Yucca is no solution to energy crisis

Richard Stallings

Sunday, Feb. 1, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Mesquite — For years I have watched with interest the courageous fight that Nevada has waged against the Energy Department over the proposed Yucca Mountain storage facility. Having served in Congress for eight years, representing a district in Idaho that included a major Energy Department facility (INL) and serving for two years as the U.S. nuclear waste negotiator, I know how difficult the struggle has been.

I worked with Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus as he led a similar fight to stop the Energy Department from locating nuclear waste products above the Idaho aquifer, and I took every opportunity to support the efforts of Sen. Harry Reid and then-Sen. Richard Bryan.

While directing the nuclear waste office, I argued against the Energy Department’s Yucca proposal and offered alternative solutions which were not appreciated. In fact, when my agency’s funding was up for renewal, the Energy Department quietly used its influence to close the office of U.S. nuclear waste negotiator in 1995.

Today, Nevada and the nation are poised at a significant crossroads. Sen. Reid has cut funding for Yucca while Gov. Jim Gibbons has proposed severe cuts to the funds the state has used to fight the Energy Department. I believe Congress will interpret Nevada’s financial retreat as a sign that Nevada’s opposition to Yucca has weakened. The Las Vegas Sun’s Jan. 25 editorial (“Selling out Nevada: Gibbons plans to cut fight against Yucca Mountain and some in GOP want blood money”) was right on target!

And what about the nearly

20 percent of the nation that uses electricity generated by nuclear power? Many argue the current policy of on-site waste storage is a solution. But that is also shortsighted and unless the Energy Department takes responsibility for the spent fuel, as it promised many years ago, several reactors may be forced to close.

There is no question that significant amounts of green power will be needed in the near future. Coal and oil are not solutions. Wind and solar may be part of the solution and, while natural gas has filled the void during the past few decades, its skyrocketing cost has raised serious questions. My conclusion is that nuclear energy must be considered.

I know the biggest obstacle is dealing with the waste stream. Long-term burial in Yucca Mountain is not the answer, nor is on-site storage, but there is a third option that has been developed that holds great possibilities. It requires a smaller investment, shorter storage time and a process our scientists have had success with. It is known as the 300-year Spent Nuclear Fuel Disposal Solution and, as its name suggests, it requires only 300 years for the spent fuel to decay instead of the tens of thousands of years in the current plan.

I have always appreciated the American “can do” spirit. We have taken difficult problems and found ways to resolve them. I believe the same holds true with our energy crisis. We need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and put less pollutants in the air. A well thought out nuclear option will help us reach these necessary goals.

It is time for the Energy Department to consider alternatives and stop pouring billions of dollars into the failed policy at Yucca Mountain.

Richard Stallings, who splits his time between Nevada and Idaho, represented Idaho as a Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1985 to 1993.

Discussion: 11 comments so far…

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By Rmoen

Feb. 1, 2009

8:22 a.m.

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Mr. Stallings is 100% correct. The federal government needs to consider alternatives to Yucca Mountain. I live in Nevada and have a website www.energyplanusa.com that takes a common sense approach to energy issues. America should be recycling nuclear waste, as Mr. Stallings suggests, and reusing the 99% energy that remains in nuclear waste created by nuclear generation plants. We should also be considering expanding the existing WIPP disposal site in New Mexico. It is several thousand feet under the earth in a salt dome that's had no geological activity for a zillion years (or there abouts).
By getalife

Feb. 1, 2009

8:57 a.m.

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I think Mr. Stallings is 100% wrong. The federal government has a plan in place and science to back that plan.

The politicians not the scientists are trying to decide the fate of Yucca.

As for other alternatives, have you been asleep to what is going on with the windfarm proposal in Searchlight? NIMBY applies to everything, not science, NIMBY.

Energy solutions will never be found in the USA because NIMBY gets votes and reality doesn't win elections.
By davelv

Feb. 1, 2009

9:21 a.m.

