Resources & Stats

February 2011

Key Facts

• The president and Congress approved Yucca Mountain, Nev., as the site of a deep geologic repository for used nuclear fuel in 2002.

• Some who want to block the project are spreading misinformation about the scientific studies conducted at Yucca Mountain.

• The Yucca Mountain site was selected because of its attributes: remote, arid and geologically stable. Used nuclear fuel will be isolated 1,000 feet below dry rock, yet 1,000 feet above the water table.

• Exhaustive studies have been conducted at the site under very stringent standards, and there is a strong scientific basis for going forward with the site. However, science does not stand still. Studies will continue throughout the life of the Yucca Mountain project.

Misrepresentation and Truth
Opponents of the Yucca Mountain repository for used nuclear fuel depend on accusations that misrepresent or ignore over 20 years of scientific research in their efforts to oppose this important national environmental project. These allegations and facts follow.

Myth: The site geology is unsuitable.

Fact: The Yucca Mountain site is remote, arid and geologically stable. It is one of the few locations in the world where containers storing radioactive materials can be isolated from the environment by 1,000 feet of dry rock below ground and the same distance above the water table. The area receives only seven inches of annual rainfall. Ninety percent of this rainfall runs off the side of the mountain ridge, is absorbed by vegetation or evaporates.

The fraction of an inch of water that seeps through fractures in the rock eventually reaches a groundwater basin beneath the mountain that is completely closed. This water does not flow to any river or ocean, or to the aquifers that provide a major source of drinking water. It would take thousands of years for such small amounts of water to possibly breach the containers and transport any release of radioactivity to the environment.

Man-made barriers work in combination with the geological surroundings to add thousands more years to this timeline. The vast majority of the radioactivity in the used reactor fuel—99 percent—will be eliminated within the first 1,000 years through the natural process of radioactive decay.

The geological and engineered features of the repository will continue to provide protection so that annual radiation exposures 1 million years in the future will be maintained well below natural background levels.

Opponents often claim that groundwater has welled up and flooded the mountain in the past and will do so in the future. This theory has no scientific basis. Numerous independent organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences, University of Nevada at Las Vegas, Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, and U.S. Geological Survey, have studied this possibility and have concluded that such “upwelling” has never occurred.

Myth: The possibility of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes makes the site unsound.

Fact: The area is not volcanically active. Yucca Mountain is not a volcano. An eruption has never occurred at Yucca Mountain. Some large eruptions occurred north of the area between 12 million and 15 million years ago, laying down the rock that eventually became Yucca Mountain. The last small eruption was 80,000 years ago in the valley floor southwest of the mountain. The odds of an eruption at Yucca Mountain during the next 10,000 years have been calculated at one in 70 million.

Although earthquakes have occurred in the area, vibrations and their impact decrease underground. More than 40 years of research at the Nevada Test Site, which includes Yucca Mountain, shows that past earthquakes have had little impact there. The repository will be 1,000 feet underground, in a block of solid rock, and will be designed to withstand severe earthquakes.

Myth: The site did not meet federal requirements, so scientific standards were lowered.

Fact: The standards were not lowered; they were raised and updated to reflect the latest scientific methods, as recommended by the National Academy of Sciences and required by Congress.

As instructed by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, DOE started studying nine potential sites for a repository. In 1986, DOE compared the results of its extensive research and analysis and concluded that Yucca Mountain clearly was the superior location. Congress in 1987 directed DOE to study only Yucca Mountain and established additional requirements for site suitability.

The stringent standards were further refined by the 1992 Energy Policy Act. The act required the Environmental Protection Agency and the NRC to establish repository radiation safety standards after considering the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences.

The first phase of exhaustive research, completed in 2001, indicated that Yucca Mountain meets the comprehensive scientific, engineering, environmental and other criteria. After more than 60 public hearings in Nevada, then-Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham certified in February 2002 that Yucca Mountain meets the site selection requirements. President Bush concurred and forwarded the recommendation to Congress for a final decision. Congress approved the site in July 2002.

The scientific results that formed the basis of the site selection showed that radiation exposures would be a small fraction of stringent EPA limits for 10,000 years. These studies showed that limits would continue to protect public health and safety for hundreds of thousands of years. The EPA is revising its regulations to require DOE to address radiation exposures as far as 1 million years in the future.

Myth: The Yucca Mountain site was chosen because of politics, not science.

Fact: The federal government has spent more than $9 billion and 20 years studying potential sites for the repository. After nine sites were studied between 1982 and 1986, the effort focused on Yucca Mountain. It was selected as the site with the best attributes for a repository.

Myth: We should not go forward with the project while there are unresolved scientific questions.

