The target date for the opening of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste entombment project shifts like the sands of the Sahara, swallowing and then exposing the bleached ruins of ancient cities lost to time. It's hard to remember or believe that -- according to initial federal plans and schedules -- the thing was supposed to be open and functioning by now.
In fact, Yucca Mountain has been delayed so long that if it were to open next year (it can't possibly, of course) and begin accepting spent nuclear fuel immediately, it would no longer hold all the material awaiting storage. So the DOE is now planning to double the size of a vast underground vault not yet built -- or even really started. Though even that won't provide enough room.
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Oh well. How far along are they?
Let's just take the plan to actually get the canisters full of spent fuel to the site, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The 319-mile, $880 million rail line from Caliente (over by the Utah border), west to a point near Tonopah and then south to Yucca mountain -- designed to avoid hauling the fuel through urban Las Vegas or through the Nellis Air Force bombing range, will be completed ...
Oh, wait. It hasn't been started. And that $880 million price tag? Whoops. The DOE ran a new cost projection last fall, and decided that for the federal government to build 319 miles of rail line in this day and age will actually cost ... $2 billion.
So it's back to the drawing board.
Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, the initial federal plan had been to ship the waste across northern Nevada through Elko and Winnemucca, then south to Hawthorne and Mina, and finally to build a new line, a mere 209 miles in length, along an old Southern Pacific Railroad bed -- a route that would cross fewer mountain ranges and (in today's dollars) cost about a billion less.
But the Walker River Paiute Tribe had objected to the waste shipments crossing their reservation, and that had put the kibosh on the northern route.
Now, lo and behold, the DOE says the tribe has withdrawn its long-held objections.
Presto! The northern route is alive again.
Now, mind you, if the DOE can come up with a way to save taxpayers a billion dollars, that's not small potatoes, and they're to be encouraged.
Though it does occur to the casual observer that -- since ongoing research (the part that hasn't been fudged) makes it appear increasingly unlikely the bedrock of Yucca Mountain can really provide "geologic containment" to protect the underlying water tables from radioactive contamination for anywhere near the first half-life of some of the stuff to be entombed -- the DOE might save the entire cost of the rail project by simply storing the stuff above ground at some location further east, where the depressed local economy might cause residents to welcome an influx of employment in the "waste dump storage security" sector.
Someplace like, oh, Panaca; Caliente; or the old Wendover Air Force Range.
Normally, it might seem silly to propose alternative plans for a project begun nearly 20 years ago.
