theLiquorWhat ever happened to the Yukka Mt disposal or whatnot that Nevada was adamantly against? I remember hearing in my Environmental Conservation class all the built up waste as it was produced faster than they had storage. And the tailings from the uranium mines is poisoning the natives water in Utah but they have less of a voice than rich white people. Everything is bad, just the downfall of our civilization
Funding to DOE for the design, planning, and development of a repository at Yucca Mountain has been zeroed out, so the lights are off, nobody is there, and no one at DOE is getting paid to work on it. By law, the licensing process requires that DOE submit the application to the NRC, which they did, before funding was cut. If I understand correctly, the NRC has continued to review the license application as is, even though funding for development has dried up.
YM is a decent site, but the real reason it was chosen was political. It left a pretty deep chip on Harry Reid's shoulder - at the time, he was a young junior senator. Over time, he got powerful, and rejecting it was the backbone of his politics. He probably was the leading influencer of Obama's decision to stop work on it. Nevada's current politicians still oppose it but are far less powerful, so they have much less leverage to stop it if Congress decides to restart work on it.
In the mean time, spent fuel continues to accumulate. About 2000 t are generated each year by nuclear power plants in the US, which generate ~ 20% of our electricity. Currently, all spent fuel is stored in some way at the reactor sites where it's generated. The original law called for the government to take ownership of the waste (and thus remove the burden from the utilities) and transport it to the repository for disposal. Clearly this hasn't happened. Legislation now moving through Congress would authorize private entities to consolidate and store the waste temporarily while a repository is developed.
Uranium mill tailings are pretty nasty. This is the mill tailing pile near Moab. It's right on the Colorado river, and Moab is about a mile to the left. The radioactivity in mill tailings comes from the decay daughters of uranium, like radium and radon. If I understand correctly,
current tailings treatment is fairly effective at containing this radioactivity. However, not much uranium is mined in the US anymore and it was the older mines treated them poorly, so the problem remains.
The US has a poor nuclear-environmental record. It's almost all attributable to the time when (1) no one knew anything about radiation and the environment, and (2) the government reeeeally wanted more nuclear weapons and was willing to incur any cost to get them fast. That doesn't mean it has to stay that way or be like that going forward.
