Rebecca Kern reports that the political logjam over Yucca Mountain should be broken by depicting the storage of nuclear waste there as a national-security issue, a leading Nevada proponent of the project says. Dan Schinhofen, chairman of the Nye County Board of County of Commissioners, who represents the county where Yucca Mountain is located indicated that if he could meet with the new administration, he would ask that the matter be considered a national security issue. The government made promises. They have taken money from ratepayers. There is $30 billion-plus sitting there. It is time to follow the law, he said. Other advocates of Yucca Mountain previously have cited national security as a prime reason for opening the site, even though much of the waste to be sent there comes from commercial nuclear plants and not federal defense facilities. Those advocates say storing waste 1,000 feet underground on a remote federal facility on the Nevada Test Site, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is more secure than storing it above ground at more than 100 commercial locations.
They say some of those sites include closed plants and several defense facilities, where temporary security precautions must be maintained in the absence of a permanent repository. Critics of Yucca Mountain have expressed a preference for a consent-based siting process to find a willing host for the waste. But Schinhofen said that approach does not work because things change over election cycles, with the potential for newly elected officials to shift their preferences on storage. So this just needs to be framed as a national-security issue, he told Bloomberg BNA at the Energy Communities Alliance meeting in Washington, featuring host communities of nuclear waste sites in the U.S. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, which was later updated in 1987, designated Yucca Mountain as the location for a permanent geological repository for the high-level nuclear waste from power plants. Read on ..
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