Dr. Conca opines that the Trump administration and Congress seem to be trying to raise Yucca Mountain from the dead. Yucca Mountain is the site of a proposed high-level nuclear waste repository in Nevada that was halted in 2010. The site has always been political, from its initial choice to its recent death. The problem this time is that most of our high-level nuclear waste is no longer high-level. And most scientists agree we should not dispose of spent nuclear fuel until we reuse it in our new reactors that are designed to burn it. So there really is not much to go into Yucca Mountain anymore. Besides, the highly-fractured, variably saturated, dual-porosity volcanic tuff at Yucca Mountain with highly oxidizing groundwater, was the wrong rock to begin with, causing the cost to skyrocket and the technical hurdles to keep mounting. Anti-nuclear activists have used Yucca Mt. to oppose the new generation of nuclear power plants by saying we have no place to put the waste. But we know how to do this and we know where to put it. Unfortunately, everyone has focused on the political and legal aspects without understanding the science. And we know what happens when Human Law runs into Natural Law. Natural Law wins every time. Otherwise, we would just make hurricanes illegal. There are four categories of nuclear waste in America. In order of descending radioactivity, they are spent nuclear fuel (SNF), high-level waste (HLW), transuranic waste (TRU) and low-level waste (LLW). HLW and TRU are almost all defense waste, generated from making nuclear weapons. SNF is solid used fuel from commercial reactors, HLW is mostly wet peanut-butter-like gunk, and TRU is a mixture of solid, debris and gunk. By law, these three require deep geologic disposal. We built a deep geologic repository for TRU waste, called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), in the massive Permian-age salt beds in New Mexico near Carlsbad. WIPP has operated extremely well since 1999.
Original URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/02/09/americas-high-level-nuclear-waste-is-gone/#6a157ad52e02
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