Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository

Um, so there's some...

All right, so there's like Yucca Mountain that was canceled a number of years ago.

That was, um, a repository in the Southwest that was gonna put the waste canisters a little ways below ground.

Um, they were-

Or, you know, it used to be called spent fuel, but I mandated that they call it used fuel.

And, uh, when Yucca Mountain went the way of all flesh, under the brilliant leadership of our late national security heroes, Lee Hamilton and Brent Scowcroft, we put together the, uh, Amer- Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future.

We didn't wanna use waste in the title.

And great people like you and Susan Eisenhower and Ernie Moniz all served on it.

And so when I came to LCV nearly 20 years ago, our stance was we have deep concerns with the life cycle of the uranium and mining and waste and storage.

We've worked to oppose Yucca Mountain.

And our position was we didn't want to see subsidies go to this mature industry.

Right.

To meet that demand, the Trump administration recently announced plans to jumpstart a new generation of nuclear power.

At the same time, Nevada Democrats in Congress, including Representative Dina Titus, who represents Nevada's First Congressional District and studied nuclear policy as a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, have reintroduced legislation aimed at permanently ending Yucca Mountain's role as the country's proposed nuclear waste repository.

Hear the full conversation with KNPR's Paul Boger at knpr.org.

The Las Vegas man who admitted to firebombing Tesla vehicles at a collision repair center in March twenty twenty-five was sentenced on October 14th.

It's 110,000 cubic yards of radioactive debris and soil.

Let's compare that maybe to Yucca Mountain, which right now isn't holding anything.

But the statutory limit of Yucca Mountain is 100,000 cubic yards, and that's with 40 miles of tunnels.

We're looking at the Runit Dome with 110,000 cubic yards, and it's only 370 feet across.

So it's a massive amount of nuclear material that's in there.

But then on the back end of the fuel cycle, I applaud this administration for the lifecycle nuclear innovation campuses, or I may be screwing that up a little bit, but whatever they're calling them, that will allow states to raise their hand and show that they're interested in all of these elements, but including, you know, final disposition and You know, that's the way it should be done.

And, you know, I'm a Nevadan, and so I've lived the Yucca Mountain experience, and that was the opposite of how it worked in Nevada, where it was a very top-down, top-heavy approach, and, you know, and ultimately, you know, failed or is failing.

This is a smarter way, and I hope it's informed by, you know, what some of our neighbors in Europe and in Canada have done in this space, because you've really got to build stakeholder support and understanding Right.

Either fuel development or fuel, you know, use fuel disposal projects.

And, and one area that I would share with you is management of nuclear waste, particularly high-level waste and spent nuclear fuel.

So the situation in the United States for a long time was centered around Yucca Mountain, and that project has been basically stalled because of the political, uh, aspects related to Yucca Mountain.

But other countries around the world, Finland, Sweden, France, Spain, and others, have identified frameworks for high-level waste and spent fuel storage that work.

So that is certainly an area where the United States can benefit from that.

Now, separately, we have taken steps in coordination with the Department of Energy and the development of these nuclear life cycle innovation campuses that do address the backend of the fuel cycle.

So I feel like we are on a path to move forward to provide a solution that is basically through a process of consensus where states would volunteer to host something that may be similar to what Yucca Mountain would've provided for the United States of America.

But we can really learn from the experience of our other regulatory counterparts that have already put in place regulatory frameworks, and in fact, have licensed high-level waste repositories, which was the case in Finland.

They just issued a license for, uh, their deep geologic repository, um, only, uh, uh, about a month or so ago.

The memorandum, prepared by the project manager in the Division of New and Renewed Licenses, records several concerns that bear on cost and schedule.

Staff noted that heat load was a dominant factor at Yucca Mountain and that the geology there behaved more like a blanket than a sink.

Staff described the borehole as a breach in the natural barrier the company relies on for containment, a concern that multiplies with multiple boreholes.

Staff expected heavy neutron leakage and uneven burn in the two-by-two core, with possible exceedance of peaking factor limits and activation of the surrounding rock.

Brine-rich groundwater was flagged as a challenge to material performance.

Seismic characterization was tied to ten CFR Section one hundred point two three, and staff wrote that severing of the borehole in an accident seems somewhat likely, with the risk assessment unclear.

On the company's claim that boreholes can be drilled within days and the reactor emplaced and operating within weeks of delivery, staff replied that the basis was unclear and that excavation and geologic investigation at depth for Yucca Mountain took a substantial amount of time, well beyond days.

The memorandum addressed the two thousand twenty-four design, and the design has since changed.