Behind Nevada's victory over Washington at nuclear tug-of-war
The Obama administration and Senate Majority Leader have effectively killed Yucca Mountain, leaving Hanford holding the (leaking) nuclear waste.
U.S. Department of Energy/Wikimedia Commons
It seems more and more likely that Hanford will remain the nation's largest nuclear waste dump until the plutonium waste produced during World War Two and the Cold War loses all its radioactivity or hell freezes over, whichever comes first. The plutonium will take about 240,000 years. (It will lose half its radioactivity in a mere 24,000.) Hell is somewhat less certain. Take your choice.
Hanford was, of course, the site of the world's first plutonium factory. Starting in 1944, its reactors churned out Pu-239 for the bomb that exploded at the Trinity test site and the bomb that exploded over Nagasaki. It produced all the Pu-239 for all the bombs in the country's nuclear arsenal into the 1950s, and kept producing it until 1989. Low-level waste produced in the early years was dumped into trenches. High-level waste was dumped into single-walled steel tanks. By the time plutonium production shut down, Hanford had become the most highly contaminated nuclear site in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world.
In 1989, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the state Department of Ecology (then headed by Chris Gregoire) signed a Tri Party Agreement under which the Energy Department would meet various guidelines for getting the waste out of the by-then leaky steel tanks, and generally cleaning up the site.
Under that agreement and a consent decree signed in 2010, the federal government is building the world's largest vitrification plant, designed to encase the most highly radioactive waste in borosilicate glass. The plant (technically the Hanford Site Waste Treatment and Mobilization Plant) has already more than doubled its original budget and fallen at least eight years behind its original schedule. It was originally supposed to start full production of glass logs sometime last year. Now the plant is supposed to be up and running by 2019. The last of the old single-walled tanks is supposed to be emptied by 2040. All the waste is supposed to be treated by 2047.
How plausible are these dates? Not very. The vit plant has been designed to produce glass logs for long-term storage at the Yucca Mountain waste repository, which may — and probably will — never be built. Some people doubt that the vit plant itself will ever work, or at least work long enough to process much of the waste. If a weld fails in one of the plant's "black cells," it may not be reparable. Once radiation builds up in the cells, no one expects human beings to go inside. Each cell will contain some 3900 linear feet of piping designed to last without maintenance for 40 years, the full period over which the plant is expected to process nuclear waste. What are the chances that a weld will fail? It turns out that nobody knows.
That is the takeaway from the Department of Energy Inspector General's draft vit plant audit, released in a dark corner of the news cycle on Friday afternoon, January 13. The construction contractor, Bechtel, allegedly hasn't had enough on-site inspectors qualified to interpret tests of nuclear-quality welds. So welds have gone into the black boxes without having been thoroughly vetted.
As a comment to the Tri-City Herald's report on the audit points out, Bechtel has been building nuclear plants for decades; that it should lack people who are certified to check nuclear welds is simply bizarre.
Of course, the audit is only a draft. Bechtel will have a chance to comment. Who knows what the final version will say?
Whatever it says, the audit hardly represents the only recent bit of bad news about construction of the vit plant, or progress toward the larger goal of getting highly radioactive wastes out of leaky tanks and ultimately out of Washington.
Take the project's culture of safety — or lack thereof: Over the past couple of years, two whistleblowers have claimed that Bechtel's culture discourages people from speaking up when they see that design or construction isn't safe. Now, the Department of Energy's own investigators have suggested more or less the same thing.
The department's Office of Enforcement and Oversight, which is part of its Office of Health, Safety and Security, has found "a definite unwillingness and uncertainty among employees about the ability to openly challenge management decisions. There are definite perceptions that there is not an environment conducive to raising concerns or where management wants or willingly listens to concerns. Most employees also believe that constructive criticism is not encouraged."
And then, of course, there's Yucca Mountain. In 1980, the federal government decided on deep geological disposal of waste from Hanford and the nation's civilian nuclear plants. Later in the decade, it started culling possible sites in 36 states, as a step toward creating two depositories, in separate regions. States in the East and Midwest objected.
In 1986, the feds narrowed the search to Washington, Texas, and Nevada — and to a single site. Nevada was the lucky winner. Nuclear Waste Policy Act amendments of 1987 called for studying and licensing a site at Yucca Mountain. In 2002, the Secretary of Energy finally recommended Yucca Mountain. President George W. Bush accepted the recommendation, Nevada's governor vetoed the choice, and Congress overrode his veto. Yucca Mountain it was.
