Author: Kiersten Sundell
What the hell happened at Yucca Mountain?
A gigantic, 19-billion-dollar disaster is what happened. Not a nuclear disaster — a political one.
For those of you who don’t know, Yucca Mountain is a mound of desert about 100 miles from Las Vegas and is a great demonstration of what happens when politics override science.
While this Nevada site was selected to store the nation’s nuclear waste for thousands of years, the present rock formation is full of fractures and flowing water, making it far from an ideal location. Nuclear waste storage casks are robust and all, but more suitable geology is definitely in order.
So how did we end up with such a terrible location?
Well back in the 1980s, Congress was eyeing three potential sites: Yucca Mountain, the Hanford site, where we store nuclear weapon waste in Washington, and a spot in Texas. But with the House Speaker being from Texas and the Majority Leader from Washington, neither wanted to house the waste; thus Yucca Mountain got shoved onto Nevada’s new Senator Harry Reid.
Nevada hated the idea, and in fact 75% of people opposed it, largely because the waste would be transported to Yucca by rail. Senator Reid fought the plan as well, kicking off a long-lasting back-and-forth between the federal government and Nevada officials. The Department of Energy kept submitting licenses and doing studies, while politicians stymied funding and progress.
After blowing $19 billion investigating and preparing the site, Obama finally axed Yucca Mountain. He’d promised Nevada he would scrap the plan if they helped him win the state in 2008, and they did.
So decades later, we’ve still got no permanent repository. What are our options now?
Well, we could follow other countries and bury waste deep in stable rock, like Finland is doing with Onkalo. That project only cost about $3.5B, because the geology is well suited to the task.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico is another solid option, as it already takes some waste from nuclear weapons. We’d just need to expand its mission, and not use the wrong brand of kitty litter.
Or we could try deep borehole disposal — basically drilling miles down to bury waste far below the surface. A company called Deep Isolation is working on a method to do this, implementing learnings from the oil and gas industry.
Whatever we do, we need to make sure that the chosen site is approved by the surrounding community. Considering the nuclear industry’s history of perpetuating environmental racism, ethical siting should be high on the priority list. In the meantime, the waste will sit peacefully in storage casks onsite of the plants it was produced at, reminding us that climate change is a much, much bigger problem.
Check out the full video about Yucca Mountain on our TikTok page!
