Dumping Science

Saturday’s editorial argues that the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository should remain a national priority.

Some time over the next year, presumably, President Barack Obama will address the nation and ask us to accept some piece of legislation to control the nation’s carbon emissions.

It may require some sacrifice, our president will tell us, but a combination of scientific evidence and national-defense threats will make the bill vital to securing our nation’s future. Indeed, even during his inaugural address, Obama pledged that in our policy-making, “we will restore science to its rightful place.”

That rhetorical flourish, however, has lost some of its credibility following the Obama administration’s recent decision to close the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, the Nevada site chosen over a 30-year process to store the nation’s nuclear waste.

Gov. Mark Sanford has already decried the decision as “Chicago-style patronage politics” intended to boost the difficult re-election prospects of U.S. Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate Majority Leader. Though similar statements have been part of Republicans’ argumentative arsenal about most every Obama policy they opposed over the past year, in this Yucca Mountain case, there has been very little rebuttal.

So, what is the science behind this decision? A very unhappy U.S. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) recently grilled U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu about this decision in a committee hearing. “It’s an unfolding of issues that continued, and I would be happy to talk to you in detail about some of the issues, but the President has made it very clear that it is not an option,” Chu responded. The President decided it’s not an option - that’s the “science.”

The actual science is apparently based on some concern about the timeframe between 10,000 years and 1 million years, when heavy rain and snow may begin to seep through the rock of Yucca Mountain and drag trace amounts of radiation through the remainder of the mountain into the water table, and thus into some future Nevada farmer’s grazing fields. We agree that it is important to make all our decisions with future generations in mind, but given that all of recorded history encompasses only 6,000 years, we would also hope that over the next ten millennia our nation’s schools will improve enough for us to come up with a better solution.

The cost of abandoning the project is staggering. Nuclear power companies - and their customers - have already contributed $30 billion toward the Yucca Mountain project, $1.2 billion of which has come from South Carolina. Aiken’s Savannah River Site received a $1.6 stimulus grant for cleanup in anticipation that its waste would be moved to Yucca Mountain. South Carolina has several other temporary storage sites, as do all but a handful of states - all of which are now in a sort of nuclear limbo.

U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn supports continued work on the project, and has said Congress will overrule the President. Just in case it doesn’t work out that way, S.C. Attorney General Henry McMaster (in an act far more sensible than his last self-serving lawsuit threat over a now-defunct provision of health-care reform) has filed a petition to intervene in the process with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, pursuing a legal course to restart the Yucca Mountain work. That seems the best course, as the Obama administration, having left science by the wayside, has offered no other concrete options.

In his search for a scientific-sounding response to the Yucca issue, the Energy Secretary stammered about salt domes, describing them as geologically stable for “up to hundreds of millions of years” (just for point of reference: we evolved away from chimps 5 million years ago). So we can probably guess that the next step for the blue-ribbon panel is to use the next decade or so to select a salt dome to dump the waste - until a salt-dome-state senator becomes Majority Leader, his party takes the White House, and the search must again begin anew.

For more on Yucca Mountain, see the following links:

Gov. Mark Sanford has already decried the decision as “Chicago-style patronage politics” intended to boost the difficult re-election prospects of U.S. Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate Majority Leader. Though similar statements have been part of Republicans’ argumentative arsenal about most every Obama policy they opposed over the past year, in this Yucca Mountain case, there has been very little rebuttal.

So, what is the science behind this decision? A very unhappy U.S. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) recently grilled U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu about this decision in a committee hearing. “It’s an unfolding of issues that continued, and I would be happy to talk to you in detail about some of the issues, but the President has made it very clear that it is not an option,” Chu responded. The President decided it’s not an option - that’s the “science.”

The actual science is apparently based on some concern about the timeframe between 10,000 years and 1 million years, when heavy rain and snow may begin to seep through the rock of Yucca Mountain and drag trace amounts of radiation through the remainder of the mountain into the water table, and thus into some future Nevada farmer’s grazing fields. We agree that it is important to make all our decisions with future generations in mind, but given that all of recorded history encompasses only 6,000 years, we would also hope that over the next ten millennia our nation’s schools will improve enough for us to come up with a better solution.

The cost of abandoning the project is staggering. Nuclear power companies - and their customers - have already contributed $30 billion toward the Yucca Mountain project, $1.2 billion of which has come from South Carolina. Aiken’s Savannah River Site received a $1.6 stimulus grant for cleanup in anticipation that its waste would be moved to Yucca Mountain. South Carolina has several other temporary storage sites, as do all but a handful of states - all of which are now in a sort of nuclear limbo.

U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn supports continued work on the project, and has said Congress will overrule the President. Just in case it doesn’t work out that way, S.C. Attorney General Henry McMaster (in an act far more sensible than his last self-serving lawsuit threat over a now-defunct provision of health-care reform) has filed a petition to intervene in the process with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, pursuing a legal course to restart the Yucca Mountain work. That seems the best course, as the Obama administration, having left science by the wayside, has offered no other concrete options.

In his search for a scientific-sounding response to the Yucca issue, the Energy Secretary stammered about salt domes, describing them as geologically stable for “up to hundreds of millions of years” (just for point of reference: we evolved away from chimps 5 million years ago). So we can probably guess that the next step for the blue-ribbon panel is to use the next decade or so to select a salt dome to dump the waste - until a salt-dome-state senator becomes Majority Leader, his party takes the White House, and the search must again begin anew.

For more on Yucca Mountain, see the following links: