Japan Crisis Revives Yucca Mountain Debate

The New York Times reports:

WASHINGTON — The threat of the release of highly radioactive spent fuel at a Japanese nuclear plant has revived a debate in the United States about how to manage such waste and has led to new recriminations over a derailed plan for a national repository in Nevada.

Pools holding spent fuel at nuclear plants in the United States are even more heavily loaded than those at the Japanese reactors, experts say, and are more vulnerable to some threats than the ones in Japan. However, utility companies have taken steps since the 9/11 terrorist attacks to make them safer.

Adding to those concerns, no plan to move the waste has emerged to replace a proposed repository at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert. President Obama promised to cancel the project during his 2008 campaign, and last year he told the Department of Energy to withdraw an application that it had submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a construction license.

Frustration in Congress is growing. “You have an unholy mess on your hands,” Representative John D. Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, told the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory B. Jaczko, at a House subcommittee hearing last week. “The stuff keeps piling up, and you’ve doubled the amount that you can store in a single pool, but that’s running out. Is there a long-term plan anywhere in government?”

Congress selected Yucca Mountain as its first choice for a waste site in 1987, pending engineering studies. Many lawmakers said the Obama administration lacked the authority to stop the project and should revive it so that waste can be removed from their states.

Support for the Yucca Mountain project is strong among both Republicans and Democrats in the House. But the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, has promised supporters back home that it is dead.

Even if a national consensus were to emerge to revive the Yucca Mountain plan, it could not receive nuclear waste for at least 10 years, proponents acknowledge.

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