US Nuclear Waste Program at an Impasse

Congress is grappling again with the elusive problem of the storage and permanent disposal of spent fuel from nuclear power reactors. The need for innovative approaches to resolve this issue is more evident now than ever before. So, too, is the need for broader understanding of the fact that the benefits to the state that accepts a waste repository can greatly outweigh the risks. This is especially true in the case of Nevada, which probably offers the best opportunities for minimizing the real or perceived land use and environmental conflicts associated with the siting of a nuclear waste repository.

The spent-fuel and high-level-waste problem was supposedly solved at the end of 1982 when Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, but for more than a year now the effort to implement the act has been in crisis. The crisis was precipitated on May 28, 1986, when the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the White House announced the latest decisions on the screening of geologic repository sites for further investigation.

The number of candidate sites for the first repository, to be located in the West, had been narrowed to three: one in Nevada in volcanic tuff, one in Texas in salt, and one in Washington in basalt. But at the same time, acting in response to political pressure, DOE called off further screening of sites for a second repository, which was to have been located somewhere in the eastern half of the country. Potential sites for the second repository had been identified in the upper Midwest, in New England, and in the Southeast.

These decisions provoked anger and distrust in Congress. Westerners viewed the indefinite deferral of the siting of a second repository as politically expedient disregard for the regional balance and fairness that Congress had sought to write into the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. Members of Congress from the West took the lead in cutting spending for the waste program and in bringing about a one-year moratorium on the excavation of deep, exploratory shafts at the three remaining candidate sites chosen for detailed geologic exploration or "characterization." The characterization projects are now estimated to cost about $1 billion each, the cost having escalated from less than $100 million since the early 1980s. The prospect today, a year after the DOE-White House announcement, is that there is little chance that the three characterization projects will go forward.

Although many blame the current impasse on DOE, the problems inherent in implementing the Nuclear Waste Policy Act are so fundamental that a crisis was probably inevitable no matter how well or badly the department behaved. In developing the act, Congress devised a strategy to investigate and compare numerous repository sites in a multi-staged screening process. Attractive in theory, in practice this strategy has proved to be unmanageable and confoundingly contentious. In particular, it ignores the need to exclude outright all sites that present—or even appear to present—major land use and environmental conflicts. Among the sites seriously considered in earlier rounds of screening were one in Mississippi next to a town and a site in Utah adjacent to Canyonlands National Park; and, of the three remaining candidate sites, the one in Texas is beneath the Ogallala aquifer (the regional groundwater supply), and the site in Washington is next to the Columbia River.

Only the site in Nevada at Yucca Mountain, a desolate, remote place in the desert about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is relatively free of such land use and environmental conflicts. It is at a far corner of the Nevada Test Site, where nuclear weapons have been tested since the early 1950s. Consideration even of this site has Nevada's governor up in arms, although unlike the situation in Texas and Washington, there is not the same public perception that a repository would be a direct threat to vital water resources in Nevada.

The controversies in potential host states are greatly extended and exacerbated by the nature of the screening process itself. Each point in this process—nomination, selection for characterization, and final winnowing—represents a major political hurdle. Together they constitute an impossibly demanding political marathon.

How can Congress rescue the siting effort? Senators J. Bennett Johnston, Jr. (D-La.) and James A. McClure (R-Idaho), the chair and the ranking minority member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, respectively, have offered an important but controversial amendment to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. On the premise that it might be possible to characterize only one site and find it licensable for repository development, the amendment seeks the cooperation of potential host states and localities in exchange for generous rewards.

Under this amendment, a state with a promising site could elect to enter into a cooperation agreement with DOE in return for large incentive payments. Over the thirty-to-forty-year life of the repository project, these payments would run to several billions of dollars. With such an agreement in hand, DOE would then proceed with characterization of only that site.

An important safeguard for the host state would rest with a special review board created to oversee the project. It would be through their strong representation on this board as well as through Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licensing that the state and local governments would he expected to find guarantees of safe containment.

One salient issue raised by the Johnston-McClure amendment is whether focusing on a single site does not greatly increase the likelihood of delay in obtaining a licensable site. That is, if the preferred site should be found unacceptable after five or more years of characterization work, then either the goal of geologic isolation of the waste would have to be done in favor of surface storage, or would have to select a new site for another long-drawn-out study. Comments of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff on the Johnston-McClure amendment in fact warn of the risk of winding up with an unlicensable site.

The warning quite obviously deserves sober consideration. Although the Yucca Mountain site has been formally ranked ahead of all others in the DOE inventory, it too presents geologic uncertainties, some of which may remain even after characterization. For instance, faults are present, and the site could be subject to earthquakes.

