Nothing seems to be more permanent than “temporary” nuclear waste storage.
Washington is learning that the hard way. For decades, this state has put up with the biggest concentration of the deadliest waste on the planet. Now Barack Obama has told Washingtonians: Get used to it.
President Obama’s new budget proposal would kill funding for a long-planned nuclear disposal site at Yucca Mountain, Nev. That site has been the intended destination of thousands of tons of intensely radioactive reactor byproducts now sitting at the Eastern Washington nuclear reservation.
If the Yucca Mountain option is foreclosed, there would be only one destination for that Hanford waste: Hanford. In other words, the thorough Hanford cleanup long-promised by the federal government simply wouldn’t happen.
The Obama budget is a grand victory for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has been pushing to kill the Yucca Mountain for many years. He’s doing the bidding of his Nevada constituents – but the Obama administration has no such excuse.
The pretense here is that the Yucca Mountain site didn’t work out, so the Department of Energy must look at other possibilities.
Actually, the federal government has been researching nuclear waste disposal possibilities for more than a half-century. Everything was considered, including seabed burial and sequestration in various geologic formations. For a long time, in fact, the government was looking at burying all the nation’s spent nuclear fuel right at Hanford.
In 1987, after billions of dollars in research, Congress settled on burial at Yucca Mountain. More billions have been spent there, courtesy of electric utility ratepayers. So far, the best argument against the site is that it isn’t perfect.
Opponents of nuclear power and the likes of Reid are essentially demanding a scientific warranty that not a single atom will leak from the site, ever. No disposal site could meet that test – which is precisely the point.
Obama’s plan dismisses decades of work that concluded that high-level radioactive waste ought to be deeply buried in an extremely arid location far from rivers, well above aquifers, removed from population centers and highly secure. When those scientific cherries lined up, Nevada – to its understandable chagrin – won the “jackpot.”
Starting the game over, as Obama proposes, would mean that it’s back to the status quo. The status quo, unfortunately, is a very radioactive Hanford.
