NRC Staff Report Reignites Yucca Mountain Debate

How the 2014 midterm U.S. elections go may well determine whether the nuclear waste storage project in Nevada goes forward, four years after the Obama administration halted it.

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, ranking member on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and U.S. Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, were among the Republicans calling for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to continue its licensing review of the Department of Energy's Yucca Mountain project after NRC's staff published Vol. 3 of its safety evaluation report on Oct. 16. Yucca Mountain is a huge underground repository built to store nuclear waste from U.S. commercial nuclear power plants. The Obama administration halted the project in 2010, with DOE moving to withdraw its application and Congress stopping appropriations for the NRC's review. U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., adamantly opposes it.

The "Safety Evaluation Report Related to Disposal of High-Level Radioactive Wastes in a Geologic Repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada" report addresses Yucca Mountain's safety after it is permanently closed – specifically, whether its design would safely house the waste materials for 1 million years and deter both human and groundwater intrusion. The staff's report concludes that it will.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ordered NRC in August 2013 to resume the licensing process using available funding appropriated from the Nuclear Waste Fund. That order led to the publication of Volume 3. The staff expects to publish volumes 2 (Repository Safety Before Permanent Closure), 4 (Administrative and Programmatic Requirements) and 5 (License Specifications) by January 2015, as they are completed. NRC's release about the newly published volume states that it "does not signal whether the NRC might authorize construction of the repository. A final licensing decision, should funds beyond those currently available be appropriated, could come only after completion of the safety evaluation report, a supplement to the Department of Energy's environmental impact statement, hearings on contentions in the adjudication, and Commission review."