Yucca Mountain

The storage facility is located on federal lands adjacent to the Nevada Nuclear Test Site in Nye County, Nevada , about 130 km northwest of Las Vegas , where about 900 nuclear explosions were carried out. The repository is located in Yucca Mountain, a mountain range in south-central Nevada. The ridge consists of volcanic material (mainly tufa ), ejected from the now-cooled supervolcano . The repository at Yucca Mountain will be located inside a long ridge, about 1,000 feet below the surface and 1,000 feet above groundwater, and will have 40 miles of tunnels. The capacity will be approximately 77,000 tons of nuclear waste.

Construction planning and research for this region has been ongoing since the early 1980s. For some time it was planned to organize a radioactive waste storage facility in Def Smith County, but later on they abandoned this idea in favor of Yucca Mountain . Founder of Arrowhead Mills ^[1] Jesse Frank Ford led Def Smith’s protests, arguing that the presence of a waste storage facility could contaminate Ogallal’s aquifer , the main source of drinking water for West Texas .

The repository was supposed to open in 1998 . Currently, a main tunnel with a length of 120 meters and several small tunnels have been dug. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has submitted an application for a construction license to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2008 . The earliest estimated date for starting construction of the repository is 2013, but even if the review of the project by the relevant authorities goes well, the future of the project in Yucca Mountain will continue to depend on the political climate in the United States. The construction of this project became an occasion for political intrigue between the two main political parties in the United States. During presidential campaigns in 2004 and 2008, Democratic candidates promised to close the project if they won the election. Congress voted to reduce the project budget in fiscal 2009 to a record low of $ 196 million, which continues the five-year trend of cutbacks in funding, in which funding was significantly lower than the amounts requested by the US Department of Energy. By 2008, about $ 9 billion was spent on the project. Presumably, the cost of operating the repository over the next 100 years may reach $ 90 billion.

The US nuclear industry still does not have the possibility of long-term disposal of radioactive waste. The deep geological repository existing in the USA in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant accepts waste only from the defense industry. Alvin Weinberg , one of the pioneers in the field of nuclear energy in the United States, commented on this:

Currently, radioactive waste in the United States is stored at the production site, which is much more dangerous and expensive than transporting and disposing of it in the repository. Therefore, the Obama administration’s refusal to continue the project caused a lot of lawsuits, where the project’s defenders are representatives of the nuclear industry and municipalities that have temporary radioactive waste depots, and on the other hand, representatives of the state of Nevada, a number of environmental and public groups and currently federal authorities . There have been lawsuits before. In particular, lawsuits were filed against the EPA , which established radiation standards that the claimants considered excessive. In July 2004, the District of Columbia Court of Appeal ruled in favor of the agency on all but one point: regulatory retention periods, defined as 10,000 years. The court ruled that the EPA observance of the ten-thousand-year isolation period for radioactive waste was not developed in accordance with the recommendation of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and was too short. In a report, NAS recommended an isolation period of one million years.

For the first 10,000 years, the EPA prescribes a radiation dose limit of up to 15 mbar per year. This is at the level of the most stringent radiation protection rules for nuclear facilities in the United States. From 10,000 to one million years, the EPA has set a dose limit of 100 millibar per year. The EPA requires the Department of Energy to prove that Yucca Mountain can safely store waste, taking into account the effects of possible earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, climate change and container corrosion, for up to one million years.

In accordance with EPA requirements, the containers for radioactive waste from the storage facility are designed for a shelf life of 12 to 100 thousand years and it is believed that they will fail after approximately two million years ^[2] .

• Geological disposal of radioactive waste
• Radioactive waste disposal at the Siberian Chemical Combine
• Decommissioning of nuclear power units
• Reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel
• Tailing dump
• Mount Cheyenne
• Environmentalism

• Disputes around Mount Yucca