Especially fundamental when dealing with waste containment are questions having to do with the behavior of groundwater. A repository at Yucca Mountain would be built in "unsaturated" tuff high above the water table. Project scientists believe that any water that infiltrated the tuff would move very slowly through the pores in the rock. But some of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Project Office consultants speculate that it could flow rapidly, through fractures, and cause leaching of waste canisters and ultimately of the waste itself.

Overcoming uncertainty

However, there are ways to reduce, if not eliminate, such geologic uncertainties. An important new strategy, not yet pursued by Congress, would be to develop a much more robust and longer-lived waste canister that would be as critical a component containment as the geologic formation itself.

Present NRC regulations require that the canister and waste package have a life of at least 300 to 1,000 years. But in principal, there is no reason not to build a canister to last many tens of thousands of years. Sweden envisions a copper canister that is expected to last hundreds of thousands of years, and a review panel of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences has found Swedish claims for the proposed canister to be entirely convincing. In many situations, so durable a canister should compensate for, or even overwhelm, geologic uncertainties that might make a site unlicensable.

To have a capability for ready retrieval waste canisters would provide another hedge against geologic uncertainties. Maintaining a retrieval option for a period of years is in fact mandated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and the NRC. The Nevada tuff site appears to lend itself particularly well to this requirement. Not only is this site relatively dry, but the depth to the repository would be only about 1,000 feet below ground surface, compared to 2,000 or 3,000 feet at other sites.

Indeed, a repository at Yucca Mountain could be designed so that retrieval operations could be carried out almost as readily as they are at interim surface storage facilities. But when the repository is finally commissioned and sealed up, permanent geologic isolation would be accomplished. Moreover, from the onset of site investigation through licensing and the entire active phase of waste emplacement operations, the repository could also serve as an underground laboratory for studying the geology and the overall system of containment.

In sum, a strategy that includes developing very durable waste packaging, providing for ready retrieval of waste canisters, and continuing the study of geologic and containment systems should promote public trust and make licensing easier as well.

The Johnston-McClure amendment raises another important question: Can the offer of large financial rewards really help bring about host state cooperation? The sponsors of the amendment hope that a state with a potentially acceptable site will volunteer to enter into a cooperation agreement. Their strategy is one of stick as well as carrot—particularly for Nevada, as. the state with the site that has been the most highly rated in past DUE assessments. Yucca Mountain is the site that seems most likely to be chosen for the repository if the process mandated by the waste act runs its course and the Texas, Washington, and Nevada sites are all characterized. Senator Johnston has stated that if the country must bear the expense of three site characterizations, the state ultimately chosen for the repository cannot expect the large rewards he and McClure have proposed. But, with the siting effort in its present state of political paralysis, the stick that the senators are wielding is neither very stout nor very credible.

Governor Richard H. Bryan of Nevada is not impressed by the carrot either. He has denounced the offer of rewards as "bribery" and "nuclear blackmail." His position is that the Yucca Mountain site should be technically disqualified because of earthquake hazards and other uncertainties and, furthermore, that Nevada has already done more than its share to accommodate national nuclear programs, including the testing of nuclear weapons at the Nevada Test Site.

Bryan has declared that he will not allow Nevada to take on the "stigma" of being the "country's nuclear wasteland." Some key members of the Nevada legislature think the governor is being demagogic on the nuclear waste issue. While the Nevada Assembly has adopted resolutions opposing consideration of Yucca Mountain as a repository site, the state Senate has not; in the Senate such resolutions have been kept bottled up in committee.

Nonetheless, Bryan has thus far dominated public discussion of the nuclear waste issue in Nevada, and public opinion polls indicate that most Nevadans today share his position. Certainly he has played successfully to the popular view that the coming of a "nuclear waste dump" would only confirm what is widely held to be an outsider's stereotypical view of Nevada as a "vast desert wasteland."

But, given the dynamic nature of the political process, it is probably still too early to tell whether or not Nevada can be persuaded to acquiesce in the siting of a repository. The incentives for cooperation that Johnston and McClure have proposed certainly give Nevadans reason to think about what might be gained as well as what might be lost.

The Reno Gazette Journal, one of Nevada's major newspapers, quickly chided Bryan for his categorical rejection of the incentives offer, telling readers that the state's "desert geography makes it one of the few realistic sites." Nevada is pathetically dependent on revenues from its "gaming industry," and, as the Gazette Journal pointed out, is "gasping for money to fund education, welfare, roads, prisons, police, fire protection, and parks."

