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Granite areas eyed for nuclear waste sites
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THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
MONTPELIER, Vt. -- The likely death of a planned nuclear waste site at Nevada's Yucca Mountain has left federal agencies looking for a possible replacement.
A national lab working for the U.S. Department of Energy is eying granite deposits stretching from Georgia to Maine as potential sites, with big sections of Minnesota and Wisconsin where that rock is prevalent.
Three decades after the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act said the federal government would handle disposal of high-level radioactive waste, the United States still has no agreed-upon solution for where and how to dispose of about 70,000 metric tons of it. About 10 percent is from the military's nuclear weapons programs; most of the rest is piling up at commercial reactor sites around the country.
Amendments to the law in 1987 designated Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as the only potential site to be studied. But with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., opposed, President Barack Obama's administration last year directed the Energy Department to withdraw its license application for the site.
The new study was done by the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico, an offshoot of the U.S. nuclear weapons program that has grown to work on a variety of federal science projects, including Yucca Mountain. The lab is operated under government contract by Sandia Corp., a subsidiary of defense giant Lockheed Martin Corp.
Exposure to high-level radioactive waste can be lethal, and the material needs to be isolated for at least thousands of years while its radioactivity dissipates. One court decision related to the decades-long controversy over Yucca Mountain specified an isolation period of 1 million years, about five times as long as homo sapiens has existed on Earth, according to the American Museum of Natural History.
The nation's only active deep underground waste site is the Waste Isolation Pilot Project near Carlsbad, N.M., which is mainly storing plutonium from bomb-making.
Local officials and residents have welcomed the economic development that has come from hosting the site, and community leaders have indicated they are open to expanding it, said Andrew Orrell, director of nuclear energy and fuel cycle programs at Sandia. That makes the salt beds of southeast New Mexico a likely long-term home for the nation's nuclear waste if Yucca Mountain remains out of the picture.
Orrell said, too, that granite and salt beds are not the only type of environments under study. Sandia teams have launched similar reviews of clay and shale and deeper holes bored into the Earth, as far as three miles, as potential sites. The studies have been done in part to keep skills sharp among staff who had been working on Yucca Mountain, Orrell said.
But Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear industry engineer who is a Vermont-based consultant on nuclear-related issues, called the report on granite sites "ominous." He pointed to factors that he said raise the likelihood of the massive granite outcroppings in rural parts of the Northeast attracting attention as potential waste sites.
Granite would appear to have an advantage over other environments, if the recent development of high-level waste sites in other countries is any guide. Both Finland and Sweden are on track to open waste sites buried deep in granite within the next 14 years.
The Sandia study said that granite's properties as a chemically and physically stable rock, with low permeability, would "strongly inhibit" radiation from reaching the outside environment if waste canisters leaked.
In addition to the Appalachian mountain range and upper Midwest, the study identifies several areas of the West as rich in granite deposits. But the western regions are described as having moderate to high seismic activity.
In contrast, the northern Appalachian and Adirondack region, including upstate New York and New England, and the Lake Superior region of Wisconsin and Minnesota, are described as having little to no seismic and volcanic activity.
Vermont is no stranger to the nuclear waste storage debate. It was one of the places Department of Energy surveyed for potential waste sites in the mid-1980s before Congress targeted Yucca Mountain.
At one public hearing in Wells River, more than 2,000 people turned out to voice their outrage at the idea.
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Nevadans want neither: the pipeline or Yucca Mtn. It's pretty much self-serving outside interests and arrogant engineering types that are pushing these two disastrous, myopic plans on Nevada.
And thank YOU, 4vs1, for getting right to the point with the word "unsustainable", which is what I suspect this water grab will be if they take as much water as they say they plan to. I have a very, VERY hard time believing there is that much recharge in those arid valleys. And turning them into Owens Valley-style wastelands will have a FAR more immediate and devastating impact on the lives of Nevadans than any hypothetical nuclear waste incident.
Thank you Tom Reynolds for succinctly pointing out the hypocrisy of Las Vegans who support the unsustainable pipeline water grab because it is for the “greater good,” regardless of what the rural Nevadan’s think, yet oppose Yucca because it isn’t supported by the majority of Las Vegans. I don’t know BTDT’s view on the pipeline but there are plenty of other hypocrites to go around.
Keep back east waste- back east, leave nevada out of it
btdt: Sort of like the independent, freedom-loving city of Las Vegas' plan to shove a water pipeline down the throats of the ranchers of eastern Nevada?
Interesting points, Abe. Thanks for filling in the details!
Tom: Nothing was flushed, and whatever was learned will be used in the future. Maybe one lesson is that when it comes to issues like these; don't try to ram it down the throats of the people first and ask questions later. Very important that.
Tom Reynolds is right about the risk of fractures either being present or being created after another ice age compresses and then decompresses a granite body. The water table doesn't matter, since repositories in granite would be deep in the rock body where fractures are few and flow is very, very slow. But to gueard against water flow contacting waste, granite repository schemes are typically considering a very long lasting metal barrier (copper or titanium or very thick steel) surrounded by a thick expanding clay layer. In the Swedish case the copper package will last more than a million years in the oxygen-free environment at depth, and the clay buffer will add a million years to the travel time from the waste package into the rock where there might be some slow water flow. Of course there is some uncertainty, but all in all this is a great disposal concept.
Clay and salt would be cheaper and deliver the same degree of safety. Not needing a robust metal barrier would make them cheaper. The degree of safety would be the same: safe is safe.
Yucca would have been safe also. But it is the most expesnive of all these options, so maybe Secretary Chu is correct when he says the nation can do better. "Its the economics stupid," isn't that the mantra for this election season?
So "ignore it and it will go away" is the right approach, btdt? Did you learn that from Harry Reid and Gregory Jaczko? Before you and the author of this piece declare victory, let me point out that while granite has a low permeability, it very often as a high FRACTURE permeability. Those granite areas that were mentioned also often have much higher water tables. And it was considered thirty years ago, but rejected for those reasons. This article is right, that we have now flushed thirty years of work down the toilet, and are truly "back to square one."
Forget all this nonsense and just send it to a state, where the representatives have been voting for it. In fact, send a little bit to each state where the representatives have been screaming for it for the past 30 years and that will be the last we hear about it.