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A Review of the President's Recommendation to Develop a Nuclear Waste Repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada
Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality
The Honorable Spencer Abraham
Mr.
Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee, I am pleased to appear before you
today. On
February 14, I forwarded a recommendation to the President, based on
approximately 24 years of federal research, that Yucca Mountain, Nevada, is
suitable for development as the nation's geologic repository for spent nuclear
fuel and high-level radioactive wastes. The
President officially recommended the site to Congress on February 15, and
pursuant to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (NWPA), the State of Nevada has
exercised a disapproval of the President's recommendation.
As a result, this issue is again before the Congress for disposition,
this time for expedited consideration under the framework Congress established
in the NWPA. I am encouraged that Congress
is considering this Joint Resolution without delay, and ask that you continue
your hard work to see this Resolution through to its final passage, so the
Department may enter the next phase of repository development -an expert and
independent scientific and technical examination of the safety of the site by
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The
significance of passing this Joint Resolution, thus overriding the State of
Nevada's disapproval, hardly needs emphasis.
Twenty years ago, Congress established in law the Federal government's
responsibility for the disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive
waste. In doing so, Congress foresaw the fundamental national
security and energy policy considerations that weigh heavily in favor of
proceeding with a geologic repository, and mandated that a repository program be
based upon a thorough scientific evaluation of several candidate sites.
In 1987, the Congress limited that evaluation to the site we consider
today: Yucca Mountain. In
formulating this recommendation, I first considered whether sound science
supported a determination that the Yucca Mountain site was scientifically and
technically suitable for the development of a repository.
The scientific evaluation of the Yucca Mountain site had been conducted
over a 24-year period; as part of the study, some of the world's best
scientists examined every aspect of the natural processes-past, present, and
future-that could affect the ability of a repository beneath Yucca Mountain to
isolate radionuclides released from any spent fuel and radioactive waste
disposed of there. The
Department's scientific inquiries and modeling clearly demonstrate that a
repository at Yucca Mountain can meet the Environmental Protection Agency's
standards for protecting the health and safety of our citizens.
These extremely stringent standards were based on the recommendations of
the National Academy of Sciences. What
they mean, in terms of the Yucca Mountain site, is that a person living 11 miles
away from the site cannot receive more annual radiation exposure during the
10,000-year regulatory period than a traveler receives today from natural
sources in three round trip flights from Las Vegas to New York. In
evaluating whether the repository can comply with the Agency's standards, our
scientists employed extremely conservative assumptions and considered the impact
of events with extremely low probability of occurrence, all erring on the side
of public safety. For example,
earthquakes were assumed to occur, and volcanic eruptions were evaluated-even
though the likelihood of a volcanic event affecting the repository during the
first 10,000 years is just one in 70 million per year.
Even with these unlikely events analyzed into the Agency's 10,000 year
compliance period, Yucca Mountain still meets the EPA standards.
A
review of the documentation that accompanied the recommendation clearly reveals
that the Department has carefully evaluated the extent to which Yucca
Mountain's substantial natural geologic barriers work in concert with the
robust engineered systems. We know
that Yucca Mountain is in a closed hydrologic basin, a geologic feature that
greatly limits the potential migration of radionuclides. Between the emplacement tunnels and the water table, which is
approximately 2000 feet below the surface, the geology provides natural
adsorption retarding any potential radionuclide movement. The hydrologic
features at this site suggest that more than ninety percent of the annual
rainfall runs off or is evaporated, meaning less than a half an inch of water
travels beneath the surface. Our
studies indicate that the vast majority of water samples taken from the mountain
are thousands of years old. Even
with this robust geology, our scientists again conservatively considered how
engineered barriers 1,000 feet below the surface and 1,000 feet above the water
table might corrode by analyzing what would happen during an ice age, if
Nevada's climate changed and rainfall increased dramatically.
Even including these scenarios, Yucca Mountain still meets the EPA
standards. After
thoroughly examining the relevant scientific and technical materials, I have
concluded that they demonstrate that the site is scientifically and technically
suitable for construction of a repository.
