THE PATH TO YUCCA MOUNTAIN AND BEYOND

摘要

Now that Congress has overridden Nevada' s veto of the Yucca Mountain site for this country's—indeed the world's—first geologic repository for highly radioactive waste, the project awaits its next and perhaps last high hurdle: a stiffly contested three-to-four-year licensing proceeding before the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Meanwhile, legitimacy of the project remains clouded among more than a few scientists by a belief that narrowing the search for a site to Yucca Mountain was blatantly political, arbitrary, and without sound technical basis. But here, in my remarks, I shall argue that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 and its attendant circumstances made it virtually inevitable that Yucca Mountain would become the site chosen. I shall then contend further that the suitability of Yucca Mountain or any other specific repository site may be obscured unless evaluated against a safety case embracing adaptive strategies of waste packaging and emplacement that is borne out by credible calculations of long-term performance. Twenty years ago when the Nuclear Waste Policy Act was passed government policymakers had no inkling that isolation of long-lived, heat-generating waste in a geologic formation was so technically daunting. Even many technical people in nuclear waste management were to find the concept that project design must be driven and shaped by a robustly believable safety case to be elusive in its subtleties. After discussing the Yucca Mountain site in light of the foregoing and suggesting a few possibilities for strategic adaptations that might work there, I shall propose that the Yucca Mountain project would benefit greatly if placed under stronger, more independent direction in a new independent federal corporation headquartered in Nevada.