To understand how the cleanup of Hanford depends on a nuclear waste repository in Nevada, work backward.
Without the repository, there will be no permanent disposal of any of the nation’s intensely radioactive reactor wastes.
Opponents of the Yucca Mountain project talk vaguely of other possibilities, but there are no other possibilities in the real world. Yucca Mountain is more dry and isolated than any realistic alternative, and it’s been studied to death for more than 20 years.
Without permanent burial of reactor wastes, Hanford will be saddled with the radioactivity of 53 million gallons of waste now held in 177 steel tanks on the Eastern Washington reservation near the Tri-Cities.
But that’s just the beginning. The likely alternative to a repository – an alternative now favored by President-elect Barack Obama – is “interim” storage of all commercial nuclear power plant waste at secure federal sites.
Hanford would top the list of secure federal sites. After all, it’s had decades of experience storing reactor waste.
The failure to open a repository at Yucca Mountain could easily bring tens of thousands of tons of additional waste from other states to Washington.
So without Yucca Mountain, Hanford remains radioactive – probably more radioactive, probably permanently.
Obama must be told that Washingtonians wouldn’t like that prospect at all. Washington’s congressional delegation, now overwhelmingly Democratic, must make the Hanford-Yucca connection themselves.
They shouldn’t buy into Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s vendetta against the Nevada project. They shouldn’t join those environmentalists who oppose a repository for specious reasons – in some cases simply to strangle the nuclear power industry by preventing it from disposing of its radioactive byproducts.
Any lawmaker who isn’t fighting for permanent nuclear waste disposal sometime in the foreseeable future simply isn’t fighting for the cleanup of Hanford.
Speaking of specious arguments, one of these is the contention that a Yucca Mountain repository wouldn’t be large enough to handle the nation’s reactor wastes. This claim hinges on the site’s 77,000-ton limit, which indeed is inadequate.
But that’s a statutory limit, not a physical one. It’s a number picked out of thin air by Congress in 1987. Yucca Mountain’s real capacity is more than three times that.
On Tuesday, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman called on Congress to lift the site’s artificial limit, which stands in the way of Hanford’s cleanup.
Yes, it’s a Republican proposal. But it’s one any lawmaker from Washington ought to support.
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