Or not. Of course, people in Nevada didn't want it. Campaigning in Nevada, Barack Obama said that if he were elected, he'd kill the Yucca project, and his administration has tried to do just that. Nevada's Democratic Sen. Harry Reid — now Senate Majority Leader — has applauded the administration's efforts. As well he might; the administration has done its best to make good on that campaign promise.
"The Obama Administration, in conjunction with DOE, has taken three important steps directed toward terminating the Yucca Mountain project," Todd Garvey wrote in a Congressional Research Service report last year. "First, the Administration’s FY2011 budget proposal eliminated all funding for the Yucca Mountain project. Second, the President and Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, established a Blue Ribbon Commission to consider alternative solutions to the nation’s nuclear waste challenge. Third, and most controversial, DOE has attempted to terminate the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC’s) Yucca Mountain licensing proceeding by seeking to withdraw the license application for the Yucca Mountain facility."
The icing on the cake: The DOE has tried to withdraw the license application with prejudice, which means it couldn't be re-submitted at a later date.
Meanwhile, State Attorney General Rob McKenna and other Washington officials have been fighting to keep the federal government from abandoning the Yucca project, as have state and county officials from South Carolina, which has its own radioactive leftovers from years of plutonium production at Savannah River.
Two years ago, the state intervened before the NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, which denied the DOE's motion to withdraw. The dismantling of Yucca continued, though. The DOE appealed to the NRC. Washington and South Carolina sued in the D.C. Circuit Court to keep the DOE from terminating the Yucca site. The court found that the issue was premature, because the NRC hadn't acted yet.
Washington then asked for a mandate forcing the NRC to decide, and to consider the DOE's application on its merits.
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Comments:
Posted Fri, Feb 10, 7:38 a.m. Inappropriate
The lawyers have been racking up billing hours for decades regarding the so-called 'Hanford clean-up'.. I vaguely remember Slade Gorton and yet to be Seattle city councilmember Margaret Pageler exchanging letters in the mid-late 1980's representing whoever and whatever. Hanford will never be cleaned up.
Posted Fri, Feb 10, 9:10 a.m. Inappropriate
Thank you for this excellent summary. It does seem unlikely that Yucca Mountain ever will be utilized. Moreover, there always were questions about transportation there of nuclear waste from other sites. Nuclear waste at Hanford clearly will remain at Hanford. Our governor and members of our congrssional delegation need to bring ceaseless pressure on the feds
to get the job properly done there.
Posted Fri, Feb 10, 9:19 a.m. Inappropriate
Look on the positive side. The Blue Ribbon Commission mentioned Carlsbad, New Mexico, and its existing deep geologic radioactive waste disposal repository that has been in operation 12+ years, as a model for how repositories ought to be sited. The Governor of the state of New Mexico (what a radical and refreshing change from Nevada!!) wrote a letter last year to Secretary Chu saying that if DOE wanted to dispose of heat-emitting wastes (like are to be produced at Hanford) into that same 250-million-year-old salt deposit [it was there before there were dinosaurs!], she'd be willing to discuss it once DOE has shown its scientific basis for a safety case. Very reasonable. FY 2012 appropriations include some money for DOE to start creating that scientific basis. If Hanford's hot wastes were to be disposed of in southern New Mexico salt beds, either in the existing working repository, or in a new one close by, the timeline could well be about the same as it was for a Yucca Mountain repository had it stayed on track. So all is not lost, and a repository in salt is safe, as Yucca would have been safe, but because of the properties of salt it would cost about half what the Yucca repository would have cost, making up for the costs sunk in Nevada, and then some! It would be a win-win for the nation, and in my totally personal but never humble opinion, Washington and several other states would be much better off pushing for this solution to their defense-waste problems rather than trying to revive the old solution that Secretary Chu said was not 'workable.' [Note he never said it was not safe.]
