Global Security Newswire

The Obama administration's cancellation of plans to establish an atomic waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada might delay by no less than 20 years the development of a long-term solution for handling the material, Reuters quoted U.S. congressional auditors as saying in a report made public last week (see GSN, April 4).

The Government Accountability Office report was sought by GOP members of the House of Representatives seeking to have the project reinstated. Development of the Yucca facility to date has cost the federal government nearly $15 billion, $9.5 billion of which has been drawn from electricity payments.

Obama officials zeroed funding to the Yucca project in recent budget requests, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu established a blue-ribbon panel to study potential new solutions. The group is due on Friday to examine possible means of dealing with U.S. nuclear waste, which the report says amounts now to slightly less than 65,000 metric tons held at 75 locations in 33 states.

"Some of the officials we spoke with estimated that the termination of Yucca Mountain could set back the opening of a new geologic repository by at least 20 years and cost billions of dollars," GAO auditors said in the report. "Prolonging on-site storage could also increase opposition to expansion of the nuclear industry."

Resistance to the Yucca plan from within Nevada and a number of legal challenges dramatically slowed work on the facility, which was originally intended to start receiving material in 1998.

The Energy Department's "decision to terminate the Yucca Mountain repository program was made for policy reasons, not technical or safety reasons," the GAO report states.

"There is no guarantee that a more acceptable or less costly alternative will be identified" by the Energy Department's blue-ribbon commission, the document adds. Identifying a new site would require additional expense and time, it states.

The Energy Department in a 14-page response to the report stood by its cancellation of the project to pursue "more workable alternatives."

The GAO document depends on multiple "misapprehensions of fact," said Peter Lyons, who leads the department's atomic power program.

Another waste storage solution might be more quickly implemented, Lyons added. "There was considerable uncertainty whether the Yucca Mountain repository would ever have opened -- let alone when," he said.

The congressional auditors urged the Energy Department to secure "more predictable funding" and outside oversight for new atomic waste holding plans (Roberta Rampton, Reuters, May 10).