POWER May 2010 - 24

Nuclear Power
thermore, each of the nuclear utilities will
sue for the cost of providing individual longterm
on-site storage of SNF, transportation,
and other costs, if they haven't already.
We believe the total liability of the federal
government could quickly surpass $50 billion
plus operating costs of the many facilities in perpetuity
should a Yucca Mountain replacement
not be found. Pursuing a new repository appears
to push into the future these NWF repayments
and reimbursements caused by DOE's contraact
breach with each nuclear plant owner.
The Birth and Slow Death
of Yucca Mountain
Congress established a national policy for
the disposition of commercial SNF and
HLW with passage of the NWPA in 1982.
When it was passed, the NWPA required the
DOE to identify and evaluate two different
sites to ensure regional equity for the permanent
geologic disposal of SNF and HLW.
Initially, nine sites were identified, and
eventually three were short-listed. In 1987,
Congress officially designated Yucca Mountain,
located about 85 miles by air northwest
of Las Vegas, Nevada. The selection of
Yucca Mountain as the nation's permanent
nuclear waste repository was then codified
with passage of Nuclear Waste Policy Act
Amendment (NWPAA). The DOE expected
to begin accepting nuclear waste in an operating
geologic repository by 1998.
But official selection did not build a
straight desert highway for the depository's
development to follow, as we detail below.
Most recently, while Yucca Mountain remained
on the books, progress was limited by
extreme budget cuts over the past two years.
The March 3 announcement was the equivalent
of a death sentence. The final " time of
death " pronouncement will come only when
the administration asks Congress to update
the NWPAA by removing the specific reference
to Yucca Mountain.
Meanwhile, ongoing responsibilities under
the NWPAA, such as administration of the
NWF, continue under the Office of Nuclear
Energy, which will continue to lead future
waste management activities.
Reduce Steam & Gas
Turbine Outage Time
Brackets can be installed
in tops-on or tops-off
configurations and in
magnetic or non-magnetic
bores.
Should the blue ribbon commission and
Congress ever come to a consensus on a
new repository site, expect a revision to the
NWPAA to replace Yucca Mountain with
the new site in order to codify the decision.
In the meantime, Yucca Mountain remains
codified as our nation's nuclear waste repository,
although the designation is meaningless
without funding and an approved license application
from the NRC.
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POWER | May 2010
Origins of the U.S. Nuclear
Waste Management Policy
The record shows that enactment of U.S. nuclear
waste management policies has always
been problematic. Yucca Mountain is not the
first time that U.S. taxpayers and the nuclear
industry have lost their " investment " to establish
a geologic repository for SNF.
During the U.S. reactor development programs
of the 1950s and 1960s, there was
every expectation that that SNF would be
reprocessed and its valuable components,
uranium and plutonium, would be recycled
into new fuel. At the same time, nearly 2.4
billion gallons of HLW, the aqueous waste
resulting from the solvent extraction cycles
after reprocessing, were projected to accumulate
by the year 2000. These projections
convinced the Atomic Energy Commission
(AEC), the predecessor agency to the NRC,
to address the unprecedented issue of how to
safely isolate radionuclides from the environment
for long periods. The AEC was also to
ensure that neither catastrophic acts of nature
nor inadvertent or malicious actions of this or
future generations would cause the material
to enter the environment.
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POWER May 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of POWER May 2010