Fact: All the scientific information will undergo intense scrutiny before the NRC decides whether to issue licenses to start construction, begin operation and close the facility when it reaches capacity. The project should go forward and be informed by scientific study that will continue throughout the NRC licensing process and beyond. The multistage repository development process requires that scientific inquiry will continue through the life of the project.

At the time Congress approved the Yucca Mountain site, the NRC identified 293 items that required additional information prior to licensing the facility. In response, DOE provided information to the NRC on all of these items. These items will be fully resolved prior to the NRC’s issuing a construction authorization for the repository. The regulatory agency will request additional information as part of the scientific discovery process during the review of the license application.

Federal regulations also require that scientific and engineering analyses continue at the repository throughout operation to ensure public safety.

Myth: The 100,000 shipments to the repository will pose a significant risk to communities nationwide.

Fact: Such claims grossly overstate both the potential risk and quantity of these shipments. The nuclear industry has an impeccable safety record during more than 35 years of transporting commercial reactor fuel.

More than 3,000 shipments of used fuel have crossed 1.7 million miles nationwide, with no injury as a result of the radioactivity of the cargo. The combination of robust shipping containers, exacting procedures, tight security, government cooperation and strict regulatory standards has produced this outstanding safety record.

A 2006 study by the National Academy of Sciences thoroughly evaluated transportation risks and concluded there were “no fundamental technical barriers to the safe transportation of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste in the United States.”

DOE estimates there will be an average of 175 rail and truck shipments annually for 24 years to move 70,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel and high-level defense waste to Yucca Mountain. The total number of shipments is less than 5 percent of the total claimed by opponents.

Shippers know accidents can happen. That’s why robust steel shipping containers are designed, tested and required by regulation to withstand even the most severe accidents. These include fires, drops onto sharp objects and submersion in water.

Myth: The shipments will be terrorist targets.

Fact: Shipments of radioactive material to a repository are not the type of vulnerable target—with opportunity for significant impact—that terrorists seek. The shipments are heavily guarded. Travel routes and times for the shipments are not publicly available; transport vehicles are equipped with devices to prevent unauthorized movement; and satellites track shipments constantly. In addition, the NRC has increased the security and safeguards requirements for used fuel shipments following the September 2001 terrorist attacks.

Tom Ridge, then-secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 2002 that he is confident that used nuclear fuel can be transferred safely to a repository: “We feel very confident that this can be done safely because over the past 20-plus years, the Department of Defense and Department of Energy have been transporting nuclear materials across the country with very high standards, great emphasis on security and public safety. … We don’t believe ultimately that should be an impediment to locating a permanent place for nuclear waste that we have stored around the country.”

Shipping containers for used nuclear fuel are extraordinarily strong. The Sandia National Laboratories have tested the containers by broadsiding them with a locomotive traveling 80 miles per hour, dropping them from 30 feet onto an unyielding concrete surface and engulfing them in a jet fuel fire at 1,475 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes. The containers withstood all the tests intact.

Sandia evaluated a possible terrorist attack by detonating a weapon 30 times more powerful than a shoulder-fired, anti-tank missile that was attached to the side of a shipping container. The weapon made only a quarter-inch hole, which the NRC estimates would release about one-third of an ounce of radioactive material, and a minute amount of radiation that would pose no risk beyond the immediate vicinity and would be easy to clean up. (Reactor fuel is formed into ceramic pellets, about the size of pencil erasers, which cannot leak, evaporate or burn.)

However, for such a scenario to occur outside of a lab, a terrorist first would have to obtain such a weapon, locate a shipment, take a position concealed from security escorts and fire the weapon perfectly into the side of a shipping container to achieve even the mild results of the Sandia test. The chances of success are extremely small.

Myth: The repository will not enhance national security.

Fact: Storing the nation’s nuclear waste 1,000 feet underground on a remote federal facility is more secure than storing it above ground at more than 100 commercial locations. Today, nuclear waste is stored at 131 temporary sites in 39 states, including 66 operating nuclear power plants.

Nuclear power plants continue to produce used nuclear fuel, and storage space is limited. Moving as much of the material as possible to a remote central location as expeditiously as possible improves security by reducing the need for the construction of additional aboveground facilities at these locations. Also, these sites include 14 closed reactors and several defense facilities, where temporary security precautions must be maintained indefinitely only because there is no federal repository for used nuclear fuel.

The repository will be 90 miles north of Las Vegas on the Nevada Test Site, where more than 800 nuclear weapons tests were conducted during the Cold War. The Nellis Air Force Range surrounds the site on three sides—the airspace above it is restricted—and the Nevada Test Site is very heavily guarded.

At temporary sites, used nuclear fuel is safely stored above ground in concrete containers or in water-filled stainless steel and concrete vaults. At Yucca Mountain, used nuclear fuel will be placed 1,000 feet underground, providing even higher levels of protection. Security at the federal repository will exceed even the most stringent security measures of the aboveground sites.