The proposal for a national nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain is back in the news, as the Department of Energy moves forward with plans, people turn their attention to nuclear power as an alternative to increasingly expensive oil, and a proposal to make Nevada the second contest of the 2008 Democratic presidential primary gains steam. I don’t have a strong view about the substantive merits of centralized versus dispersed storage of nuclear waste, or the suitability of the Yucca Mountain site on engineering grounds. What I do have an opinion on is whether the current approach to establishing a centralized repository at that site is a good one.
To some degree, the dispute over Yucca Mountain is a technical dispute over what the real level of risk is. But it also goes deeper, so that purely technical debate about milirems and geological stability will not resolve the issue. The deeper dispute arises from the fact that there are two ways of looking at what makes a risk acceptable, which I’ll call the “economic paradigm” and the “social paradigm.” Each paradigm can be treated as a descriptive theory (how actual people actually do think about risks) or as a normative theory (how people should think about risks).
The economic paradigm says that the acceptability of a risk is entirely a function of its (percieved) level of harm. In this way of thinking there are some levels of risk that are de minimis — so unlikely, and/or of such small magnitude, that they effectively don’t count. For risks above the de minimis level, we can apply some sort of cost-benefit criterion, so that for a given level of benefit, we would put up with a certain level of risk. There is much room for debate about how the de minimis level and the exchange rate between risks and benefits should be
Proponents of Yucca Mountain typically work within the economic paradigm. Their primary arguments focus on establishing that the harms from the waste repository fall below the de minimis level. Secondarily, they point to benenfits — either to society at large, or specifically to those who will bear the risk — that outweigh the risk.
The social paradigm doesn’t deny that the level of harm plays a role in shaping risk acceptability. But it points out that social factors — the why and how of imposing and mitigating risks — can play as large, or even larger, of a role. An unfair risk can be just as unacceptable as a harmful risk. Research on risk perception consistently shows that if a risk is imposed through a democratic, participatory process in which the affected people have a say, people will accept a certain level of risk — but the same risky project would be greeted with insatiable howls of outrage if it was implemented through the “DAD” (“Decide, Announce, Defend”) approach. Think, as an analogy, of the way you might be angry if your housemate just went and used some of your milk, even though you would gladly have given them that same milk if they had asked permission first.
Opponents of Yucca Mountain are thinking in the social paradigm. In one sense, putting all of the country’s waste in one state seems intrinsically unfair — why should Nevadans have to bear the risks (however small they may be) for the rest of the country’s energy choices? This prima facie distributional unfairness can, however, be overcome through a properly democratic approach to decision-making. If the people of Nevada were to feel that they had been given a real say in how the nation’s nuclear waste would be handled, and that Yucca Mountain was not a foregone conclusion, they would be much more likely to support Yucca Mountain. And if they still said “no thanks,” such a participatory process would be able to identify a solution that would be acceptable to whoever ended up living next to the waste. (There is an excellent case study of how this all can work out based on a landfill siting process in Canton Aargau, Switzerland*.) Further, there are concerns about politically motivated intervention in the supposedly benevolent dictatorship of the bureaucrats and scientists who chose the current plan — notably Congress’s 1987 order to the DOE to only consider the feasibility of Yucca Mountain.
Because the prevailing institutions accept only economic-paradigm arguments, people who oppose risks for social reasons will often have to recast their arguments in economic terms, creating a frustrating proxy battle. But social-paradigmers’ larger assessments of the harms are not just a strategic move — there’s understandable spillover between knowledge of the fairness of a process, and skepticism about the data on the harms. There’s enough uncertainty in technical risk assessment that it’s quite reasonable to be concerned that if someone is proposing to impose a risk in an unfair way, they may have (consciously or unconsciously) resolved those uncertainties in ways that make the outcome more favorable to them, and hence unfavorable to the people who will have to directly bear the risk.
So to try to defend the project with strictly economic paradigm arguments miss the point. Even if you believe that the economic paradigm is normatively correct, your arguments will fall on deaf ears unless you can either win Nevadans over to that paradigm first, or satisfy their fairness concerns. Resolving the question of fairness is critical. At sites across the country, nuclear waste sits in temporary storage, produced over the past few decades pursuant to the DOE’s now-broken promise that it would find an acceptable place to permanently store it.
* Full disclosure: One of the authors, Tom Webler, is one of my bosses on a different research project.
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I think it’s very true the way you break down the two paradigms.
OK, I will admit up front to a major bias, I am Canadian and so health care is (in my world view) a birthright of any civilized nation.
Having said that, my immediate gut reaction upon reading about any proposal involving the storage of nuclear waste is: this is s a country that cannot even reliably assure their poorest citizens that their safety will be safeguarded against the flu, salmonella poisoning or plain old broken bones. How in the hell can they be trusted to make decisions regarding the safety of it’s citizens agains the hazards of nuclear waste?
I really liked the analysis in this post.
I do wonder, however, what a “fair” procedure would look like. Fairness would require, I think, that Nevadans have a greater say in the matter than the rest of the country. But how would that be done with a national issue?
Nice post; I think it’s important to consider the use of nuclear power at least until other power sources (solar, wind, etc.) are available.
