The Post Editorial Board reports that the U.S. nuclear power plants have produced massive amounts of reliable electricity for decades while emitting negligible amounts of carbon dioxide. The big drawback is the more than 70,000 tons of radioactive spent fuel U.S. nuclear facilities have piled up with 2,000 more tons added to the total every year. A report the NRC released in late January, 2015 underscores that this problem is solvable if only Congress and the White House would stick to a plan.
For decades, the plan was to open a permanent, geologically isolated storage facility in Yucca Mountain, Nev., in which canisters of dry waste would be stored behind layers of rock and titanium barriers. The federal government spent more than 15 billion dollars researching and developing the site. Until, that is, not-in-my-backyard opposition from Nevada Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid -D- prevailed. In 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama promised to pull the plug on the Yucca project. After Mr. Obama took swing-state Nevada in the presidential election, his Energy Department ended funding.
But the regulatory process had already begun, resulting in the NRC report. The U.S. nuclear regulators found that the Yucca facility would have been technically sound. They considered the potential for corrosion, cracking, damage from seismic activity and unintentional human intrusion. They gamed out the likelihood of breaches over massive time scales up to a million years from now. Everything checked out, with a few conditions. The NRC experts, for example, would have barred planes from flying directly over the site. They also noted that if the federal government restarted work on Yucca, officials would have to obtain certain land and water rights from the state.
This means, firstly, that opponents of nuclear power who raise the specter of radioactive waste haunting humanity hundreds of thousands of years from now are wildly exaggerated and climate issues would be reduced.
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