Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Sun editorial:

Yucca as growth industry

Cost, volume of proposed nuclear waste at burial site explode in latest estimates

The cost of the federal plan to bury nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain just keeps rising, as does the volume of the waste planned for shipment to the site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

A warning about the project’s spiraling cost and need for more capacity came last month from Ward Sproat, the Energy Department’s director of nuclear waste programs.

He said then that Yucca Mountain’s “total system life cycle” cost would top $90 billion, and that the Energy Department would need to greatly enlarge the project, which has been vigorously opposed by Nevada for 20 years.

Sproat announced more precise estimates Tuesday. The cost, he said, is now pegged at $96.2 billion. The cost estimate for Yucca Mountain has been rising steadily since 2001, when $57.5 billion was projected to be its total cost.

He also said the Energy Department no longer deems Yucca’s congressionally imposed storage limit of 77,000 tons of nuclear waste to be sufficient. He said the current cost estimate assumes that Yucca will hold 122,000 tons of waste.

Those cost and storage estimates are based on little, if any, new construction of nuclear power plants, where most of the deadly waste would originate under the federal plan.

So imagine if John McCain’s call for building 45 nuclear power plants over the next 22 years comes to pass. Imagine how big Yucca Mountain would become if Congress agrees to up its storage capacity. Imagine the truckloads of waste entering Nevada, one after the other, every minute of every hour — practically forever.

There is now more reason than ever to stop Yucca Mountain, which Nevada has documented would be extremely hazardous even built to current plans. If it were to get final approval — in June the Energy Department applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to store nuclear waste — there would be no end to its expansion, and no end to the jeopardy it would pose to Southern Nevada.

Join the Discussion:

Check this out for a full explanation of our conversion to the LiveFyre commenting system and instructions on how to sign up for an account.

Full comments policy