Expert: Yucca not best place for storing nuclear waste

There are better places than Yucca Mountain to bury nuclear waste though the ridge would be safe enough to store the nation's growing stack of spent fuel from commercial power reactors.

That's what one expert on Energy Secretary Steven Chu's Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future believes.

The expert, Per Peterson, a University of California, Berkeley, nuclear engineering professor, said the choices range from stowing it in salt formations that stretch from Texas to Louisiana and that exist in New Mexico, or putting it down deep boreholes below the water table.

In either case, drinking water supplies would be spared of contamination because the water is either too saline already or there is no evident pathway to it, he said.

And, he said, the search should start for a new course on dealing with tens of thousands of tons of highly radioactive waste stored in pools and above ground at reactor sites, once destined for a maze of tunnels in Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"I think the commission's recommendations make an enormous amount of sense, and implementing them is important," said Peterson, who offered his thoughts Thursday on the 180-page report that was released for comment July 29.

The report recommends establishing one or more facilities for interim storage of used fuel and creating a new organization to manage the material, with full access to nuclear waste fee revenues.

Temporary storage of the waste in dry casks would allow the government to take title to it and remove it from reactor sites.

"Developing a consolidated storage is a positive thing," Peterson said. "Particularly for spent fuel now at shutdown reactor sites."

He said he thinks the site selection process for a repository should be more fair than the one that singled out Yucca Mountain in 1987. The site should have consent of a state or community hosting it, and it should meet a safety standard that is independent of the site.

In the case of Yucca Mountain, the safety standard for containing the waste was tailored for the mountain. It hinged on preventing groundwater contamination by spending billions of dollars to cover waste containers with corrosion-retardant titanium shields.

Also, he said it would be "silly to build a $3 billion railroad to a repository site that is inferior," as called for in the Yucca plan.

The commission didn't take a position on proceeding with the Yucca project. Regardless, law requires study for a second repository, which would become the nation's first repository because Yucca Mountain has been abandoned.

The Obama administration pulled the plug on the project's funding. Nuclear regulators were starting to review the Energy Department's license application, but the agency sought to withdraw it.

Peterson spoke as an individual, not as a voice of the commission though he is a member of it and supports the draft recommendations.

The recommendations, in part, call for changing the nuclear waste law, consolidating the waste at temporary above-ground sites, and starting the search for a new repository site. But before the search can start, Congress will have to rewrite the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, something that probably won't happen until after the recommendations are finalized by January.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the leading opponent of the Yucca project in Congress, said changing the law shouldn't be a monumental task.

"I'll take a look at it next year," Reid, D-Nev., said Friday during a visit to the Review-Journal.

Contact reporter Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308.