Another consideration—likely to become even more pressing if the Democrats take the White House in 1988—is the possibility of the United States signing a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would eliminate most of the 7,000 or so jobs at the Nevada Test Site, the largest single employer of civilians in Nevada. In fact, in 1978 when the signing of a test ban treaty appeared to be imminent, a Nevada state blue ribbon panel recommended civilian nuclear power programs, including radioactive waste disposal, as a prime alternative use of the Nevada Test Site.

Rethinking the "dump" image

Nevadans will never be willing to cooperate in a repository project unless they critically examine the prevailing notion that for them to think in terms of economic benefits is to invite a bribe to accept a "nuclear dump." If a dump were really what was contemplated, the proposal should not be entertained at all but flatly rejected. But the fact is that a repository has from the beginning been conceived as a modern, highly organized, and well-monitored industrial facility.

Under existing circumstances Nevada would have the negotiating leverage not only to assure that the benefits it received were truly generous but that the repository would be truly benign. Nevada need not simply accept or reject terms proposed by Johnston and McClure, or any other members of Congress. The state could and should play an important part in defining the terms of a cooperation agreement.

For instance, the state, noting the geologic uncertainties at Yucca Mountain, could insist on greater reliance on a systems approach and, more specifically, on improved waste packaging. Furthermore, the state could seek to have the siting investigation include an additional site, to be chosen under criteria partly of its own devising. A 1984 study by the U.S. Geological Survey has indicated that numerous potential repository sites are to be found in the Basin and Range Province, of which Nevada and the Great Basin are an important part.

Congress hardly could object to the consideration of a second site if the excavation of an exploratory shaft and tunnels—which accounts for much of the cost of characterization—were confined, at least initially, to the site of principal interest. In case the Yucca Mountain site proved to be unlicensable, having a backup site could save the siting effort from ultimate failure.

In any event, the fate of the waste program could well depend on what happens—or does not happen—in Nevada. Yucca Mountain offers political and technical advantages unique among the present suite of DOE sites, and if there is a better site, it is probably more likely to be found in Nevada than elsewhere. Some 87 percent of Nevada remains federal land. Much of it is public domain land not yet withdrawn for specific purposes, and most of it is arid. Moreover, Nevada is one of the least-populated states and at the same time the most-urbanized state—well over half of its population lives in Las Vegas and Clark County—which greatly reduces potential conflict between repository siting and human settlement.

High stakes

Should there be no progress in Nevada, this could mean that the entire repository siting effort under the 1982 waste act will be regarded as a failure, making any attempt by Congress to renew the search for sites that much more difficult. Under these circumstances the siting effort would most likely be abandoned and spent fuel would continue to accumulate at the reactor sites.

Continued at-reactor storage actually would be strongly and directly encouraged by one of the measures recently put forward in Congress to stop all exploration of specific sites while a special commission conducts an eighteen-month investigation of what has gone wrong. A moratorium-and-study bill sponsored principally by senators from states targeted in DOE siting studies would go beyond a similar measure introduced in the House in that it would allow the utilities to recover the cost of at-reactor storage from the Nuclear Waste Fund that collects a fee on every kilowatt hour of nuclear-generated electricity.

The utilities, however, have been urging that the government begin to take spent fuel off their hands before the end of the century and place it temporarily in a surface, monitored, retrievable storage facility that DOE proposes to build at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. But the state of Tennessee has adamantly opposed this storage project. Its opposition will be all the more determined given the lack of progress toward establishing a geologic repository. Tennesseans worry that spent-fuel storage at Oak Ridge would turn out not to be temporary but permanent.

Abandonment of the repository siting effort simply cannot be viewed as acceptable. There is increased risk of accidents and radiation releases associated with the continually growing amounts of spent fuel being stored at reactor sites—at least when storage is in the form of a much greater density of fuel assemblies in the pools used to dissipate radioactive-decay heat. This risk is not high, but it is by no means zero.

Furthermore, abandonment of the permanent disposal effort could symbolize a general political inability in our technological society to cope effectively with hazardous substances of any kind. Any collapse of the American effort at direct geologic isolation of spent fuel would only further weaken U.S. influence on the nuclear enterprise abroad, where fuel reprocessing and the recycling of plutonium will increase risks of nuclear terrorism and of nuclear weapons proliferation.

In sum, whereas passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 was intended to mark a confident new beginning, the effort to carry out that act—unless there is progress soon toward repository siting in Nevada—may be nearing a sorry end.