Fuel Cycle to Nowhere: U.S. Law and Policy on Nuclear Waste

The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act and Its Implementation by DOE

Yucca Mountain: Blueprint for Failure 187 terize. The price tag later ballooned to $1 billion per site. In 1987, impatient at the slow progress and high cost of the selection process mandated under the 1982 act, Congress junked it and, through a raw political process, itself designated Yucca as the sole repository .2 Congress also terminated the search for a second repository in the East, destroying the premise of regional equity underlying enactment of the NWPA.3 Congress’s selection of Yucca was orchestrated through backroom negotiations that Nevada, then politically weak and vulnerable, has with substantial justification long regarded as deeply unfair. Local or state views played no significant role in the selection of the site. By making the key decisions itself—determining the site location and the wastes that would be stored there—and setting a tight timetable for developing the repository, Congress significantly, and quite deliberately, restricted the scope of Nevada’s potential influence over the facility.4 Nevada’s resistance to the Yucca repository was reinforced by its earlier, profoundly negative experience as long-term host to nuclear weapons testing at another federal nuclear facility, the Nuclear Test Site, which forms part of the larger Yucca Mountain site.5 Moreover, as Nevada itself had no nuclear power plants, most of the waste destined for disposal at Yucca would consist of out-of-state SNF.6 The state also feared that hosting a nuclear waste repository ninety miles south of Las Vegas would imperil its tourism and gambling industries.7 These circumstances generated a surge of collective resentment that Nevada had been steamrolled and spawned a campaign of resistance by the state to defeat the Yucca project through all means available. Nevada’s unrelenting opposition significantly delayed DOE’s efforts to characterize and license the site. Nevada’s political fortunes improved dramatically with Nevada senator Harry Reid’s assumption of Senate leadership in January 2007 and the election of President Obama in 2008. The new administration deprived DOE of the funding needed to pursue NRC licensing of the Yucca repository and effectively declared the Yucca project dead. A recent decision by the NRC Atomic Safety and Licensing Board rejecting DOE’s motion to withdraw the Yucca license application with prejudice has heartened Yucca proponents. Even if the NRC and the courts were to uphold this ruling, and even if the NRC were later to grant the license and that ruling in turn were upheld by the courts, Congress would still have to fund Yucca’s construction. Further turns of the political wheel of fortune —Republican control of Congress, a new president—might resuscitate Yucca from near death. At this juncture, the prospects for Yucca’s resurrection are remote, and it is fair to conclude that the elaborate and ambitious NWPA system devised by Congress to force early development of a repository has crashed into bankruptcy, leaving the federal government without any alternative site or statutory authority to develop one. The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act and Its Implementation by DOE This section reviews the background of the 1982 NWPA; DOE’s implementation of the site selection process that it provides; the problems created by the tight timetable that Congress decreed, compounded by the political resistance in potential host states; and the political calculations and processes that led Congress to amend NWPA in 1987 and ineluctably select Yucca. 188 Fuel Cycle to Nowhere Background of NWPA The Carter administration effectively terminated reprocessing of SNF in the United States, and the ensuing Interagency Review Group (IRG) process and report firmly set the nation on a path whose singular goal was to build, on a sharply accelerated time­ table, deep geologic repositories for the most highly radioactive nuclear wastes— namely, SNF and HLW. The 1982 NWPA emerged out of extensive debates and deliberations in Congress over the years 1980–1982. It was strongly shaped by the recommendations expressed in IRG’s 1979 draft report, which called for permanent geologic disposal at several repositories located in more than one region of the United States. This plan was designed to reduce the risk and expense of transporting wastes long distances and to provide geographic equity.8 IRG conducted technical studies and examined six methods for disposing of HLW and TRU.9 Of these options, IRG in its final report recommended the use of mined deep geologic repositories for disposal, despite some criticism that the report’s earlier draft version did not sufficiently consider alternatives to mined repositories.10 IRG’s recommendation was...