As I stated in my recommendation to the President: "Irrespective
of any other considerations, I could not and would not recommend the Yucca
Mountain site without having first determined that a repository at Yucca
Mountain will bring together the location, natural barriers, and design elements
necessary to protect the health and safety of the public, including those
Americans living in the immediate vicinity, now and into the future." Having
reached this conclusion, I went on to evaluate whether compelling national
interests counseled in favor of moving forward with a geologic repository at
Yucca Mountain, and if so, whether there were
countervailing arguments so strong that I should nonetheless decline to proceed.
This evaluation argued strongly in favor of proceeding, and
certainly that there was no basis for abandoning the policy decisions made by
the Congress in enacting the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act and the 1987
amendments to that Act. In short,
the relevant considerations are as follows. First,
Yucca Mountain is critical to our national security. Today, over forty percent of our Navy's combatant vessels,
including aircraft carriers and submarines, are nuclear powered.
The additional capabilities that nuclear power brings to these platforms
is essential to national security. To
maintain operational readiness, we must assure disposal of spent fuel to support
refueling of these vessels. We are
in the midst of advancing the non-proliferation objectives that have been the
welcome result of the end of the Cold War.
A geologic repository is an integral part of our disposition plans for
surplus weapons grade materials. Yucca
Mountain is an important component of homeland security.
More than 161 million people live within 75 miles of one or more nuclear
waste sites, all of which were intended to be temporary.
We believe that today these sites are safe, but prudence demands we
consolidate this waste from widely dispersed, above-ground sites into a deep
underground location that can be better protected. A
repository is also important to our nation's energy security.
Nuclear power provides 20 percent of the nation's electricity and emits
no airborne pollution or greenhouse gases. The reactors we have today give us
one of the most reliable forms of carbon-free power generation, free from
interruptions due to international events and price fluctuations.
This nation must develop a permanent, safe, and secure site for disposal
of spent nuclear fuel if we are to continue to rely on our 103 operating
commercial reactors to provide us with electricity.
And
a repository is important to our efforts to protect the environment.
A repository is indispensable to implementing an environmentally sound
disposition plan for high-level defense wastes, which are located in Colorado,
Idaho, South Carolina, New Mexico, New York, Tennessee, and Washington.
The Department must move forward and dispose of these materials, which
include approximately 100 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste and
2,500 metric tons of defense production spent nuclear fuel. Finally,
I carefully considered the primary arguments against locating a repository at
Yucca Mountain. None of these
arguments rose to a level that outweighs the case for going forward with the
site designation. Of these, the only one I
shall address in my prepared testimony is the concern critics of the project
have raised about the "transportation issue."
I wish to address this issue briefly, not because I believe there is any
real basis for believing these concerns are warranted, but rather, because I
believe that simply by incanting the words "transportation of nuclear
waste," opponents are hoping they can incite public fear, without any basis
in fact, and that this hope has become the last refuge for opposition to the
project. The facts, however, are
these. First,
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, working with the Departments of
Transportation and Energy, has overseen approximately 30 years of safe shipment
of spent nuclear fuel in this country. The
Department and commercial nuclear industry have substantial experience to date
-some 1.6 million miles-- without any harmful radiation release.
And the successful and extensive European experience in transporting this
type of nuclear material corroborates our experience.
The transportation of this material will involve approximately 175
shipments per year, not the 2,800 that the opponents allege.
It would also constitute 0.00006% of the annual hazardous material
shipments, and 0.006% of the annual radioactive material shipments that occur in
this country today. Second,
because the site has not yet been designated, the Department is just beginning
to formulate its preliminary thoughts about a transportation plan.
There is an eight-year period before any transportation to Yucca Mountain
might occur. This will afford ample time to implement a program that builds upon
our record of safe and orderly transportation of nuclear materials and makes
improvements to it where appropriate. Thus
any suggestion that the Department has chosen any particular route or mechanism
is completely fictitious. Those
decisions have not been made, and cannot possibly start to be made until the
site has been designated and the Department has the opportunity to work with
affected States, local governments, and other entities on how to proceed.
