Politically, not much has changed. Harry Reid still wields an inexplicable* position of influence over the Senate, and Obama still holds the presidency. Absent a surprise intervention by the Supreme Court on the Yucca licensing issue or a sudden change of heart by the residents of Nevada outside of Nye county (the potential host of Yucca Mountain, and generally more supportive overall of the project, namely because of the perceived benefits in terms of high-paying jobs and local investment which generally balance out perceived risks), it is unlikely anything much is going to happen.
(*One of my students in my Nuclear Waste Management class asked me how Harry Reid managed to ascend to such a position of influence from what is otherwise an inconsequential state - to which I had to answer, "I don't know, it is beyond the scope of this class." I really don't have a good answer for this one.)
As an aside, relevant to this discussion is an interview in this month's Nuclear News with Chairwoman Allison MacFarlane:
Q: Do you have technical concerns about a repository at Yucca Mountain, such as the rock form or the possibility of contact with an aquifer?(Emphasis mine.)
Let me explain. The technical analysis that I did on Yucca Mountain was in the pre-2002 time frame. Since then, in 2008, the Department of Energy submitted a license application. Then the NRC did some technical analysis. I haven’t looked at either of those. So I haven’t updated myself on the technical situation or on any new information that’s come in within the last 10 years. And so, as a careful scientist, I would hold off on making any judgment.
On one hand, as a fellow scientist, I appreciate Dr. MacFarlane's reticence toward commenting on a technical issue which she herself recognizes that she is not current on. On the other hand, it is somewhat distressing that the chairwoman of the NRC would not deign to familiarize herself with those very same findings. (I realize that Dr. MacFarlane obviously has a very full agenda, but nonetheless given that her specialty with geologic disposal of nuclear wastes was one of her core competencies given for her nomination to head the agency, the fact that she has been an extremely outspoken critic of Yucca Mountain, and the fact that this is a timely and controversial topic facing her agency, one would think that she might find the time for a bit of... "light weekend reading...")
Process matters
By this point, your response is probably something along the lines of, "Thanks for the update on News of the Obvious." But to be honest, it seems like a great many people haven't seemed to get the memo yet. Following a discussion on Jim Conca's recent Forbes piece featuring WIPP (the Waste Isolation Pilot Project in Carlsbad, NM, which is responsible for handling military-origin transuranic wastes to be buried deep in salt bed caverns), the question was inevitably asked - "If WIPP is working, why can't Yucca Mountain?"
Herein lies the problem. Debates over the technical details of Yucca aside (details which have been exhaustively studied for nearly two decades), it was never about technical feasibility. One of the most salient arguments I have tried to convey upon my students (and anyone else unfortunate enough to be caught within earshot) is that process matters. Again and again this has been emphasized - by myself and by the findings of the Blue Ribbon Commission themselves. (As well as by social science experts - see for example, this decent op-ed by Chris Mooney on science communication right around the time Yucca faced the axe.)
WIPP worked namely because WIPP made sure to do the process right. From the start, WIPP focused on public engagement and local consent - trying to build understanding and consensus before they broke ground. And to that end, they've been remarkably successful. WIPP enjoys extremely high levels of support from the local Carlsbad community, largely in part due to the influx of high-paying jobs it has brought an otherwise very rural economy. And by committing to transparency and public oversight from the start, the WIPP project managed to soften much of the opposition which may have otherwise doomed such a project - namely because the public felt like both they had a say and that the process was fair and trustworthy. (Mind you, it is unlikely one will ever gain complete consensus - namely because there are some who persist in asserting that nuclear waste is an "unsolvable" problem and frankly have no interest in solving it...)
But far too often in the technical community, there is an attitude that this process can be circumvented. "Who cares what the unwashed masses think? We're right and they're not" - a fine ethos for a dictatorship run by scientists and engineers, a recipe for repeated and painful failure in a democracy. This is the attitude that I see prevailing each and every time I hear someone hammer on why we need to keep pushing on Yucca Mountain - either by forcing a showdown on the licensing process or some other means. And let me reiterate - on a technical basis, I think Yucca Mountain is a sufficient (not ideal, namely because it consigns otherwise recoverable resources to waste, but sufficient) solution.
Here's the problem - it's off the table. There is about a snowball's chance in hell of any of the following factors aligning to rescue Yucca Mountain right now: Chairwoman MacFarlane rescuing the Yucca Mountain license (previously withdrawn with prejudice by Secretary Chu), a sudden reversal in position by President Obama, an intervention by the Supreme Court to finish the Yucca Mountain licensing evaluation, a marked shift of opinion in the state of Nevada, or the sudden departure of Sen. Harry Reid.
Like it or not, the political deck has been stacked against Yucca. Perhaps why it's so hard for technical folks to accept is because of this - it's a victory of politics over science - and unabashedly so. But even assuming Yucca were never to have been derailed by an opportunistic president looking to make a deal with an influential senator, the problems at the core still remain - a process built on a foundation of rolling over state-level consent. It is hardly believable that the opposition which has escalated through the courts up until the 2010 would suddenly evaporate upon Yucca's grand opening. Instead, it is far more likely that another decade of contentious (and expensive) lawsuits would have followed, bankrolled (in somewhat ironic fashion) by the same funds legally obligated to the state of Nevada for hosting the repository by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act.
