When the widely read opinion writer George F. Will published a postelection column prescribing next steps for the victorious Republican Party, he joined others in calling for renewed action on the long-envisioned nuclear waste repository in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. Will charged that the “signature achievement” of Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s “waning career has been blocking this project, on which approximately $15 billion has been spent.” He continued: “So, rather than nuclear waste being safely stored in the mountain’s 40 miles of tunnels 1,000 feet underground atop 1,000 feet of rock, more than 160 million Americans live within 75 miles of one or more of the 121 locations where 70,000 tons of waste are stored.”
In the days before the election doomed Democratic leadership of the Senate, a Chicago Tribune editorial, a Wall Street Journal op-ed, and a Boston Globe editorial looked forward to post-election revival of Yucca’s prospects. An excerpt from the Globe illustrates the thinking:
For more than a quarter century, the government has been considering whether to use Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles from Las Vegas, as the country’s only long-term storage facility for waste from nuclear reactors. The plan is to collect the nuclear waste created by power plants and bury it underneath the mountain. The site was chosen because it is geologically inert; natural processes such as earthquakes are highly unlikely to will disturb any materials placed at the site, which scientists say will maintain its integrity for at least 300,000 years. The problem isn’t any lack of supporting research; it’s that Democrats have been loath to support the construction of the site. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, from Nevada, has consistently blocked funding for Yucca Mountain. Barack Obama vowed to kill the project as a candidate for office, and has opposed it as president—mainly to placate Nevada voters who oppose constructing a large repository in their state.
Yucca has also been getting renewed attention in Washington-insider publications. Roll Call recently ran a commentary headlined “Without Reid, Yucca Mountain looms.” Before the election but after the October appearance of a new Nuclear Regulatory Commission report affirming Yucca’s safety, the Hill reported on movement in Congress to act.
At the New York Times, an October article about the NRC’s safety affirmation—covered also at Science—spoke of “laying the groundwork to restart the project if control of the Senate changes hands in the elections.”
But Yucca technopolitics will continue. A 5 November Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists commentary alleges that in fact the “likely repository configuration doesn’t come close to meeting NRC requirements” because the inevitable problem of water seepage over time is not being properly confronted. The commentary ends with an accusation: “What it comes down to is this: The NRC is going along with a shell game to advance the political fortunes of the Yucca Mountain project.”
---
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
