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

Twists and Turns in the Technical Debate over Yucca

Yucca Mountain: Blueprint for Failure 217 lations to deal with the delay. One NRC rule authorized (but did not require) the use of dry casks for on-site SNF storage.338 The other authorized on-site storage of SNF for at least thirty years and potentially for a century, long after reactors had shut down.339 By using generic rulemaking, NRC was able to authorize plant operators to maintain or expand the volume of their on-site SNF storage without requiring individual plant license amendments, public hearings, environmental impact assessments, or studies.340 The dry-cask regulations were challenged by Michigan’s attorney general and owners of property adjacent to nuclear plants on the grounds that not requiring specific environmental assessments of the effects of the rule at individual plants violated NEPA. The Sixth Circuit rejected these claims, holding that NRC’s environmental assessment of the generic rule was sufficient to satisfy NEPA.341 The New York Times reported in 1995 that efforts toward a permanent repository “have failed” and noted that, “for the foreseeable future, more than 70 communities near nuclear generating plants will become repositories for spent nuclear fuel, the most radioactive of all atomic wastes, without any public hearings or environmental studies of the sites.”342 In response to these delays, DOE put together a task force in 1993 to figure out alternative strategies for nuclear waste; the task force recommended shifting the program’s goal from rapid, full-scale development of a repository to licensed demonstration of the capability for disposal, since a repository was not urgently needed for safety reasons, and a demonstration project would not foreclose future options.343 Congress in 1992 enacted the Energy Policy Act, directing EPA and NRC to adopt Yucca-specific environmental and safety standards in lieu of the generic repository and MRS standards that they had adopted previously.344 As explained in Chapter 1, Nevada and environmental group representatives criticized this measure as designed to produce weaker standards in order to make it possible to license Yucca. Ironically, the Yuccaspecific standards eventually adopted after litigation challenges were substantially more stringent than the previous generic standards, as detailed in later sections. Twists and Turns in the Technical Debate over Yucca Sharp technical debates over the Yucca site’s characteristics, its suitability for a repository , and the repository design have continued unabated for nearly three decades, from the initial DOE studies of Yucca as part of the NWPA site selection process, to characterization studies and the development of repository designs after the site was selected by Congress in 1987, and since presidential and congressional approval of a repository at Yucca in 2002. Novel questions and lingering uncertainties are to some degree inevitable in a project of Yucca’s scope and complexity. The technical debates, moreover, were supercharged by the high stakes in the siting decision: DOE’s determination to build a repository at Yucca, the billions of dollars DOE had spent in the effort, Nevada’s intense opposition, the state’s tactical deployment of its own technical studies, and the alliance between the state and local and national environmental organizations and anti-nuclear groups opposed to the project. The stepwise ascent along scientific and policy learning curves produced repeated changes in DOE’s technical assessments for Yucca and revisions to the project design and objectives. The emergence of additional information and more complete understanding spawned skepticism about Yucca’s suitability, and not just from hard-line op- 218 Fuel Cycle to Nowhere ponents. Yucca’s opponents steadily disseminated all technical discoveries, concerns, criticisms, and project revisions by DOE as they sought to demonstrate the technical unsuitability of the site and to highlight deficiencies in DOE’s assessments of and specifications and rationales for the project. Opponents, for example, asserted as evidence of the site’s unsuitability that groundwater movement was much higher than expected;345 that the groundwater under Yucca occasionally rises above its normal level;346 that 621 small earthquakes had occurred within fifty miles of Yucca between 1977 and 1997;347 that the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board had expressed concern that DOE’s waste packages would break down too quickly;348 and that revised estimates showed that volcanic and seismic events in the vicinity were ten times more likely than had been thought earlier.349 In 1990, NRC’s Board on Radioactive Waste Management criticized DOE’s tendency to overpromise in its approach to waste disposal by representing that the Yucca repository would be absolutely safe.350 According...