$8 billion and all I got was this lousy blog post
Hence my point of emphasis to folks still pushing Yucca Mountain: he's dead, Jim. Let this one go and start thinking about what to do right now while we begin the process again, this time hopefully learning something from our $8 billion lesson.
The sunk cost is perhaps what is hard for most to accept, particularly in the nuclear community. $8 billion is a high price to pay for learning to respect the process of siting a repository in equal measure to the level of technical effort that went into it. But again, this is where the hard-nosed realism of technical folks must prevail - what do you hope to do now? Wishing for a more favorable political situation won't bring back your $8 billion or put a single fuel assembly into the ground. Instead, it's going to require a hard gut check and some long thinking about where we go from here.
So what now?
Let me quote now from wisdom of the Bard Jagger:You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, you just might find
You get what you need
Meanwhile, the main upshot of such a move to interim storage is that it provides a workable solution for the time being until the process of siting a repository can be restarted (which it inevitably must be). This something both recommended by the BRC and is now being proposed by outgoing Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM). Whether it or not it goes anywhere in Congress is anyone's guess (although it will likely and unfortunately be eclipsed by much of the talk of the coming "fiscal cliff.")
My own feelings on interim storage have evolved somewhat over the years; it was not long ago that I was critical of such a strategy, namely because it felt like "kicking the can down the road" to future generations. But here's the rub - as much as I generally favor strategies like reprocessing on the grounds of energy recovery, as far as economics go, it simply can't compete with the cost of mining new uranium, even with the repository cost tacked on - and the requisite technologies like fast-spectrum reactors which can effectively transmute and fission long-lived actinides (thermal spectrum, "light water" reactors like those we run now aren't particularly efficient at this) - simply aren't here yet. In that sense, absent the infrastructure to reprocess and effectively burn all of the long-lived constituents of used fuel (not just plutonium), it may just make sense to let it sit around for awhile under well-monitored conditions. Even assuming technology never progresses forward, the end result is a cooler, less radioactive fuel that is less expensive to dispose of. (It is one of the few problems in life that manages to get cheaper the longer you wait.)
Such a position doesn't necessarily sit perfectly with me - as a technical person, I have a bias toward action. (Which of course would be why my research focuses on advanced waste management and recovery strategies). But such a solution is certainly better than a complete failure of the federal government to meet its obligations to ratepayers (i.e., consumers of nuclear electricity) who have paid $30 billion over the last two decades to handle this problem, only to be met with nothing to show for it.
Siting even an interim storage for used fuel won't be trivial - it will likely run into some of the same political challenges Yucca Mountain has faced, if the fate of the proposed Private Fuel Storage facility in Utah is any indication. (PFS has negotiated with a Native American tribe - the Skull Valley Band of the Goshute Tribe - to host such a facility. Despite the fact that the facility is on tribal lands, the state of Utah has attempted to do everything in its power to block the proposed facility - namely by denying rail and road access.) But it may serve as a useful trial run for getting the process right when it comes to the "real thing," i.e., siting a permanent geologic repository.
On a final note, I will be supervising my students' end of semester projects this evening. The task I assigned them was to propose an amendment to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, taking into account the failures of U.S. high-level waste management policy (including a technical analysis of their proposed alternatives compared to the "baseline" scenario). It should be interesting to see what they come up with.
This work by
I trust you have read the excellent "Plentiful Energy" and its accessible description of the Integral Fast Reactor. I don't doubt that construction of a full-scale version, whether GE's PRISM or otherwise, would bring to light some practical issues, but essential it pretty much does burn all the long-lived products of fission.
ReplyDeleteI very much hope the UK takes advantage of GE's proposal to dispose of their reprocessed plutonium stocks and then trades up to the full reprocessing version of the reactor.
@Joffan - I haven't read "Plentiful Energy" yet, but I am pretty familiar with both the IFR and PRISM concepts. So I say, "fast reactor isn't here yet" pretty carefully; I am quite optimistic that we will one day (hopefully well within my lifetime) see their wide commercial deployment. At that time, reprocessing, despite its economic disadvantages, makes much more sense from a waste management perspective. I think my larger emphasis is that I think it's okay to defer reprocessing until we have a clear path for materials from spent fuel to fast-spectrum reactors, whereupon reprocessing makes much more sense.
Delete@Steve, this is not a very comforting article. A bit depressing actually. Thanks for it anyway, of course.
DeleteI have a few questions: You say reprocessing does not compete economically with mining fresh uranium. Would that change if oil prices where to double or quadruple in the coming decades?
And what is the situation with ocean 'mining' of uranium (using absorbers). I assuming reprocessing *would* compete with that. Is that right?
