowerment. O'Bama will also fail to note that the same resources diverted into renewable energy infrastructure would likely cover the entire cost of renewable energy from end to end. Remember that's only the nuke waste recycling. The amount already sunk into Yucca could probably fund 25% of the switch from fossil/nuke to renewable local scale electric generation. If we cut our energy gluttony, which we should for a number of reasons, Yucca could have funded the entire switch. But O'Bama and his sponsors are not interested in reducing the volume of infrastructure, the volume of consumption, the volume of plunder, the volume of toxic waste. They aim to EXPAND all of those in the name of "economic growth" which they believe is the key to prosperity. What's going to finally shatter such delusions?
Oh, McCain..."Any national security expert - amateur - would tell you: You need one place to store it, and that's not going to happen now because the administration has declared that."
Doesn't he know a bunch of old man sayings, like, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket?"
Or in the first place, don't put things with such potential danger on main waterways, next to large cities?
Sure, it might not explode over its lifetime, but the engineering safety assessments have nothing to do with "terrorism." Just sayin'....
Could we just restrict the use of reactors to naval ships (and space whatsits) already? These things were obviously ill-purposed for use in the civilian world.
How about solar and other small devices on residential and commercial property coupled with a new way to regulate flow over the electric grid in order to ensure correct supply and flow? (Oh wait, would that kind of democratize the grid? A little anti-Enron action? Oh no!)
Thanks, Billy. I always appreciate your well-informed comment on the issues.
---USAn---
Billy, PJD,
Not sure who you work for but your comment is misleading. The yearly as well as the cumulative subsidies fossil fuels and nukes have gotten dwarf what renewables have gotten; they have gotten many thousands of times as much tax money and breaks. "Significant" as you use it is a meaningless term in the context of the massively socialist yet strangely privately profitable nuclear industry.
At some point every technology is tiny. At some point there is only one. Then it grows. Then there are more. Wind energy is our fastest-growing energy source and can grow much much faster. Solar and conservation are also increasing dramatically; we need to help them all grow even faster because they provide the only way out of our current problems. They are faster, cheaper, more ecological, more economically democratic. They are faster yielding and more efficient use of capital. They provide more jobs for the money. They are better in every way that matters.
Because of the unsolved--maybe unsolvable--waste problem, nuclear reactors are almost as dangerous retired as they are operating. So while it MAY not make sense to decommission them all right away, it is clear that we should never again build a coal, oil or nuclear plant anywhere in the world.
When people buy more efficient appliances, conserve, convert (from cars to bicycles, for example, or fossil fuel to passive solar heating and cooling) the energy isn't recorded as a shift to renewables. It disappears from statistics. But it IS an increase of tasks being done renewably. Tom Bender called this the "Clothesline Paradox". Don't let this fool you; don't let last year's numbers make you think anything is permanent.
The numbers are in fact a sign of how sick and skewed our economics, our philosophy, and our psychology have been. We can start to heal all of those right now, by moving quickly toward wind, solar and conservation.
Among other things, I'm talking about the Price-Anderson insurance scam, whereby the federal government agreed to the Rasmussen Study, a fundamentally flawed analysis of the potential costs of nuclear mishaps, and short-circuited the free market's sound rejection of nuclear power. The actual value of this, like the potential losses when shorting the stock market, or the clothesline paradox of switching tasks to renewable energy and thus making them disappear from statistics and consciousness, is incalculable. But without it the nuclear power industry would not exist, and given the free-flowing and hard-to-quantify overlap of the war and industry uses of nukes, it would no doubt make bombs cost more, so we might even have fewer.
Well, that last bit's probably naive, but at least we would not be burdened with this nuclear albatross and might even have come to our senses in 1973 and started putting more into solar, wind and above all, conservation. The foot bone's connected to the...
And just because I've argued with so many pro-nukers that the next argument is resounding in my head even without you, I'll say that one paradox with activism (let's call it The Effectiveness Paradox) is that it makes what it opposes better--in this case safer. Unfortunately, 1. it can't make it safe, just somewhat less dangerous, and 2. even more than making it safer, it makes it sneakier, so hijinks and cheating and cutting corners get hidden much more effectively, thus making it SEEM safer than it actually is. The effects of uranium mining, transport etc. are worse than is generally known, as is true of so much of modern industry.
Let's hope this doesn't happen with global climate catastrophe.
The real answer to the energy problems we face is CONSERVATION! Yet, nobody dares utter the word in this sick capitalistic, wasteful culture. Americans are too dumb and/or lazy to employ the miriad ways to cut back on consumption of electricity, such as: Power strips to shut down phantom loads to appliances when not in use, compact fluorescent bulbs, and the simple act of shutting off lights not in use. Further, how many computer users actually turn off the bloody things when finished ranting on blogs and such? We are our own worst enemy folks!
kickapooviking,
yes, but...
huh? lots of people not only utter the word but are actively advancing conservation. no judgment, and a smile on my face, but maybe one who mispells myriad should think twyce about criticizing people for being dumb and lazy.
doing math is also important. while everything is useful and we all have to start somewhere, the amount of energy that power strips and CFLs will save is miniscule and drives me near the edge of the world dropping off into despair when compared to a single hour's increase in cars in the world.
we are our own worst enemies but in ways i rarely see mentioned anywhere in public. psychology is much more taboo than conservation, and our unconsciousness about our own physio-psycho-societal systems of conflict, denial and emotional expression will get us long before we destroy ourselves with lights in empty rooms.
If we would continue with the plan to fill up Yucca with radioactive waste, then since it all to paid for by the taxpayers, we could then have a bail in rather than a bail out. Nice change of pace.