Yucca Mountain: The Reason Nuclear Waste Might End Up In Your Backyard After All

Yucca Mountain has been hailed as the perfect solution to our nuclear waste problems.  It seems sturdy enough, it’s underground, and it’s far away, so hey, you don’t even have to look at it! Situated 150 kilometers northwest of Las Vegas, Yucca Mountain is a volcanic mountain made of permeable soil perched atop 32 different earthquake fault lines.  These combined factors make it very vulnerable to the possibility of waste leaks from the metal canisters it is being contained in.

Paul Craig, an engineering professor at the University of California, has studied the probability of waste escaping from the containers.  He noted that the scientists who designed the holding facility in Yucca Mountain failed to take into account ‘deliquescence’, which occurs when salt in a surrounding area tends to liquefy and corrode metals.  Craig states that deliquescence would undoubtedly occur due to the fact that the dump will be operated at about 200 degrees, causing the metal containers holding waste to corrode.

Critics have also focused on transporting waste to Yucca Mountain.  Various Native American tribes have rejected the Department of Energy’s request to use their lands for the shipping of nuclear waste, leaving the DOE to default on one last option: the Caliente corridor.  The Caliente corridor is not only uncomfortably close to where hundreds of thousands of people work and live, it is incredibly vulnerable to flooding.  In the past floods have swept across the corridor, and research shows that it is likely to happen again, creating risk for a ‘Mobile Chernobyl”.  And every single proposal to store nuclear waste in North America targets Native American groups on poor reservations with little political power- a prime example of environmental injustice.

            While recent news has shown that Barack Obama has very little interest in pursuing Yucca Mountain as a containment site for nuclear waste, the issue still remains that there is nowhere to put nuclear waste.  How can we sustain an industry that cannot clean up after itself?  To me, the lack of an ability to dispose its waste is a deal-breaker.  Instead, we need to explore what other alternative energies are available that have no waste to dispose of, such as solar and wind power. With the fragile economy at stake, we need to move forward with technologies that will sustain themselves without having to be shoved down a deep hole at the end of their life cycles.