I have another question. Reading up on the WIPP project I learned that the WIPP site location was *almost* abandoned during the consultation, because of something to do with the geohydrology, but at the last moment, the WIPP was saved by the external public oversight body which urged for another look at the problem and possible solutions.
What do you think the chances are of a future waste repository public consultation coming to the conclusion that perhaps *yucca* should be given another look, despite everything that has happened? Improbable?
@Joris: I'll make the disclaimer up-front that I'm not an expert on uranium mining - so I'm really not sure what the price relationship is between petroleum cost and uranium recovery cost. What I can say is that generally the studies I've seen indicate the price of uranium would have to rise substantially - probably well over triple the present price (and more, depending on the pessimism of the study) to make reprocessing "break even" with raw uranium cost.
DeleteAs far as ocean recovery, this is actually the subject of an upcoming (half-finished) post of mine. Basically, right now, reprocessing is cheaper - but one of the big issues is that the cost of ocean recovery may, if technological developments pan out, precpitously drop. That's great for recoverable uranium resources - it pretty much means we have 1000 years of uranium. But it also makes the economic case for reprocessing much harder.
But then again, that's sort of the point - economics is never going to be the sole selling point for reprocessing, at least not in my lifetime absent radical new developments. Rather, reprocessing is fundamentally more about waste conditioning, which itself is contingent also upon having the other fuel cycle pieces in place, like a viable fast reactor (like GE's PRISM, the IFR, or other variants).
As far as WIPP, I'm actually not familiar with that - I'll have to do some more research. (If you have any articles on that, I'd be most grateful).
I think Yucca was never doomed by technical features. I'm somewhat pessimistic Yucca would go forward as of now simply because the well has been so poisoned over the original process - but let's say we did hypothetically start over and Nevada was brought in to a proper consultation. Is it *possible* that Yucca could be revived? Maybe - but I think part of the problem is that the opposition has formed much like an immune response, and as a result, you have an entrenched and hardened opposition in place now - it would be a lot harder than starting somewhere else. It doesn't mean it's impossible - especially if it were to be considered for something more temporary (like a monitored retrievable storage site). But I do think it's improbable, mainly because I think attitudes have been poisoned by the original process - something which would take significant extra effort to overcome. (Then again, maybe in 20 years this could change.)
Process does matter, and the Number One process that should matter in a Constitutional Republic is the primacy of the rule of law. In that context, this whole Yucca Mountain thing has shaken my faith in whether we are truly a Constitutional Republic anymore. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act is still the law of the land. The NWPA says that the DoE must develop a waste repository, and that Yucca Mountain is it. As far as I know, the NWPA has not been repealed or amended to say anything different. So, from a legal viewpoint, the Obama Administration, and the DoE, are violating federal law. Now, I know what would happen to me if I violated federal law, even a "minor" one. They'd lock me up and throw away the key. So how is it that the highest government officials, as well as U.S. Senators, can violate a federal law and face no sanctions? Are laws just for the "little people"? Has the rule of law be superceded by political expediency? Perhaps it has, and I am being naive is thinking that the rule of law means anything when placed up against political popularity and the need to get re-elected.
ReplyDelete@JoeyT - You are absolutely correct that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act is still in effect, along with its subsequent amendments specifying Yucca Mountain as the nation's sole geologic repository. But here's the problem - Congress, up to this point, has declined to intervene. They can, at their discretion, act in ways to force the hand of the administration (namely by power of the purse). Up until now, they've declined. (I'm not saying this as a matter of approval, but just as an unfortunate statement of fact - Congress seems to have no real interest in enforcing the law any more than the president.) About the only hope is the intervention of the courts - and I really have little faith in that happening.
DeleteNone of this makes it right, and in a just world, there would be consequences for members of the government violating the laws that would leave us "little people" being thrown in federal prison. But in the meantime, that and a two dollars will buy you a cup of coffee.
Ultimately, while I agree that there should be consequences for the fact that this administration has chosen to flout the law (and Congress has proven critically derelict in its duties), the law as-written is also effectively unworkable. The larger issue at hand, as I see it, is the need to get a credible, workable process restarted for high-level waste management.
Even assuming the issue (eventually) prevails through the courts, having some kind of interim measure in place would seem to be advantageous, and in either case would begin to break the logjam which has plagued U.S. HLW management.
Well, I think you may be right and the only response I have is to echo the famous words, "It is clear to me now that the Republic no longer functions." Congress wrote the NWPA into law. As I understand it, it is the function of the Executive to carry out the mandate of those laws. If they won't, why have it at all? As I understand it, the function of the judiciary is interpretation and application of the law. Its primary purpose is to serve the people by ensuring equal justice under the law. If it abdicates that responsibility, why have it? If those two branches fail in their duties under the laws passed by the legislature, it effectively neuters the power of the legislature, so why bother to have it? It appears that the NWPA is a classic example of how the system has broken down. I don't think it will result in much fuss in this case because it just involves the nuclear business, and my sense is that the public and the government would just as soon not have to bother with that, but let it happen often enough in other ways that are deemed more important, then it may very well signal the end of our system of government as we know it.
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