Yucca Mountain: The Failed Nuclear Storage Option - What Wyoming can learn from the Nevada site

by Wyoming Liberty Group

As political and industry forces move ahead, seeking to make Wyoming a storage site for nuclear waste, it may be instructive to understand what happened when another state faced the specter of becoming a dumping ground for toxic garbage: They utterly rejected it.

Again and again.

You may have heard of the place—Yucca Mountain—in Nevada, about 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas. You may have heard of it because of the hue and cry that has arisen from the many people who have opposed having nuclear waste stored in their backyard.

What happened there is happening here in many ways. Those who backed Yucca Mountain as a repository for nuclear waste cited, among other things, the economic benefit that would come with it. They cited the jobs that would be created. They talked up the industry that would emerge from the waste storage.

We've heard much the same benefits being touted in Wyoming.

But something else trumped the dollars dancing in some people's heads in Nevada: Many were more concerned with the safety of people from the dangers of nuclear waste.

As far back as 1957, the top minds in the country suggested that the best way to deal with the nuclear waste problem was to bury the toxic stuff in a big hole deep underground.

Decades later, in 1978, the federal government began examining Yucca Mountain as a possible long-term solution to the problem of storing millions of pounds of nuclear waste, which in many cases requires thousands of years before it is no longer hazardous.

Six years later, in 1984, the government narrowed down the search to three sites: Hanford, Washington; Deaf Smith County, Texas; and Yucca Mountain. A few years later, Congress bestowed the dubious distinction on only Yucca Mountain. The plan was for the government to start bringing it nuclear waste by 1998, but it didn't happen for a variety of reasons, including opposition to the plan.

In 2002, the U.S. Congress approved the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository. But plans continued to stall, and by 2006, one of the leading opponents, Harry Reid, the U.S. senator from Nevada, became the senate majority leader. And in his powerful position, it was said that he vowed, "Yucca Mountain is dead. It'll never happen."

As it happened, he was prescient. It hasn't happened.

The reasons are so obvious that many of the articles about the debate in Nevada practically gloss over it: Safety. Nuclear waste is so toxic and for so long that it, if mishandled, can kill wide swaths of people in a huge radius.

A large majority of people in Nevada remain opposed to storing nuclear waste. And that opposition comes from a wide spectrum of interests, not just from the political arena but from business interests and others.

In 2019, Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak made it clear that "not one ounce" of nuclear waste would find its way to Yucca Mountain.

In Nevada's recent senatorial election, Sen. Jacky Rosen attacked her opponent, Sam Brown, for his support for Yucca Mountain. "Nevada Republicans and Democrats have been fighting against storing dangerous nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain for decades, but Sam Brown agrees with the D.C. politicians in Congress who still want to turn Nevada into the nation's dumping ground for toxic waste," said the senator's spokesperson.

What's more, all three of the last presidents—Obama, Trump and Biden—opposed attempts to build the facility at Yucca Mountain.

Indeed, Nevada's position remains so firm that the state's official stance is memorialized on its website: "The state's official position is that Yucca Mountain is a singularly bad site to house the nation's high-level nuclear waste and spent nuclear fuel for several reasons," it states.

Among the reasons—national security. The state said, "it will give terrorists more attractive and vulnerable targets. The DOE [Department of Energy] expects more than 100,000 shipments of spent fuel to be transported to Yucca Mountain-thus creating 100,000 mobile targets. Furthermore, the DOE plans to store high-level nuclear waste and spent nuclear fuel above ground at the Yucca site for at least 100 years. This creates the largest new spent fuel storage target in the world."

Without Yucca Mountain, nuclear power plants in the United States have no permanent storage for their radioactive waste. The result: the toxic garbage sits on the site of 76 nuclear reactors in 34 states in what are called dry casks. Meanwhile, the Department of Energy has in temporary storage more than 100 million gallons of radioactive waste and 2,500 metric tons of spent fuel.

This hazardous nuclear waste needs a permanent storage solution, if not a temporary one. Let's make sure Wyoming thinks this through carefully before it becomes what Yucca Mountain rejected: the nation's nuclear dumping ground.