News

DOE Would Expand Nuclear Dump in Nevada

November 6, 2008 

By H. JOSEF HEBERT - Associated Press Writer

The Energy Department will tell Congress in the coming weeks it
should begin looking for a second permanent site to bury nuclear waste, or
approve a large expansion of the proposed waste repository at Yucca Mountain in
Nevada.

Edward Sproat, head of the department's civilian nuclear waste
program, said Thursday the 77,000-ton limit Congress put on the
capacity of
the proposed Yucca waste dump will fall far short of what will be
needed and
has to be expanded, or another dump built elsewhere in the country.

The future of the Yucca Mountain project is anything but certain.

President-elect Obama has said he doesn't believe the desert
site 90
miles northwest of Las Vegas is suitable for keeping highly
radioactive used
reactor fuel up to a million years and believes other options should be
explored.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has vowed to block the
project.

Sproat, addressing a conference on nuclear waste, said the Energy
Department will send a report to Congress in the coming weeks
maintaining
that the Yucca site will need to be expanded. He said within two years
the
amount of waste produced by the country's 104 nuclear power plants plus
defense waste will exceed 77,000 tons. Yucca Mountain is not projected
to be
opened before 2020 at the earliest.

"We've done enough testing around the site to now that we can
make it
bigger," Sproat told reporters. But he said Congress will have to
remove the
capacity limit now in place.

If the limit is not removed, said Sproat, the report will urge
Congress to give the department authority to begin looking for and
evaluating a second nuclear waste repository elsewhere in the country.
The
law currently prohibits any such search, said Sproat.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission must issue a license to build
the
underground waste dump at Yucca Mountain, a ridge of volcanic rock in
the
Nevada desert not far from where the government exploded numerous
nuclear
bombs during the Cold War era. The NRC has four years to make a
decision.

Sproat acknowledged that the next president could withdraw the
license
application now before the NRC. But he said that would throw "the whole
process...into a lot of confusion and uncertainty" since Congress also
has
prohibited the government from considering any place other than the
Nevada
site.

An alternative could be a temporary above-ground repository,
possibly
on a federal site.

Sproat said the report, which has been completed, will say either
expand Yucca Mountain, begin the process of finding a second
repository, or
"don't do anything and let this whole thing just sit for another 10 to
20
years and see what happens." He said the department would prefer the
go-ahead for a larger Yucca site.

"We do think there is room for additional storage at Yucca. How
much,
we're not clear on," said Sproat.

Allison Macfarlane, a geologist and associate professor for
environmental science and policy at George Mason University who has
studied
the Yucca Mountain area, said there are clear limits to Yucca expansion
because of nearby earthquake fault lines and potential volcanic
activity.

"There are geological constraints on Yucca Mountain. It is not an
endless sink for nuclear waste," said Macfarlane at the conference
sponsored
by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.