The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, as designated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act amendments of 1987, is a proposed deep geological repository storage facility within Yucca Mountain for spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste in the United States. The site is on federal land adjacent to the Nevada Test Site in Nye County, Nevada, about northwest of the Las Vegas Valley.
The project was approved in 2002 by the 107th United States Congress, but the 112th Congress ended federal funding for the site via amendment to the Department of Defense and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, passed on April 14, 2011. The project has encountered many difficulties and was highly contested by the public, the Western Shoshone peoples, and many politicians. The project also faces strong state and regional opposition. The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons.
This leaves the United States government (which disposes of its transuranic waste from nuclear weapons production below the surface at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico) and American nuclear power plants without any designated long-term storage for their high-level radioactive waste (spent fuel) stored on-site in steel and concrete casks (dry cask storage) at 76 reactor sites in 34 states.
Under President Barack Obama, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) reviewed options other than Yucca Mountain for a high-level waste repository. The Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, established by the secretary of energy, released its final report in January 2012. It detailed an urgent need to find a site suitable for constructing a consolidated geological repository, stating that any future facility should be developed by a new independent organization with direct access to the Nuclear Waste Fund, which is not subject to political and financial control as the Cabinet-level DOE is. But the site met with strong opposition in Nevada, including from then-Senate leader Harry Reid.
Under the first Donald Trump administration, the DOE terminated the Deep Borehole Field Test program and other non-Yucca Mountain waste disposition research activities. For FY18, the DOE requested $120 million and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) $30 million from Congress to continue licensing activities for the Yucca Mountain Repository. For fiscal year 2019, the DOE again requested $120 million while the NRC increased its request to $47.7 million. Congress provided no funding for the remainder of fiscal year 2018. In May 2019, Representative John Shimkus reintroduced a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives for the site, but the Appropriation Committee killed an amendment by Representative Mike Simpson to add $74 million in Yucca Mountain funding to a DOE appropriations bill. On May 20, 2020, Under Secretary of Energy Mark W. Menezes testified in front of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that President Trump strongly opposes proceeding with the Yucca Mountain Repository.
In May 2021, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said that Yucca Mountain would not be part of the Biden administration's plans for nuclear waste disposal. She anticipated announcing the department's next steps "in the coming months".
Introduction
Spent nuclear fuel is the radioactive byproduct of electricity generation at commercial nuclear power plants, and high-level radioactive waste is the byproduct of reprocessing spent fuel to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons. In 1982, Congress established a national policy to solve the problem of nuclear waste disposal. This policy is a federal law called the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which made the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) responsible for finding a site, building, and operating an underground disposal facility called a geologic repository. The recommendation to use a geologic repository dates to 1957, when the National Academy of Sciences recommended that the best way to protect the environment and public health and safety is to dispose of the waste in rock deep underground.
The DOE began studying Yucca Mountain in 1978 to determine whether it would be suitable for the nation's first long-term geologic repository for over (150 million pounds)"Faff and Fallout." The Economist August 1, 2015: 23. Print. of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste as of 2015 stored at 121 sites around the nation. An estimated of the waste would be from U.S. military nuclear programs.
On December 19, 1984, the DOE selected ten locations in six states for consideration as potential repository sites, based on data collected for nearly ten years. The ten sites were studied and results of these preliminary studies were reported in 1985. Based on these reports, President Ronald Reagan approved three sites for intensive scientific study called site characterization. The three sites were Hanford, Washington; Deaf Smith County, Texas; and Yucca Mountain.
In 1987, Congress amended the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and directed DOE to study only Yucca Mountain, which is adjacent to the former nuclear test site. The Act provided that if during site characterization Yucca Mountain was found unsuitable, studies would stop immediately. This option expired when Reagan actually recommended the site. On July 23, 2002, President George W. Bush signed House Joint Resolution 87 (), allowing the DOE to take the next step in establishing a safe repository in which to store nuclear waste. The DOE was to begin accepting spent fuel at the Yucca Mountain Repository by January 31, 1998, but did not do so because of a series of delays due to legal challenges, concerns over how to transport nuclear waste to the facility, and political pressure resulting in underfunding of the construction.
On July 18, 2006, the DOE proposed March 31, 2017, as the date to open the facility and begin accepting waste based on full funding. On September 8, 2006, Bush nominated Ward (Edward) Sproat, a nuclear industry executive formerly of PECO energy in Pennsylvania, to lead the Yucca Mountain Project. Following the 2006 midterm congressional elections, Harry Reid, a longtime opponent of the repository, became the Senate Majority Leader, putting him in a position to greatly affect the future of the project. Reid said he would continue to work to block completion of the project, and is quoted as having said, "Yucca Mountain is dead. It'll never happen."
