Japan shows need for spent fuel storage

The catastrophe occurring in Japan has caused tremendous loss of life, will debilitate that economy for years to come and has raised genuine fears about the safety of relying on nuclear power for electricity. To date the major damage has been caused by the massive tsunami that followed a 9.0 earthquake, one of the largest in recorded history.

The tragedy also raises important concerns about where spent nuclear fuel should be stored. Although Japan leaves the nuclear waste in cooling ponds only for relatively short periods of time, reports have indicated that the waste pools have failed and are becoming a huge problem.

Japan, unlike the United States, ships the spent fuel off for reprocessing as soon as practical (ultimately a deep burial site will be built, similar to what was planned for Yucca Mountain, Nevada).

What does not make sense is current U.S. policy on nuclear waste. The Obama administration, pressed hard by the Nevada delegation, stopped the ongoing process of licensing the Yucca Mountain repository. Instead, the Department of Energy has decided to leave the waste at some 75 nuclear reactor sites for an interim period, maybe 100 to 120 years, until a scientific solution for disposing of the spent nuclear fuel can be created.

This is insane. While I applaud the decision to abandon the concept of long-term storage of the spent fuel (300,000 years!), and concur that interim storage for 100 years is right, leaving this dangerous stuff scattered at multiple locations is irresponsible.

We need to ask ourselves as Americans where it is safest to store this spent fuel. One choice is to place the waste deep underground at a secure military site, already prepared, in the desert 100 miles from any populated area. There it is not vulnerable to terrorist attacks or earthquakes, and certainly not to tsunamis.

The alternative is to leave the waste within five miles of 165 million people. It is vulnerable to terrorist attack (think light planes), many of the reactors are located near or on known fault zones, and some are in coastal areas that could be subject to tsunamis. Clearly this is unacceptable.

In addition, the decision to abandon Yucca is clearly illegal. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982/87 designated Yucca, and that law has not been overturned (Sen. Harry Reid knows he does not have the votes to change the law, so he seeks to close Yucca through the appropriations process).

A panel of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the body that oversees the waste disposal process, ruled the licensing process must proceed and cannot be stopped by fiat. The NRC itself, under the chairmanship of former Reid staffer Greg Jaczko, has failed to adhere to its responsibility and support or overturn that decision.

It may not matter soon what the NRC decides. Several states are pursuing litigation to force Energy Secretary Steven Chu to proceed with licensing Yucca Mountain. They will certainly succeed. That might be some relief to Chu, who was for Yucca Mountain before he was against it. As the director of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, he joined eight other directors of national labs in endorsing Yucca just two years before he became energy secretary.

When the courts and the NRC rule, as they will, that the Yucca Mountain repository must proceed, Nevada will have lost considerable leverage. Right now, the state could negotiate for fantastic benefits, given how urgently needed the Yucca facility is. This would be in addition to the considerable economic impact that the repository brought to the state when it was being developed. We have lost more than 1,500 of the best, highest-paying jobs one could imagine.

One might wonder why Nevada ranks so poorly in the amount of money it receives versus what it sends to the federal government -- at 65 cents on the dollar, one of the worst in the country. Likely that is because we have demanded so little from the feds -- except to stop the Yucca repository.

What a great deal.

Sen. Reid and others have described Yucca as "that damned $100 billion project." Just think a minute about that.

It is likely that soon the combination of the court process, the NRC decision and the urgency spurred by the damage in Japan will force the reopening of the Yucca Mountain repository.

The question is whether our elected officials will be smart enough to capitalize on the situation and bring the state a safe, economically advantageous opportunity. Or will they continue to squander our precious political leverage?

Longtime Nevada resident Tyrus W. Cobb was special assistant to President Ronald Reagan for National Security Affairs.