Keep Yucca Mountain on the Table
Nicolas Loris /
Nevada’s attorney general Catherine Cortez Masto penned an op-ed in the Las Vegas Sun over the weekend, calling the geologic repository Yucca Mountain “unworkable” as a long-term solution to store our nation’s nuclear waste. She claims the administration has scientific and technological reasons to permanently shut down Yucca. But instead supporting the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s responsibility to determine if that’s the case, she focuses on questionable arguments to instill fear in Nevadans.
The first claim is that Yucca is unstable, a hotbed for seismic activity that could disrupt the safe storage of spent nuclear fuel. But the Department of Energy’s Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM) concludes upon careful study that “Experience with earthquakes throughout the world has shown that underground structures can withstand the ground motion generated by earthquakes. And, in actual tests at the Nevada Test Site, mine tunnels have withstood ground motion from underground nuclear explosions that are greater than any ground motion anticipated at or near Yucca Mountain. Repository facilities at the surface also can be designed to safely withstand earthquake effects. Information from historical and contemporary earthquake catalogues from the Southern Great Basin Seismic Network was used to analyze the potential for earthquakes at Yucca Mountain. It also appears that the potential for earthquake damage to an underground repository is very slight.”
Many of her other arguments are not specific to Yucca Mountain but questions about the containers and drip shields used to further bolster safety. Such man-made devices will likely be necessary for any geologic repository and are not a result of what Mastro calls Yucca’s “fundamental inadequacies.”