Washington Post front page: Yucca “dysfunction”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0659
The Washington Post continues to spotlight the controversy over geological nuclear-waste storage at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Last week, as discussed here , it was an editorial. Now a headline above the fold on the 15 June front page asks, “At Yucca Mountain, money down a hole?” The subheadline summarizes the story by two science writers, Joel Achenbach and Brian Vastag: “Three-decade battle over nuclear waste site a study in dysfunction.” In the online version, the headline declares, “Nuclear waste dump is mired in inertia.” The reporters describe Yucca as a project “that came to life slowly and tortuously and is in the process of dying in a similar fashion.” They summarize the two sides’ positions:
The pro-Yucca forces see this multi-decade saga as the ultimate case of not-in-my-back-yard politics. The anti-Yucca camp argues that the mountain is not geologically sound as a toxic waste dump, that it’s too wet for long-term storage of containers that can corrode, and too vulnerable to earthquakes.
The article observes that Yucca “could yet be resuscitated by the courts,” but “as it now stands,” the project “is likely to turn into a $15 billion Hole to Nowhere.” They summarize the resulting “cloud of recrimination that expands daily,” including malfeasance allegations against Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “whom Republican lawmakers have accused of illegal machinations to shut down the mountain depository.” Then, at length, the reporters rehash the details of Yucca’s multidecade past. They end the piece with irony:
With Yucca Mountain closed, the Obama administration has resorted to the classic maneuver for difficult problems: It has assigned the nuclear waste dilemma to a “blue-ribbon commission” led by gray-haired Washington luminaries (Lee Hamilton, Brent Scowcroft). In May, the “Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future” made a draft recommendation for a medium-term solution: aboveground storage of nuclear fuel in concrete containers, or “dry-cask storage.” But the commission also called for the country to develop “expeditiously” a permanent storage site in one or more “deep geological facilities.” It did not specify where such a hole should be.
Members of the physics community might note that these irony-minded Post science writers left unmentioned another expensive, futile hole in the ground: the one in Texas that, until dysfunctionality won out in 1993, was to have contained the Superconducting Super Collider.
