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Nuclear Waste: Yucca Mountain Will Do Little to Protect Waste, Makhijani Says Construction of the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository would do little to reduce the risk of a terrorist attack on a spent-fuel cooling pool at a U.S. nuclear power plant, said Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, in an op-ed piece in today’s Washington Post (see GSN, Feb. 12). Makhijani wrote that officials have called spent-fuel pools at U.S. nuclear plants major security concerns and have said a single repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada would help alleviate that risk by consolidating all the spent fuel in one location. Makhijani argued, however, that because spent fuel must be cooled in water for several years before it can be shipped anywhere, cooling pools must remain at nuclear plants as long as such plants are in operation. A completely new approach to nuclear waste security is needed, according to Makhijani. “To end the security vulnerability of spent fuel-pools, existing nuclear power plants must be phased out,” he wrote. He added that while this would be difficult, since nuclear power accounts for about 20 percent of U.S. energy supplies, it could be done in an orderly fashion. The Bush administration, however, is considering relicensing the more than 100 U.S. nuclear power plants far beyond their current licenses, according to Makhijani. This would effectively defeat the idea of Yucca Mountain as a consolidation point, since it would result in dozens of nuclear plants continuing to operate throughout the country, needing on-site spent-fuel pools, Makhijani wrote. “Given relicensing, Yucca Mountain, which is crisscrossed with geological faults, may well run out of room before it can take the spent fuel from existing power plants, to say nothing of new ones,” Makhijani wrote. Yucca Mountain itself is not a suitable site for a waste repository, according to Makhijani. The computer models used by the Energy Department have several uncertainties and regulations have been changed or removed to accommodate the site, Makhijani wrote. “It’s possible to do a far better job, but the Energy Department seems incapable of it,” Makhijani wrote. “President Bush should declare both Yucca Mountain and the Energy Department unsuitable for the job and create a blue-ribbon commission to recommend a new program for him” (Arjun Makhijani, Washington Post, Feb. 13).
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