Third,
even without a repository at Yucca Mountain, the need to find a place to put the
spent fuel that is continuing to accumulate will lead to the transportation of
these materials, and likely quite soon. On-site
storage space is running out and not all utilities can find new adjacent land
where they can put this material. Therefore, they will devise ad hoc off-site consolidated
storage alternatives. Already a
consortium of utilities is working on a facility that they have presented to the
NRC. Whether or not this effort ultimately succeeds, it is likely that some
similar effort will. Thus the
transportation of nuclear materials is not a function of a repository at Yucca
Mountain, but rather is a necessary consequence of the material that continues
to accumulate at the 131 sites in 39 States that are running out of room for it. Finally,
Yucca Mountain critics argue that nuclear materials in transit could be a
terrorist target. But they are forgetting the obvious:
spent fuel in secure transit to a permanent repository is certainly less
susceptible to terrorist acts than spent fuel stranded at the temporary,
stationary sites -- many very close to major cities and waterways -- where it
now resides. Let
me close with one last thought. The critics of this program would have Congress
overturn the fundamental decisions it legislated 15 years ago - that a single
underground repository located at Yucca Mountain holds the greatest promise for
the long-term safety and security for the Nation. The great body of scientific work done since then has
confirmed the fundamental soundness of the Yucca Mountain site. The only issues remaining are the type that only can be
resolved in a Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing proceeding.
The
critics who would upend this path to resolution of the remaining issues have a
heavy burden of proof in urging that the policy decision made by Congress in
1987 and the findings of the body of scientific work that examined Yucca
Mountain both be abandoned before the NRC has even had the opportunity to
pass on whether a repository can safely be sited there.
Given the history and the work to date, their burden would be substantial
even if this project were not critical to many important national interests.
But it is. Rejection of the
proposed resolution would leave the country with no ultimate destination for our
spent naval fuel, no adequate path for disposing of our own surplus plutonium,
thereby making it hard for us to press other countries to dispose of theirs, and
no means to complete the environmental cleanup of our defense complex.
Utilities may have to start planning to decommission existing nuclear
reactors and figuring out how to replace them.
Congress would still have to formulate an alternative in view of the
statutory obligation that the Government dispose of commercial spent fuel that
was legislated in 1982, but that would be no easy task. In
short, a decision to oppose this project's going forward at this stage is a
decision to abandon the repository program and subject the country to these
consequences without ever letting neutral experts at the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission decide whether that is the right course. Nothing the critics of this project have advanced comes close
to meeting the burden of proof they should have to satisfy to warrant proceeding
in this fashion. Opposition to
nuclear power is not a sufficient ground, since we all, and the United
States Government in particular, have an obligation to safely dispose of this
waste regardless of any such policy view. Nor
are concerns about transportation, for all the reasons outlined above.
Rather, opposition to this resolution, and to submitting this question to
the NRC, seems warranted only if one is convinced that there is such
overwhelming evidence that a repository at Yucca Mountain cannot meet the NRC
and EPA standards that it would be a waste of time and money to use the ordinary
NRC processes to find out. Support
for the proposed resolution, on the other hand, does not require being convinced
that the Department of Energy is right in believing that a repository at Yucca
Mountain will meet the applicable standards or that the NRC will decide it
should be licensed -- although in
my judgment the scientific work to date provides ample basis for reaching that
conclusion. Indeed, it doesn't even
require being convinced that this outcome is the most likely.
Rather, all that is required to support the resolution is to believe
there is enough of a serious possibility that $4 billion and 24 years of
scientific research have produced a sufficient basis for our conclusion that the
site can be safely developed as a repository.
That conclusion will then subject the extensive scientific basis for the
President's recommendation to objective testing in the only official context
it can be -- an NRC licensing proceeding. I
urge the Congress to act promptly and favorably on the proposed joint resolution
so that the next stage of addressing the merits of all remaining issues, by
applying the independent expertise of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, can
begin in earnest.
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