Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Turning out the lights on Yucca Mountain

WASHINGTON - One mile deep into Yucca Mountain, lights are being turned off. The train that carries visitors into the cavernous hole in the mountain will run no more. Layoffs are possible.

The Energy Department says it is merely cutting back on unneeded costs. But the moment the lights went out and the train went quiet may one day be remembered as the beginning of the end of the nation's nuclear waste repository in Nevada.

Yucca Mountain's leading critics, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, have begun saying that the project is dead. Nearly 20 years behind schedule, it can look that way at times.

Yet Washington continues to spend a half-billion dollars a year on Yucca. That's not the balance sheet of something gone dead.

So if Yucca Mountain is indeed now dead, if "it's history," as Reid told the state Legislature last month, how would we know it? What will the end look like?

The answer is still unclear, but month by month, it's coming into focus.

Three clear indicators are just around the corner.

First are potentially crippling budget cuts this summer from Congress.

Next is whether the Energy Department can meet its June 2008 deadline to submit the project to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for approval.

A final indicator is the November 2008 presidential election, which could put an anti-Yucca president in the White House.

Action on any one of those could deliver a fatal blow, say lawmakers, Energy officials and industry insiders interviewed by the Sun.

Or, despite reports of its death, Yucca could continue along as it has for another 20 years.

"There may not be the eureka moment here, but I think it's going to be pretty obvious by the middle to end of next summer," said Bob Loux, executive director of Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects, the state agency fighting Yucca Mountain.

Budget hearings are to begin soon in Washington and Reid has vowed to cut the project back "as best we can," which is a modest way of describing what has happened in past years. President Bush's $900 million request for fiscal 2005 essentially was halved and has stayed at that level.

But that still leaves $494 million in Bush's proposed budget. The Energy Department's project manager, Edward Sproat, insists he needs the full amount to meet the 2008 deadline to forward the project to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for review.

Convincing Congress that Yucca is still a worthy investment could prove difficult, given Reid's new clout and waning patience on a project for which 60 percent of the current budget is being spent on do-overs. About $260 million is going to fix shoddy science.

The Energy Department has missed this particular application deadline before, which is partly why the dump that was supposed to open in 1998 is now penciled in for 2017.

But missing the deadline again, said Michelle Boyd, a nuclear policy analyst at the watchdog group Public Citizen, "is going to be the death knell."

Or maybe not. Last week outgoing Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner Jeffrey S. Merrifield said that if the deadline is missed again, the time may have come to turn management over to a public-private partnership. But in Merrifield's view, that means "Yucca Mountain is not dead ... What I'm talking about is Plan B."

By the time voters choose a new president in November 2008, nuclear waste could stand as the national issue it was when Yucca was being considered years ago. Nuclear energy is gaining popularity as a power source that doesn't spew global warming pollutants, and Nevada's early Democratic caucus means candidates are being grilled about Yucca Mountain. Democratic candidates are mostly opposed. Republican contenders offer mixed opinions.

Veteran nuclear policy expert Daniel Hirsch of the California-based Committee to Bridge the Gap believes Yucca will not truly die until the White House gives the order.

Others, including Nevada Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley, say that even White House opposition might not be enough. But it might set in motion Yucca's demise.

"The way I envision the end of Yucca Mountain is when the nuclear industry is so frustrated by the lack of progress ... and comes to Congress and asks us to make a settlement with them."

Utility companies desperately need a dump for the waste that is mounting at nuclear power plants nationwide. Congress promised to take it off their hands by 1998, and lawsuits have left taxpayers with a $7 billion liability. If the companies have any hope of building new power plants, they need to assure the public the waste problem is solved.

The industry's lobby arm, the Nuclear Energy Institute, believes Yucca remains viable, even as it considers the promise of temporary waste sites being planned for 11 communities nationwide under the government's proposed recycling plan.

The institute's Steve Kraft said, "the only thing that would stop it is we discover something about Yucca Mountain that we didn't know before," which, he adds, he "can't imagine."

Science remains a wild card. Will water seep through and corrode the waste canisters, sending radioactive toxins into the Nevada ground water? Will standards for protecting residents from cancer be considered good enough?

Some answers could start becoming known as the commission review begins.

Republican Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico, perhaps the leading nuclear energy advocate on Capitol Hill, is not worried. "I do not believe that Yucca Mountain is dead," he said in a statement to the Sun. "I don't doubt that additional delays will occur, but the Yucca program is resilient."

Recently the Energy Department decided to turn off some lights at Yucca and skip upgrades to the rail line, relying on computers rather than humans to retrieve data deep in the mountain. Savings of $100 million are expected over several years. Layoffs can happen as work ebbs and flows.

So how will anyone know Yucca is gone, done, dead, fini?

Reid and others who have watched the project for years say they see the writing on the wall. They sense the momentum shift on Capitol Hill. Saying it's dead will make it so, they say. Or as Reid's office asks: How can you prove it's alive?

Longtime nuclear industry observer Paul Craig, a professor emeritus of engineering at the University of California, Davis, doesn't believe anyone will know when it dies - at least not immediately.

Nobody will want to fess up, he said, because then someone will have to tackle the thorny issue of what happens to the waste.

Craig, who served on an independent Yucca Mountain technical review board until 2004, believes the project will simply go the way of the late war hero Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

"My guess is Yucca will never die ... It will fade away."