The Road to Yucca Mountain: The Development of Radioactive Waste Policy in the United States (review)

Once again, J. Samuel Walker has demonstrated that there is an important place for public history in the scholarly arena. The Road to Yucca Mountain is the fifth in a series of official histories of nuclear regulation. As with the other volumes in the series, the monograph is well-researched, objective, and informative. Although the story that Walker tells is primarily Atomic Energy Commission/Nuclear Regulatory Commission document-driven, the author engages sources from other key agencies as well. He also pauses to provide important context, especially regarding public reaction to the problem of nuclear waste disposal.

Solving the problem of waste disposal is not unlike a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: the noble knights gallop toward their destination, yet the next scene finds them just as far away. At least the Pythons finally arrive at the castle. No such luck for the Department of Energy (DOE). As Walker concludes about where we stand today: “The quest for a long-term solution to high-level waste disposal remained a perplexing national problem that was too important to ignore, too controversial to compromise easily, and too complicated to settle conclusively” (p. 186).

Early advocates for weapons development and commercial nuclear power predicted a far different outcome. For instance, Herbert M. Parker, who supervised health physics at the Hanford Engineer Works, was convinced that “present disposal procedures may be continued . . . with the assurance of safety for a period of perhaps 50 years” (p. 8). The scientists at Hanford were so confident about their margin for error that they consistently placed national security concerns over safety concerns, going so far as to intentionally release iodine-131 into the air in 1949 in order to glean information about Soviet plutonium production. The results troubled even Parker, who balked at further intentional releases.

The road from Hanford to the Yucca Mountain, Nevada, nuclear waste repository, the object of DOE’s 8,600-page licensing application issued in June 2008, was littered with controversy. Initially, the more substantive controversies—from leaking containers to the integrity of deep salt mine burial—remained behind closed doors, the domain of experts. Walker shows how the inclusion of new disciplines, in the form of men such as sanitary engineer Abel Wolman, and of competing organizations, cast doubt on the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) reflexive overconfidence. Indeed, as Walker notes, the AEC was at pains to quash “hysterical” reaction from the public before it even existed—a policy it pursued by understating the real danger and, in Walker’s assessment, squandering public credibility by the dawn of the 1960s.

From that point on, Walker’s story is increasingly driven by public concern, ultimately channeled through the more formal venues of state and local politics. Thus, it took a congressional supermajority to override the objections of Nevada’s governor about the Yucca Mountain facility, and prolonged intervention of the federal Department of Transportation to broker an agreement about transporting nuclear waste through jurisdictions that sought to detour such plans.

Through each bump in the road, Walker not only directs the narrative effectively, he provides crucial signposts as well. While his account adds a great deal to our knowledge of the development of the nuclear complex, as well as the history of science and technology more broadly, its greatest contribution is to demonstrate that public historians are capable of criticizing the very government that employs them. With assessments like “The AEC’s first effort to identify a suitable site for disposing of high-level radioactive wastes from commercial nuclear power failed spectacularly” (p. 74), Walker has paved the way for public history that not only documents important policies, but effectively analyzes their outcomes as well.