Yucca Mountain Nuclear Storage on Ice. Now What?
March 04 2009 / by joelg / In association with Future Blogger.net
Category: Energy Year: 2009 Rating: 4
By Joel Greenberg
The Obama administration recently announced their proposed budget with an interesting nuclear wrinkle: they are no longer funding Yucca Mountain, the underground repository for nuclear wastes in Nevada, 90 miles Northwest of Las Vegas. "Unfunding" effectively kills the project. Supporters view Yucca Mountain as a reasonable solution to storing nuclear waste for the long term. Critics call it a boondoggle based upon flawed science.
Nuclear waste is a byproduct of generating electricity in the 104 nuclear reactors currently running in the US. It's highly toxic with some elements remaining dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. It's currently being stored on-site at each reactor, which are running out of room to store the waste. While Yucca Mountain had room for the existing waste from these 104 reactors, it did not have room for the future waste from the reactors that are now planned as a result of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which has kicked off a renaissance of nuclear power in the US after 30 years of dormancy.
Surprised?
"No," says Dr. Mike Kotschenreuther, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Fusion Studies at the University of Texas, "We've known that President Obama said he was going to discontinue Yucca Mountain for some time. We're still going to need a solution to nuclear waste, even if Yucca Mountain is no longer a viable project, so we've been doing our best to come up with a solution."