In the 2008 Omnibus Spending Bill, the Yucca Mountain Project's budget was reduced to $390 million. The project was able to reallocate resources and delay transportation expenditures to complete the License Application for submission on June 3, 2008. During his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to abandon the project. After his election, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told Obama he did not have the ability to do so. On April 23, 2009, Lindsey Graham and eight other U.S. senators introduced legislation to provide "rebates" from a $30 billion federally managed fund into which nuclear power plants had been paying, so as to refund all collected funds if Congress canceled the project.
In November 2013, in response to a lawsuit filed by the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners and the Nuclear Energy Institute, the U.S. court of appeals ruled that nuclear utilities may stop paying into the nuclear waste recovery fund until either the DOE follows the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which designates Yucca Mountain as the repository, or Congress changes the law. The fee ended May 16, 2014.
Lacking an operating repository, the federal government paid utility companies $5.3 billion between 1998 and 2015, in compensation for failing to comply with the contract it signed to take the spent nuclear fuel by 1998. For the ten years after 2015, it was estimated to cost taxpayers $24 billion in payments from the Judgment Fund. The Judgment Fund is not subject to budget rules, so payments therefrom have no impact on yearly spending for other programs.
Facility
The Yucca Mountain project's purpose is to comply with the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 by developing a national site for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste storage. Since April 2009, the project's management and operating contractor has been USA Repository Services (USA-RS), a wholly owned subsidiary of URS Corporation (now part of AECOM), with supporting principal subcontractors Shaw Corporation (now part of McDermott International Inc.) and Areva Federal Services LLC (now Orano federal services business). Sandia National Laboratories was responsible for post-closure analysis and ensuring compliance with the NWPA.
The DOE constructed an Exploratory Studies Facility to enable access to investigate the site's suitability for hosting the repository. The actual repository facility would be constructed after completion of initial studies and granting of permission. The Exploratory Studies Facility's main tunnel is U-shaped, long and wide. After completing the Exploratory Studies Facility, the DOE excavated another, -long "cross-drift" tunnel to enable further studies of the rock and groundwater.
Several cathedral-like alcoves branch from the main tunnel. Most of the scientific experiments were conducted in these alcoves. The emplacement drifts (smaller-diameter tunnels branching off the main tunnel) where waste would have been stored were not constructed since they required authorization from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The repository has a statutory limit of .
To store that much waste would require of tunnels. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act limits the repository's capacity to of initial heavy metal in commercial spent fuel. The 104 U.S. commercial reactors then operating were expected to produce this quantity of spent fuel by 2014, assuming that the spent fuel rods are not reprocessed. Currently, the US has no civil reprocessing plant.
The tunnel boring machine (TBM) that excavated the main tunnel cost $13 million (equivalent to $ million in ) and was long when in operation. It now sits at its exit point at the facility's South Portal (south entrance). The short side tunnel alcoves were excavated using explosives.
Project funding and progress The facility's cost is being paid for by a combination of a tax on each kilowatt hour of nuclear power and by taxpayers for disposal of weapons and naval nuclear waste. Based on the 2001 cost estimate, about 73% is funded by consumers of nuclear-powered electricity and 27% by taxpayers.
By 2007, the DOE announced it was seeking to double the size of the Yucca Mountain repository to a capacity of , or 300 million pounds.
By 2008, Yucca Mountain was one of the most studied pieces of geology in the world; between geologic studies and materials science, the U.S. had invested $9 billion (equivalent to $ billion in ) in the project. This site studied by the Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology (NBMG) differs substantially from other potential repositories because of its natural analogues of nuclear material. The DOE estimates that it has over 100 million gallons of highly radioactive waste and of spent fuel from the production of nuclear weapons and from research activities in temporary storage.
The total system life cycle cost presented to Congress in July 2008 was $96 billion in 2007 dollars ($ billion in ). This was an increase from the 2001 estimate of $70 billion in 2007 dollars ($ billion in ), which was attributed primarily to a 26% increase in capacity, as well as "further refinement and specificity in system designs since the 2001 estimate". Additionally, the cost of the project continued to escalate because of insufficient funding to most efficiently complete the project.
Developments under the Obama administration