Whatever else one thinks of Yucca Mountain, the view from on top is breathtaking: To the west, you can spot Mount Whitney, the highest point in the continental U.S.; to the south, Death Valley, the nation's lowest point; and in between, and all around, the sweeping vista of the Amargosa Valley, peppered with wild sage, blackbrush, and a sprinkling of volcanic cinder cones. If Yucca Mountain had not been designated as a dumpsite for radioactive waste in 1987, it might easily have become a scenic overlook on the long drive between Tonopah and Las Vegas.
Instead, gazing out from the summit today, it is difficult to focus on anything but those cinder cones. Within a few miles of the mountain's base, there are at least seven of these small volcanoes, two of which have erupted during the past 10,000 years - precisely the period of time that the Yucca Mountain repository is supposed to last. Indeed, Yucca Mountain itself is nothing more than a 1200-foot pile of volcanic debris, a somewhat unsettling detail that the project's promoters have not exactly emphasized. How scientists can guarantee that these volcanoes, which fluctuate between active and dormant status over geologic time, will not erupt again at any time in the next 10,000 years, is a question very much in need of an answer.
It was also the question that seemed to be on President Barack Obama's mind early last year, as he canceled funding for the nuclear repository and shuttered the site indefinitely. "Yucca Mountain," Senator Harry Reid of Nevada commented with a grin, "is gone."
Yet if Obama's decision to close Yucca Mountain seemed like a victory for the environment, it may have been just the opposite. Although the issues at Yucca are serious and several - including those cinder cones, a nearby seismic fault, and the gradual creep of water through the mountain - the decision to cancel the repository may be even riskier still.
The unfortunate reality is that for nuclear waste, as the President likes to say, there are no easy answers. Today, Yucca Mountain is one of only two options for the waste that are even under consideration; and the other - the one endorsed by Obama and Reid - is to do nothing at all, leaving the waste where it currently sits, scattered among 121 locations in 39 states, beside water sources like the Hudson River, and in many cases, just a few miles from population centers like Manhattan and Chicago. Whereas the repository at Yucca is more than a thousand feet underground, deep in the Nevada desert, in a honeycomb of tunnels more than five miles long, the current facilities for storing the nation's 132 million pounds of radioactive garbage are almost all on the grounds of private energy companies, and in containers that were intended to be temporary - either concrete casks stored outside nuclear reactors, or submerged inside the plants under relatively shallow pools of water. I have stood at the edge of one of these spent-fuel pools, looking down at the iridescent glow of radioactive rods, knowing that if the water were to drain accidentally, I would be exposed to a radiation dose equivalent to that on the ground in Hiroshima just after the blast. If Yucca Mountain is an imperfect solution to the nation's nuclear waste crisis, the current arrangement is no solution at all.
Yet finding a solution for our radioactive waste is a matter of rising urgency. Since the dawn of the atomic age, the federal government has promised Americans that the refuse from nuclear plants would be safeguarded by a rigorous government program. That's because nuclear waste is staggeringly lethal - far more volatile than raw uranium (a chunk of which I keep on my desk) or even fresh nuclear fuel, which is only 3% pure. Brimming with nuclear byproducts like cesium, strontium, and plutonium, the apt comparison is between spent nuclear fuel and a nuclear weapon. In fact, spent fuel can be used to make a nuclear weapon. Yet after decades of working to develop a better place to house these lethal chemicals, at a cost of more than $13 billion to taxpayers, the Obama administration appears ready to return to square one and leave the waste untouched while we embark on another 50-year, multi-billion-dollar quest for a new facility.
The larger debate over atomic power itself can be highly polarizing and complex, with heated opinions on both sides. For my own part, I believe that the case for nuclear plants remains strong - and that our country needs to confront the difficult choice between atomic power, with its risk of a meltdown, and coal power, with its certain doom - spewing millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air and accelerating global warming. The record for nuclear plants in the US is surprisingly strong; to date, not a single civilian life has been lost at a plant, and the 104 existing reactors provide some 20% of household electricity with virtually no carbon footprint. If these nuclear plants were phased out tomorrow, as many anti-nuclear activists propose, the only viable way to supplement their power would be with more coal - and more pollution, and more sick and dying. To an increasing number of environmentalists, the nuclear option has begun to seem, in a field of distasteful choices, slightly less distasteful than the others. But this is a calculation about which reasonable people can, and do, differ.
Still, even the most fervent critics of nuclear power should be concerned about the closure of Yucca Mountain. Regardless of whether or not we continue to use nuclear plants, the question of what to do with the existing stockpile of radioactive waste cannot be wished away. To close Yucca Mountain is an implicit decision to leave that waste in the hands of energy companies, in temporary containers, near major cities and waterways - simply because the Nevada desert may experience a seismic event at some point in the next 10,000 years. This is a trade-off that few people outside Nevada would consider wise.
Over the past year, as President Obama has allowed development of the repository to grind to a halt, it has been especially sad to watch a leader from the state of Illinois, which leads the US in nuclear production and generates more than half its electricity from nuclear plants, buckle to political pressure from Majority Leader Reid without offering any other solution to the waste crisis. At a minimum, we should be prepared to open Yucca on a conditional basis, and consolidate our waste there while we search for a more perfect solution. The notion that doing so would be risky represents a serious misunderstanding of the risk in doing nothing.