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Mr. Stallings should read the pending patent on the 300 year solution. In fact Yucca Mountain is still needed as stated therein: "Note also that while the main thrust of the 300-year disposal solution is related to burning the separated actinides, if the policy of the country is not to do that, the separated actinides, which have only a tiny fraction of the mass, volume, and heat load of fission products and SNF, could be disposed in a mini-Yucca Mountain, or would avoid the need for a future second, third, etc., Yucca Mountain. "

This single-senator political decision to end Yucca Mountain reminds me of the politician in Mississippi who tried to legislate that pi was equal to 3 to make it easier for a constituent's kid in his physics class. Science should not be put into the hands of politicians. Yucca Mountain is required, and WIPP can not take the waste destined thereto.
By Future2012

Feb. 1, 2009

10:19 a.m.

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Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus led a similar fight to stop the Energy Department from locating nuclear waste products above the Idaho aquifer.

What Richard Stallings forgot to tell you is the Idaho legal agreement with the Feds has that high level waste already at the Idaho national lab coming to Yucca mountain. That is a signed agreement between the state and the Federal govenments.

This waste is similar to the waste at Savannah River and Hanford. These wastes are the byproduct waste from the chemical processes to separate tritium and plutonium, for nuclear weapons. All this HLW is coming to Yucca.

Idaho will also ship the TMI fuel, and AGR fuel, etc, etc, etc, to Yucca as part of the agreement.

All of these waste forms and their shipping canister are covered in the Yucca LA if anyone would read it.

Richard Stallings is making the Idaho NIMBY case for Yucca.

Harry Reid would have to get All of the state agreement overturn to stop Yucca. Of course violating the law is f no concern to Harry.
By Future2012

Feb. 1, 2009

10:22 a.m.

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Yucca Mountain is design so that the waste can be removed long after emplacement.

It would make an ideal 300 year storage area
By Future2012

Feb. 1, 2009

10:30 a.m.

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Is Richard Stallings promoting Yucca Mountain for the reprocessing facility and mini storage location needed by the 300-year Spent Nuclear Fuel Disposal Solution?

Has Harry Reid agreed to this new use of Yucca Mountain and is he willing to change the NWPA?
By Metman

Feb. 1, 2009

6:55 p.m.

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"Yucca is no solution to energy crisis"

Maybe it is not the whole solution, but it is certainly a major part of it.

This article is full of wishful thinking, vagaries and mythical promises so like that of the politics of the day. The thrust of this argument is there is some "magical" 11th hour breakthrough that will make all the hard choices go away. Note it is offered by a one time politician, not a one time scientist. Let's call this argument what it is: a smokescreen.

People have a hard time making tough decisions, about difficult problems. They want to postpone hard choices. But that is immature and irresponsible. There are no perfect answers to the majority of problems in life, but there are certainly clear and reasoned approaches that make sense to reasonable and informed people. That is the case with the Yucca Mountain Repository: The French, the Scandinavians, the Chinese and the Japanese have all come to the Nevada desert to learn from the American's about how to approach their own repository solutions. They are using Nuclear Power and will continue to do so to provide for their people.

They know the waste has to be dealt with--as it must be dealt with here as well. Nevada is not fighting a "noble fight" against the Department of Energy, and it is not fighting against a nuclear dump. It is fighting the decision of the United States Congress, representing the interests of the American public, to solve a well understood and difficult problem by using the best resources available to the government to contain these materials with a repository. Make no mistake, as Harry Reid and his supporters are fond of repeating today, elections have consequences. So do decisions; and decisions based on fear and false rhetoric are going to have serious consequences for the American Public. Nuclear Power is going to be a large part of mankind's energy portfolio. The only question is will it be a part of the United States energy reserves. The United States could potentially fall further and further behind the world economic engine.

If Harry Reid and his allies are successful with their fear mongering, the double talk, the "not-in-my-backyard politics" we all will lose an important chance to secure an energy future for our children.

We all understand this problem must be dealt with responsibly; our government agencies have documented safeguards, processes and procedures by setting standards, regulations and licensing requirements. The Department of Energy is only one part of the equation; the Environmental Protection Agency and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are also a large part of the process. They are not symbiotic and they are not provincial.

If we were responsible we would trust them to do the job we gave them to do and not politicize the process any further. But then, if we were responsible we would not saddle our children with several trillion dollars of debt and leave the tough decisions to people yet born.
By bag

Feb. 1, 2009

9:52 p.m.

