Yucca Mountain and nuclear waste
Yucca Mountain, located 100 miles northwest of Las
Vegas, was picked as the repository to hold the nation’s nuclear waste. The
Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 had three western states under consideration, and
in 1987, with Congress being pressed to pick a site, Yucca Mountain got the
nod.
‘’The politics won out,’’ said Allison Macfarlane of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Yucca Mountain Project. ‘’The weakest
state, politically, that was under consideration, got stuck with it.’’
Well, twenty years later, with more than $9 billion of
our tax dollars spent, it is still not open. It may never be open. In my
opinion it never should be.
Several facts have come to light in recent years, such
as that the Mountain sits on a fault line, underground water could rise and be
contaminated, and geological reports by the Department of Energy scientists who
work at the site were falsified.
Yucca Mountain originally was designed to hold 77,000
tons of nuclear waste. In the United States, nuclear waste is stored on site at
the various nuclear power plants around the country. According to the energy
department, by the time Yucca Mountain opens there will be more than 77,000
tons of nuclear waste waiting to be transferred there, so the department has
asked to increase the storage capacity.
Last year the Bush administration’s energy department
made public its proposed Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. The program, pushed
by President George W.Bush, is offering to take other
countries’ commercial high-level radioactive wastes for permanent disposal in
the U.S.
Nuclear Information and Resource Service Nuclear Waste
Specialist Kevin Kamps said of Bush’s partnership,
“it would bury the U.S. under a mountain of radioactive garbage”.
In 2005 the public was made aware of the fact that
possible dangers exist because Yucca Mountain either sits directly atop or near
33 known fault lines, the largest of which, the Ghost Dance Fault, runs
directly through the site. But that did not slow development of the site.
Because Yucca Mountain is so near Las Vegas, Bush and his energy department
must have figured that it was a good bet that no earthquakes would happen while
they were in charge.
The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, using computer
modeling based on geological data, historical quakes and results from about 20
test wells, showed
that a magnitude 5 or 6 earthquake could raise the water table between 450 and
750 feet at the storage site. Because the repository would be only 600 to 800
feet above the present water table, “flooding could be expected to occur,” they
wrote.
The water table below the Yucca Mountain site is
unusually deep, about 1,500 feet below the surface, Davies said. But within a
six-mile radius north of the proposed storage facility the groundwater level
rapidly rises to a more normal depth of about 600 feet. (Source: Nuclear
Information and Resource Service.)
The containers in which the
waste will be stored, if exposed to the ground water, could leak and
contaminate water tables throughout Nevada. Imagine if the water made it into
the Colorado River, which feeds most of southern Nevada, western Arizona and
southern California. Another gamble Bush and the Department of Energy are
willing to take.
According to the department, a hydrologist at the U.S.
Geological Survey, who was studying how water flowed through the mountain,
faked documentation on the times and dates at which certain geological samples
were taken from the site.
Yucca Mountain is not just a boondoggle, but has the
potential of creating one of the deadliest environmental disasters ever seen on
the planet.
Oh, did I mention that Yucca Mountain is an extinct
Volcano?