Posted Fri, Feb 10, 9:57 a.m. Inappropriate
Ted, please read "Going the Distance? The Safe Transport of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Radioactive Waste in the United States (2006)" by a board of experts selected by the National Academies. These types of shipments are tens of thousands of times less risky to the public than the shipments of common industrial chemicals that move across the US all the time. Nevada, under Department of Transportation rules governing these types of shipments, can designate routes, but did not do so, since then it would take away from their anti-arguments that gripping specter of these shipments grinding slowly past your childrens' schools, etc. Shipments that traveled 12-million LOADED miles have arrived without any radiological incidents whatsoever at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the repository in New Mexico. Transportation is not a significant risk-issue in reality, but it gets a lot of play by nay-sayers because it can cover such a huge swath of the US population and get them worried and excited. Nevada at one point sent a mock spent fuel truck shipment, labeled ludicrously as "Mobile Chernobyl" cross-country to try to raise concern and anger across the nation. They were disappointed that few seemed to care or take interest. I heard that they abruptly stopped using the Mobile Chernobyl words when someone from the National Academy of Sciences warned a prominent Nevada figure that it made them the laughingstock of the scientific community: it is simply impossible for spent fuel or high-level waste in a transport cask to undergo the explosive scenario suggested by the use of the word Chernobyl.
Posted Fri, Feb 10, 10:15 a.m. Inappropriate
I believe the Federal Government should provide adequate storage at Hanford and give the title to all that nuclear "Waste" to the State of Washington. What is waste now will in the future become a valuable commodity and will easily support the education system in our state. Before Madame Curie we did not even know about radioactivity and have come a long way. We will be able to use the "Waste" productively as our knowledge advances and it will.
People are afraid of radioactivity because they can not see it. When we are allowed to develop high pressure nuclear reactors or can find the way to do fission reactors the waste will become very valuable.
Posted Fri, Feb 10, 10:59 a.m. Inappropriate
My understanding is that a lot of this highly radioactive waste (as opposed to things like medical isotopes) can be reprocessed into fuel for reactors designed to use it. But since nuclear power is Eeevil, a potential source of energy far cleaner than what is in storage now will go to waste for purely political reasons.
Posted Fri, Feb 10, 2:50 p.m. Inappropriate
Sorry, alangunsul, but I'm scared of radioactivity because it damages biological tissue, of which I have a lot.
The only short term "solution" is to keep pushing on vitrification. With any luck, the Fukashima cleanup will advance robotics for use in these difficult environments sufficiently so that vitrification will actually become practical. As for long term storage? There is no reasonable solution. Just how are you going to communicate to someone in the future to stay the hell away? Think you can do that to someone 100,000 years from now? How about 10,000 years from now? Ah, hubris, the identifying characteristic of modern technocrats.
Posted Fri, Feb 10, 5:19 p.m. Inappropriate
Alangunsul and dbreneman--Taking title to Hanford waste is not a good idea. It is not good for making into new fuel, it is already the result of reprocessing, so it has no value today nor in any future that we can envision, and Steve E. is right, it is dangerous, so making it into a stable form for transport and disposal is the right thing to do. What you say may be true in the future for what we call "spent fuel" from commercial reactors. It can be reprocessed to make new fuel, and it may even be used itself as a fuel in a breeder concept called the Traveling Wave Reactor that one US company is promoting (with Bill Gates' endorsement).
Steve E, you are right, we can't control the future, those of us with kids and grandkids learned that the hard way. My kids and grandkids are wonderful people in spite of all my instructions! But as good stewards of risks we created we owe it to the future to build lasting monuments that inform, not scare, the future about the risks below them. There are two sessions at the Waste Management Symposium in Phoenix coming up later this month dedicated to figuring out how these monuments ought to be built and what they should say. If we can get a far off future to take us seriously, they may just renovate the monument for the next few thousands of years. I'll be in that conference, if you have any good ideas, I'll pass them along.
My personal hope is that the ITER project currently under constructon in France (the US is a contributor and participant) will show us that fusion energy is commercially do-able. If we can shift from fission to fusion, waste issues go away except for some activated metals that do not require isolation from the environment for more than maybe about 500 years, the same as is true for the low-level waste being safely buried at Hanford today.
Posted Sat, Feb 11, 3:54 p.m. Inappropriate
Daniel, you say that Yucca was the lucky winner in 1986, but that is not exactly correct. Studies were underway at all three sites, including Hanford, until a senator from Louisiana slipped something in a bill in 1986 and abruptly killed Hanford and Texas before studies could be completed to select the best of the three sites. Yucca won purely on the basis of politics, and now it has been killed by politics.
Technical arguments about what would make the best geologic waste repository should not be be focused entirely on 'perfect' containment. It is generally agreed that any containment will fail given the time required. But, if the time for the waste to travel to the biosphere is factored into the total time, then the risks become more acceptable.
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