"The United States does not know how to safely, permanently dispose of high-level nuclear waste or irradiated fuel from nuclear power plants. There have been commissions and generic studies, but Yucca Mountain doesn’t die. It always looms as the fallback position.
At the same time, there are those who, through some sort of misplaced “we can do anything” attitude, have adopted the notion that nuclear waste is a resource. It isn’t. Trying to process it into new fuel is costly and just makes more waste. The obsession to do something, anything with the waste is like a terrible addiction that prevents us from looking for needed new directions to safely dispose of nuclear waste.
Many years ago, the U.S. did reprocess spent nuclear fuel to extract plutonium for producing nuclear weapons. The sites where reprocessing was done are now the equivalent of Superfund sites, with a case in point being Hanford, Wash., where full cleanup is unachievable. Reprocessing activities in other countries have also led to horrible pollution and contamination problems such as radiation releases into the Irish Sea.
The battle against nuclear waste in Nevada will not stop until Congress kicks its own Yucca Mountain habit. Like reprocessing, a repository inside the mountain will fail, requiring a cleanup that is impossible and wasting the money that ratepayers have paid for a successful disposal program.
A repository at Yucca Mountain is also wildly expensive, simply because the site is not capable of isolating the waste. Yucca Mountain is a ridge of material produced by the eruptions of nearby ancient volcanoes. The rock is full of fractures in a heavily faulted region. The Department of Energy managers used to refer to it as a “block of rock” until studies clearly showed that it was not."
