When Entergy Nuclear shut down Vermont Yankee on Dec. 29, 2014, many citizens of the Upper Valley probably breathed sighs of relief. But cleaning up shuttered nuclear plants is almost as complicated as health care, and Entergy recently announced that the decommissioning of Vermont Yankee might be finished by 2053, and might cost $1.24 billion.
Both figures are probably optimistic. High-level radioactive waste in the spent fuel rods is likely to be stored at the Vermont Yankee site for an indefinite future. That Vermont will remain host to Yankee’s radioactive refuse for lack of a national nuclear waste repository is a depressing consequence of the plant’s energy production and our political failure to deal with its aftermath.
One upside of the decommissioning story is this: it may be an unusual opportunity for President Trump to do something valuable while continuing his efforts to obliterate everything his predecessor accomplished. Reversing a ruling by the Obama administration, Trump proposed in March to spend $120 million to restart a licensing review for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada. That could be a very good thing, given the nationwide distribution of high-level radioactive waste.
My interest in nuclear waste began in 1972, when I first saw the Trojan Nuclear Plant under construction next to the Columbia River in Oregon. It seemed out of place in the environmentally conscious state where I was raised, and by 1980 I began to write about it. But when the managers at Portland General Electric, the Trojan’s owner, learned I was talking with people at the plant, they made access difficult.
Things had not been going well for PGE. In 1973, two environmentalists took the company to court to prevent them from building the seven additional nuclear reactors they were planning at the time. A reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania lost its coolant in 1979, causing an accident that undermined public confidence in commercial nuclear power. And just a few days before the accident at Three Mile Island, Hollywood released a film, China Syndrome with Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas, that portrayed the nuclear industry as brutally irresponsible. To make things worse for PGE, parts of China Syndrome had been filmed in the Trojan control room.
After publishing articles about this political conflict, which The American Scholar would call “The Trojan War,” I encountered geologist Dennis O’Leary, who spent 17 years with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Yucca Mountain Project. We both were puzzled by how our country’s polarized politics has made serious public discussion of climate change impossible, and we collaborated on an essay titled Ecology and Fear: A Climate Change Debate? — hoping to foster a serious bipartisan conversation. The conservative journals we approached were not interested.
When I read about the Trump administration’s plans to put the Yucca Mountain repository back in play, I emailed O’Leary to ask what he thought of this development. As is his way, O’Leary answered with an essay, the crux of which is that $120 million for starting the licensing process will finance only the bare beginning of what needs to be done, but kick-starting the process still makes sense.
There is considerable reluctance to confront reality on nuclear waste as well as climate change, according to O’Leary. A strong NIMBY reaction has prevailed in Nevada, where Sen. Harry Reid pushed to stop the Yucca Mountain Project. The Obama administration ended the licensing process for Yucca Mountain in 2009, after 30 years of research and expenses running to $13 billion in taxpayer money.
The Yucca Mountain repository was designed to contain 70,000 metric tons of radioactive waste, including military and research waste. The U.S. now has about 78,000 metric tons of nuclear waste, and we produce about 2,000 metric tons of spent fuel each year. This should be stored securely rather than spread around the country in places like the Vermont Yankee site, inviting accidents or acts of terror that could “Chernobylize” large tracts of populated land, according to O’Leary. Even if a Yucca Mountain repository were completed and approved, we would need a second repository site as soon as possible.
Cleaning up our nuclear mess, which is as dangerous as climate change, will be very expensive. O’Leary writes: “I estimate the overall costs to come to about $500 billion to a trillion, providing two nuclear waste repositories ready for operation by 2070 at the earliest, and complete abandonment (and hopefully complete cleanup) of the nuclear power industry by end of the century. And Europe is not much better off than we are.”
Once President Trump realizes how complex and expensive this project will be, he’ll probably want to drop it. But for those of us in the Upper Valley who have been looking for a hidden gem among his many terrible proposals, this is one worth our enthusiastic support. Making safe all the sites like Vermont Yankee would do much more to protect our children than building a preposterous wall, destroying our public education system or withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement.
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.