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First of all Stallings provides no detail regarding his solution. Second, of all when Stallings was the Nuclear Waste Negotiator he worked agressively to negotiate a deal with Nevada regarding Yucca (not a bad thing, but he should be honest about what he did). Third, the Office closed not because of some grand conspiracy as he suggest, but it "sunset" as required by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. The people who crafted the legislation had the good sense to not allow the office to last forever. They were given a chance to negotiate a deal with Nevada and were not successful and the office correctly went away. If Stallings had been successful we would not be in the position we find are selves in today. We would have pocketed a nice chuck of the massive nuclear waste fund (current balance $20 billion). We would have some 10,000 highly paid people building the railroad and facilities at Yucca (jobs that will last generations). We would be recylcing the used fuel making it much safer and gaining huge amounts of energy (perhaps worth trillions of dollars -- according to DOE the energy value of just 70,000 metric tons of spent fuel equals 13.6 billion barrels of oils). We could also use the fund which generates about 1.5 billion in new income every year to do other things to make the whole system safer. READ THE NUCLEAR WASTE POLICY ACT -- DON'T BELIEVE HARRY REID AND NEVADA POLITICIANS THE OPPORTUNITY IS THERE IF WE JUST BEHAVED LIKE NORMAL RATIONALE ADULTS.
By dantac

Feb. 2, 2009

2:59 a.m.

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The French who operate only 58 reactors retrieve some 1150 MTHM spent fuel every year. They reprocess about 80 percent of theirs plus reprocess spent fuel for other countries who burn MOX as well. America operates some 100 reactors
and retrieves some 2000 MTHM but plans to store
the precious material in a mountain forever once
the first 300 years of retrievability are over.
Can't our reactors be adapted for burning of MOX ?
Why not enter the international reprocessing business ? If cheap hydrogen and fuel cell power stations don't show up nuclear remains the only choice. Plain truth. Ask China and India.
By Ardent

Feb. 2, 2009

11:06 a.m.

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I love how politicians focus on one appealing element of a very complex plan and ask us to share in their enthusiasm, uncritically, as if they had just discovered some sort of panacea.

I'm no expert, but the 300-year plan Stallings is touting looks to be little more than an elaborate reprocessing method using industry-standard techniques (e.g., PUREX and UREX).

The principal differences seem to be twofold: (a) the number of reprocessing steps seems to be more than usual (the material is reprocessed many times over to separate ever-shrinking percentages of fission products); (b) the resulting by-products would require only a Class C repository for storage.

If you read between the lines, what you see developing in the former politician's mind is the following: A scenario in which we end our "once-through" policy, which would allow us to indefinitely suspend the real question of finding an ultimate resting site for our nuclear waste. In other words, we won't need a repository at Yucca Mountain or anywhere else if we just keep up the "juggling act" of reprocessing waste.

Most revealing is the implied solution for the nasty by-products of reprocessing, of which there would presumably be much more given the added number of reprocessing steps. In essence, Stallings is recommending the creation of millions upon millions of gallons of solvent polluted with radioactive waste. This solvent will have to be vitrified into glass logs and stored somewhere. Anyone here ever heard of Hanford?

Wise up, people. This is the classic shell game politicians use to promote a reprocessing "solution" as an answer to Yucca Mountain. What they never mention is the literal solution, or solvent, used to reprocess. This is how France and other reprocessers can claim the remarkable recovery rates. That "80 percent" of high-level waste recovered for reuse is accomplished by generating millions and millions of gallons of low-level waste, but we never hear that as part of the equation.

In short, this is merely a "dilution," literally and figuratively, of the nuclear waste dilemma; it's a way to "spread the waste thinner" and take advantage of less-stringent Class C disposal requirements. In other words, it's another way to postpone dealing with the real problem that, in the end, will still need to be solved -- and not with just a solvent!
By patt

Feb. 2, 2009

4 p.m.

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Mr. Stallings says he is familiar with the Yucca Mountain program. So when he talks about "the courageous fight that Nevada has waged against the Energy Department over the proposed Yucca Mountain storage facility" he obviously knows that's a fallacy. Reid likes to promote a fantasy where he is the lone figure fighting the big evil Dept. of Energy, when everyone knows that DOE is only working on a repository in Nevada at the direction of Congress, of which Reid is a member. Congress has required the repository work in Nevada, not DOE. So why pretend otherwise, Mr. Stallings??? We know you know better.
And why call it a failed program? The License Application has gone to the NRC - - that seems like progress, not failure.