Nuclear Waste Storage Problem

Although the nuclear waste storage problem has not yet reached crisis proportions, it is a chronic, complex issue that defies societal consensus, even within the scientific community. Each category of nuclear waste--high-level, low-level, and transuranic (TRU)--presents unique challenges for containment. All are potentially dangerous; at issue is the selection of the best options for long-term storage.

High-level nuclear waste is comprised of spent fuel from private sector and military reactors, as well as the liquids remaining from fuel processed for atomic weaponry. Used reactor fuel is considered intensely hot and irradiated. High-level nuclear wastes have long half-lives and are considered permanent hazards. (Half-life describes the amount of time required for 50 percent of a reactor fuel's original radioactivity to decay.) High-level nuclear waste depositories must be guarded indefinitely, and require deep storage. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is the federal agency responsible for the disposal of high-level nuclear wastes.

Irradiated uranium fuel, in widespread use among commercial nuclear power plants, is considered to be the most dangerous radioactive waste on earth. Although minuscule as a percentage of the volume of all high-level nuclear waste generated in the United States, commercial nuclear power plants are major producers of radioactivity: "Commercial nuclear power plants account for 95 percent of the radioactivity from all civilian and milit

ite that the DOE has settled on for its proposed geologic burial of radioactive wastes is Yucca Mountain. Yucca Mountain is located on federal land 90 miles west of Las Vegas. The DOE proposes to store nuclear waste 1,400 feet underground. The site is expected to receive about 70,000 tons of radioactive waste. Yucca Mountain's location in the desert Southwest makes it ideal from the standpoint of the threat of water contamination of underground waste containers. Water is one of major security issues in nuclear storage: "Water corrodes containers, dissolves contaminants and then migrates, transporting the hazard" (Wheelwright 43). Rainfall in the desert is minimal and the water table is very deep. The desert area where Yucca Mountain is located only gets about six inches of rainfall per year, none of which reaches the water table due to evaporation and plant consumption. The mountain itself also acts as a barrier to underground rainfall accumulation. Although the climate of the Yucca Mountain area is amenable to nuclear waste storage, its geology raises some concerns. Parallel fault lines run to the east and the west of the mountain; a third fault line cuts across it. Critics of the proposed burial site contend that mor