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Trump Rejects Yucca Mountain Nuke Dump In Bid For Nevada Votes

This article is more than 4 years old.

Reversing yet again his stance on the project, President Trump dumped the nuclear waste repository planned at the Nevada Test Site in a tweet last week in an attempt to win Nevada in the 2020 election – a state he narrowly lost in 2016.

The White House confirmed that the Administration will not include any funding for Yucca Mountain when it submits its 2021 budget this week. This is in contrast to Trump’s last three budgets that contained about $120 million each to restart the licensing of Yucca Mountain.

Within an hour of Trump's tweet, his campaign announced that Donald Trump Jr. would appear in Las Vegas later this month for a campaign event.

But don’t expect cheers from Nevada over Trump’s tweet.

They just don’t trust this Administration. Nevada has never liked the fact that the federal government has been trying to force Yucca Mountain down their throats for 33 years. Nevadans still refer to the 1987 Amendment to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act as the “Screw Nevada Bill.”

It certainly didn’t help the trust issue that the Trump Administration secretly shipped a bunch of Cold War plutonium to the Nevada site from South Carolina in 2018, claiming national security as the reason for not telling Nevada.

Congresswoman Susie Lee (D-NV) accused Trump of playing “political games with Nevadans’ health and future.”

The immediate upshot of this latest flip flop is the future of about 75,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel sitting at about 60 sites across the country, like the 2,000 tons at the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant near San Diego.

What everyone wants is an actual plan for the future, something they can depend on. Something they can plan for. A certain future is also necessary for nuclear power to expand in order to successfully address global warming.

Unfortunately, such certainty will have to wait until America once again cares about science and the truth. We scientists know the best places to put this waste and we’ve been trying to get it there for 60 years.

Unfortunately, the repository rock at Yucca Mountain, chosen as a result of politics in 1987, is not that place. The rock at Yucca Mountain is a highly fractured, dual porosity, variably-saturated volcanic rock having oxidizing groundwater that sits on the edge of the Las Vegas Shear Zone.

Nothing in this last sentence should sound reassuring.

Because of these properties, the plan for Yucca Mountain requires seven engineered barriers to even attempt to work as planned, and that will cost about ten times more than it would otherwise, and that number keeps going up. We will never have enough money for this choice, and Congress will never allocate $300 billion for something that could cost $30 billion.

The right rock doesn’t need any barriers and would cost only 10% of the price at Yucca Mountain since it wouldn’t need any help from humans, who generally don’t build things that last a million years anyway.

The best we can do in the next 20 years is to build a centralized interim storage facility where all this waste, particularly that from shuttered plants like SONGS, can go for the next 50 years or so while we get our act together and dispose of it in the right place.

Trump says he’ll explore innovative approaches that don’t involve Yucca Mountain, but we know what to do with this waste and where to put it, and there are only a few choices:

- put it in massive salt, like the Salado Salt in New Mexico where our only operating nuclear repository for nuclear bomb waste is located; after all, it was designed and built for all nuclear waste from any source after it was chosen based completely on science,

- put it in deep boreholes in the crust, deep enough that nothing in it can get out for millions of years.

An interesting effect of interim storage, is that it would hold the waste until we could burn it in future specialized fast reactors like the one being designed by TerraPower, Bill Gates’ nuclear group in Washington State. That would get ten times more energy out of the same waste. Then put that waste, which is radioactive for a much shorter time, into salt or deep boreholes.

Otherwise, all of the waste will stay right where it is, in dry cask storage at each site, for who knows how long.

We don't have the money or the time to waste on nonsense and empty campaign promises.

Hopefully, Nevada won’t get fooled again.

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