6 May (NucNet): A US Nuclear Regulatory Commission supplement to the final environmental impact statement for a proposed permanent repository for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada concludes that potential impacts on groundwater and surface groundwater discharges would be “small.”
The document is a supplement to environmental impact statements prepared by the Department of Energy on the proposed repository, some 150km from Las Vegas.
Yucca Mountain is the only site that has been studied in detail for geological disposal, but according to the state of Nevada’s Eureka County Nuclear Waste Office its status remains “uncertain”.
In 2011 the Obama administration halted funding for Yucca Mountain and established a committee to look at alternatives.
The committee concluded the US would have to develop a “consent-based approach” for choosing a site because leaving the decision to Congress had failed.
It noted that local willingness had been crucial to decision-making on sites for nuclear waste repositories in Finland, France, Spain and Sweden.
In 2013, a federal appeals court ruled that the NRC must resume its review of the DOE’s licence application for the site.
The review had been stopped when funding was withdrawn, but the states of South Carolina and Washington, the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, and others, filed suit in the US Court of Appeals requiring the NRC to restart licensing proceedings.
The court upheld the appeal and the licensing process resumed in November 2013.
The Eureka County Nuclear Waste Office said federal funding for the repository programme is “currently non-existent”.
The DOE has spent an estimated $8bn (€7bn) studying the site and constructing the exploratory tunnel beneath Yucca Mountain.
The DOE's own estimates suggest the cost of building and operating the repository could reach $97bn, the office said.
“Today the Yucca Mountain site has been abandoned and nothing exists but a boarded up exploratory tunnel,” the office said.
