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Yucca as growth industry
Cost, volume of proposed nuclear waste at burial site explode in latest estimates
Thursday, Aug. 7, 2008 | 2:06 a.m.
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.
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Reid is the second most powerful Democrat in DC.
The Democrats control both houses.
I guess the Democrats like Yucca so much that Reid can not kill it.
You say "If it were to get final approval..." Well the point to that would be that if approved - it is safe. The YMP License Application was submitted June of 2008. Opponents, if they permit an adjudication of their positions on technical facts of the program, have should have nothing to fear from a quality review process.
The LA process continues to establish the suitability of the Yucca Mountain site, and is based on the science of the five supporting national labs and the USGS. Is Obama really smarter than the five national labs, the USGS, and the NRC to make a decision to stop the project.
There will be no waste from proper storage. We used to have blasts conducted below ground and above ground and made it through from 60 years ago. I think we have figured out how to build a vault to store the waste. We need jobs and power. Lets get both.
Is Nevada nuts? Turn down a $96 Billion Federal project over 40 years with thousands of non-gaming jobs. This alone could turn around our ailing economy. The politicians and the local print media need to stop the nonsensical opposition to Yucca. Yes, Nevada got politically screwed 25 years ago--get over it! We are wasting time--where do we sign up for this Federally sponsored economic windfall. Reid et al need to get out of the way.
A rhetorically effective editorial, as usual, but not much in the way of accurate representation of the issue.
Our state media outlets are apparently in agreement about omitting or suppressing one significant fact about the funds used to finance the repository: The majority of the expense is paid by the Nuclear Waste Fund, as mandated in Section 302(c) of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA), which is the law that mandates creation of a national repository. The Fund currently holds about $21 billion and is generated exclusively by utility customers who are provided power by nuclear plants. That $21 billion has accumulated over the past 25 years since the inception of the NWPA, and if we project the same rate to cover the entire lifetime costs of the repository, we find that the entire $96 billion is pretty much paid for by rate-payers (customers), with potential for a surplus. This, I think, is consistent with what the DOE has projected in terms of funding and the funding mechanism.
And as for Nevada's alleged studies about the safety of the repository, there are none of any merit, and whatever the state has produced is obviously biased by its political stance (i.e., they arrived at a political conclusion and then went out and funded only those studies that would support it, rather than forming a political conclusion based on scientific evidence). Some might argue that this is a fair response to the notorious 1987 amendment to the NWPA that selected Yucca Mountain as the sole site for a proposed repository, but in the end scientific and regulatory review will form the basis for the decision to approve or reject the repository license application, not political or rhetorical strategems.
One other thing that should be pointed out: Presenting the figure of $96 billion in the abstract (i.e., out of context) is also something of a misrepresentation -- at least to the extent that it leaves us free to use our normal frame of reference for news about government spending.
We are accustomed to think in terms of annual expenditures, or costs over a few years to maybe a decade, but seldom are we confronted with spending plans that encompass or surpass a whole century's time (the proposed lifetime of the repository).
In other words, that $96 billion is the total cost to study, build, operate, then close the repository, which is estimated to encompass a period of about 150 years.
So even given this "alarmingly high" estimate (which, by the way, could easily balloon further), we're looking at under $1 billion per year, an amount that would be paid for by consumers of electricity generated by nuclear power.
That's downright cheap, by government project standards, not to mention fair in terms of who pays and for what.
If it so bad and the Democrats control both house and the senate and Reid is from Nevada and is thesecond most powerful Democrat in DC then how much is not been kill?