The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) became the world's first deep depository for nuclear waste when it received its first shipment of waste on March 26, 1999. This large facility is located near Carlsbad, New Mexico. WIPP is 655 meters below the Earth's surface in the salt beds of the Salado Formation and is intended to house up to 6.25 million cubic feet of transuranic waste for more than 10,000 years.
Under congressional mandate, the WIPP facility does not accept commercial or high-level waste; it only accepts transuranic waste. More than 99 percent of transuranic waste is temporarily stored in drums at nuclear defense sites around the country. Waste shipped to WIPP is tracked by satellite and moved only at night, when traffic is lighter. It can be transported only in good weather and must be routed around major cities. Figure 4.16 shows a tractor trailer container transporting radioactive waste to WIPP.
As of May 1, 2004, the WIPP facility has received 2,543 shipments of radioactive waste and disposed of 19,793 cubic meters. By 2035, barring court challenges, almost 40,000 truckloads of nuclear waste will be trucked across the country to WIPP.
Yucca Mountain
The centerpiece of the federal government's plan to dispose of highly radioactive waste is a proposed facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. (See Figure 4.17.) The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 was amended in 1987 to require the secretary of energy to investigate the site and, if suitable, recommend to the president that the site
FIGURE 4.16
Using specially designed containment canisters, a truck hauls radioactive waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, where it can be safely stored. (
Yucca Mountain is a 1,200-foot-high volcanic ridge located on federally owned land in the desert approximately 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The repository would be constructed 1,200 feet below the land surface and 800 feet above the groundwater table.
STANDARDS FOR CONTAINMENT.
For the Yucca Mountain Repository to be built, the DOE must satisfactorily demonstrate to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the combination of the site and the repository design complies with the standards set forth by the EPA. The EPA's standard is based on a new approach of using numerical probabilities to establish requirements for containing radioactivity within the repository. Their quantitative terms are as follows:
- Cumulative releases of radioactivity from a repository must have a likelihood of less than 1 chance in 10 of exceeding limits established in the standard, and a likelihood of less than 1 chance in 1,000 of exceeding 10 times the limits, for a period of 10,000 years.
- Exposures of radiation to individual members of the public for 1,000 years must not exceed specified limits.
- Limits are placed on the concentration of radioactivity for 1,000 years after disposal from the repository to a nearby source of groundwater that currently supplies drinking water for thousands of persons, and is irreplaceable.
- Prescribed technical or institutional procedures or steps must provide confidence that the containment requirements are likely to be met.
FIGURE 4.17
An aerial view of Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Yucca Mountain is the proposed site for a major, long-term, nuclear waste storage facility. (
Crisis in the Industry
The long delay in providing disposal sites for nuclear wastes, coupled with the accelerated pace at which nuclear plants are being retired, has created a crisis in the industry. Several aging plants are being maintained—at a cost of $20 million a year for each reactor—simply because there is no place to send the waste once the plants are decommissioned. Under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, the DOE was scheduled to begin picking up waste on January 31, 1998.
The utilities have been paying $.01 per 10 kilowatt-hours of nuclear power generated by the reactors to finance a repository. Although the 1987 waste amendment designated Yucca Mountain as the site, little progress was made in approving the project. In 1996 the U.S. Court of Appeals, in Indiana Michigan Power Co. v. Department of Energy (88F3d1272 [D.C. Ctr., 1996]), ruled that the nuclear waste act created an obligation for the DOE to start disposing of utilities' waste no later than January 31, 1998. Because the DOE missed the deadline, more than twenty utilities have sued.
In February 1999 the DOE announced that because it was unable to receive nuclear waste for permanent storage, it would take ownership of the waste and pay temporary storage costs with money the utilities have paid to develop the permanent repository. The waste will stay where it currently is being stored, and the DOE will pay the storage costs. Even without the expense of temporary storage, the nuclear waste fund (the money collected from the utilities) is many billions short of what Yucca Mountain is expected to cost.
A Serious Leak of Radioactive Waste—Hanford
In 1997 scientists discovered that about 900,000 gallons of radioactive waste had leaked into the soil from 68 of the 149 tanks at the nuclear weapons plant in Hanford, Washington. Eventually, all the tanks are expected to leak. The leak contaminated underground water moving toward the nearby Columbia River. Managers at the plant maintained that the leaks were insignificant because radioactive materials would be trapped by the area above the water table (the "vadose zone"). Furthermore, officials had been saying for decades that no waste from the tanks would reach the groundwater in the next 10,000 years.
However, as of early 2004 government officials estimate that groundwater contamination affects approximately eighty square miles of the site, prompting comparisons of the situation to the Chernobyl disaster. (In April 1986 an explosion at the nuclear power plant located in the Soviet [now the Ukraine] town of Chernobyl killed thirty people.) A threatened lawsuit by the State of Washington against the DOE over the leaks at the Hanford site resulted in an agreement to clean up the two
TABLE 4.6
Public concern about contamination of soil and water by toxic waste, 2004
PLEASE TELL ME IF YOU PERSONALLY WORRY ABOUT THIS PROBLEM A GREAT DEAL, A FAIR AMOUNT, ONLY A LITTLE, OR NOT AT ALL. CONTAMINATION OF SOIL AND WATER BY TOXIC WASTE?
| Great deal % | Fair amount % | Only a little % | Not at all % | No opinion % | |
| 2004 Mar 8–11 | 48 | 26 | 21 | 5 | * |
| 2003 Mar 3–5 | 51 | 28 | 16 | 5 | * |
| 2002 Mar 4–7 | 53 | 29 | 15 | 3 | * |
| 2001 Mar 5–7 | 58 | 27 | 12 | 3 | * |
| 2000 Apr 3–9 | 64 | 25 | 7 | 4 | * |
| 1999 Apr 13–14 | 63 | 27 | 7 | 3 | * |
| 1999 Mar 12–14 | 55 | 29 | 11 | 5 | * |
| 1991 Apr 11–14 | 62 | 21 | 11 | 5 | 1 |
| 1990 Apr 5–8 | 63 | 22 | 10 | 5 | * |
| 1989 May 4–7 | 69 | 21 | 6 | 3 | * |
| SOURCE: "Please tell me if you personally worry about this problem a great deal, a fair amount, only a little, or not at all. Contamination of soil and water by toxic waste?," in Poll Topics and Trends: Environment, The Gallup Organization, Princeton, NJ, March 17, 2004 [Online] www.gallup.com [accessed March 30, 2004] | |||||
indoor pools near the Columbia River by 2007. Progress reports on site clean-up are available at http://www.hanford.gov/cp/gpp.
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