Nevada, US | Subterranean Sites
Yucca Mountain in southern Nevada is more a ridge than a mountain. Created by an extinct supervolcano, it slowly rises from a height of four thousand feet to six thousand feet along its’ length of six miles.
To enter it, one rides an open train into one of the biggest holes in the world, bored straight into the face of Yucca Mountain, into a five-mile long U shaped tunnel which curves through the huge ridge.
In 1997 a 25-foot diameter borer machine emerged from the face of the mountain to open the other end of the tunnel three miles south of the north portal. For most of its length the tunnel is about a thousand feet beneath the summit of the mountain and even more important a thousand feet above the water table. That’s important because, of course, this tunnel in Yucca Mountain is where the United States government is intending to store the nation’s high level nuclear waste for the next ten thousand years and beyond.
Yucca was chosen as the site for storing the high level nuclear waste after being chosen as one among three — the others in Texas and Washington — capable of the task of storing the material for 10,000 years. Partially, Yucca was chosen arbitrarily after Congress balked at spending the money to test the other sites, much to the frustrations of Nevada citizens who opposed the project.
The more than five miles of tunnels, cross drifts and alcoves that have been drilled so far are really part of what is called the Exploratory Studies Facility. It is a research program, costing $8 billion so far, intended to prove the absolute safety of the repository for ten thousand years. If it morphs into the actual nuclear waste site then they will bore another sixty miles of tunnels branching off the main one where they will actually store the hot waste.
Deep in the tunnel tests are conducted to find out the effects of the enormous amount of heat that the sealed in nuclear waste will produce. In sealed of tunnels row of huge heaters are lined up to raise the temperature to several hundred degrees. The waste itself will be stored in something called Alloy 22, a metal which will survive the oxidization over the long time spans involved in the plan. The design of the Yucca Mountain Repository is capable of holding up to 125,000 metric tonnes of heavy metal.
Currently, the country’s 104 nuclear plants and the nuclear weapons program have produced over 40, 000 metric tonnes of spend fuel, and will have produced an estimated 63,000 MT by 2014. In 2035 it will be two times that. Most of that waste is currently stored in 33 states at a few Dept. of Energy sites, and at the sites of 72 nuclear power plants in what are euphemistically called “swimming pools.” These were designed as temporary storage sites where the risks of dangerous failures are increasing over time.
Today the future of Yucca Mountain is still very much in flux. On February 14, 2002 Secretary of Energy Spencer Abrams recommended the approval of Yucca Mt to President Bush who acted the next day to notify the Congress of his intention to move ahead with the project. However, in 2009 Obama reversed this position and as along with Energy Secretary Steven Chu said that “the Yucca Mountain site no longer was viewed as an option for storing reactor waste.” While this may be the case, and the project has no official opening date, it continues to move forward. With a 2008 budget of $390 million, the lowest since 2002, the project is underfunded but the DoE has managed to reroute funds and is still being perusing the project.
In 2006 a committee of 96 doctoral degree-granting institutions and 11 associate member universities was put together to review the project for safety and viability. A previous review from the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Work was favorable towards the site.
Whether Yucca mountain ends up being used as a storage facility, or another, better option for the waste comes along such as re-using it as nuclear fuel, the question of nuclear waste storage and disposal is a continually mounting one, one which must be answered within a few decades and be the correct, or at least viable, for the next 10,000 decades.
In conjunction with the Long Now Foundation. Modified from original text by Peter Schwartz at the Long Now Blog.
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