Just a technical point…not that you don’t know this, but the math teacher in me can’t let it escape:
I would just add “…and the best estimate of the probability that said level of harm will actually come to pass”.
A lot of people hate this one and that includes people living on the travel route for this nuclear waste which will be stored there. Trains carrying it will travel through my city’s downtown and poorest neighborhoods. If there is an accident, there will be no time to evacuate(I think it’s 90 seconds within a mile, 10 minutes within 3)
It also goes through an area of the mountains where there’s been a lot derailments and that’s near a population of people.
So there are lots of safety issues here.
Very nice post; there’s a lot here to discuss. Note, too, that this analysis of the social aspects of risk perceptions is not limited to Yucca Mountain. It can be applied to any form of development that is presumptively controversial or unwanted in a local community: oil refineries, McMansion developments, halfway houses, homeless shelters.
I was disappointed in Siobhan’s cheap and irrelevant shots against the USA. He asks, “How in the hell can they be trusted to make decisions regarding the safety of it’s citizens agains the hazards of nuclear waste?”
The obvious answer is that even if they “can’t be trusted” by others’ standards, the USA is still the one to make the decisions about nuclear waste disposal within its borders. Like it or not we are stuck with it.
And just out of curiosity, what country is more trustworthy? Do you have greater faith in the French? I just perused the web site for ANDRA, the agency responsible for nuclear waste disposal in France.
http://www.andra.fr/interne.php3?id_rubrique=110
And if someone can show me that the French are doing a better job, I am all ears. So far as I could tell they have no plan for long-term disposal of high-level wastes either. It’s a mess everywhere and the problem is inherent in the time frames of nuclear waste which requires thinking ahead for thousands of years, obviously an impossible task. It has little to do with the stupidity of Americans.
•••
Personally I am and have been very much against nuclear power because of the issues of waste disposal particularly and nothing I have read here or anywhere convinces me that there is a free lunch. But this article about French outlooks
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/french.html
is food for thought.
As a person who actually once walked on metal gratings suspended over aging nuclear rod bundles at one of the K-Basins at Hanford . . . (I am not making this up. Oh, and no, it no longer glows. No I didn’t need to suit up. )
Before I start, I need to say: I have no idea whether, on the balance, we should store everything at Yucca mountain. I can only give my opinion on some isolated questions. The full issue is so complex that gathering information to support an informed opinion overall is nearly impossible. I also need to say Stentor wrote a very nice post, but I’m going to criticize the content of a link. (No reflection on Stentor linking it. It’s just that having worked at a DOE national lab, something bugs me about the article.)
Ok, small bit: From an engineering point of view, compared to current storage practices, Yucca mountain is an absolutely terrific site. Yucca beats the heck out of leaving aging radioactive waste in tanks and basis at Hanford, Savannah River and all the other places we, as a nation, have created and stored the waste. (I can’t comment on the risks during transportation. That’s not my area and I know nothing about how they plan to transport the stuff or the probability off accidents. )
Should the waste should go to Yucca mountain? I don’t know. I’d tend to say, yes it should. However, I simply don’t know anywhere near enough to balance the risks and benefits of transporting waste, processing it and ultimately storing the waste in Yucca mountain.
Still, while I don’t know if waste should be stored in Yucca mountain, I was a bit disappointed in the content of the article Stentor linked. (Though not in Stentor for linking it.)
This article — like many more I’ve read– focuses on waste from commercial nuclear reactors producing power. The problem with that focus? We Americans have loads and load and loads of waste from former weapons production activities.
You may ask why this disticntion is important? Well, first, with focusing on the commercial nuclear slant makes those assessing fairness think the intention is to force Nevada to store the waste created to fill the commercial energy needs of consumers in “state X”. It causes people to ask questions like this:
Second, failing to mention the weapons related waste makes it sound like the waste is sort of uniformly spread around the rest of the states. That’s simply not true. Google Hanford Site, Savannah River, Oak Ridge, Rocky Flats. That’s where the bulk of the weapons waste is. In contrast, there are small bits of waste in other states.
If we focus on the weapons waste, we see this is “USA” waste, created at the Federal level. Creating the weapons was hazardous. They were created for the country as a whole– not for idividual states. Portions of states were cordoned off not to benefit the state but to benefit the country. (BTW, during WWII, the Umitilla Indians and Yakima Indians were displaced from their land in WA state to create the weapons facilities. They obviously can’t return while the Hanford site in WA remains a waste depository.)
So in a sense, Nevada is being asked to take its turn carrying a federal burden that has been carried by a few other states for a long time. We’ve already concentrated this particular risk on a few states and communities who are carrying the burden for the country as a whole.
Nuclear Energy is one of the most misrepresented forms of technology known. If Nuclear Energy were a person I would call it an almost continuous and universal case of character assasination. The regulatory industry is filled with people who consider it ther mission to kill nuclear poweer. Nuclear energy is Cheap (before excess regulation) clean and quiet. Lets study the idea of breeder reactors to recycle nuclear waste. With Breeder reactors you can bring down (through Transmutating the elements) the average half lives of the material to under 500 years. In many cases under a 100 years. Yucca mountain is designed for unimaginably long toxic disposal. Designing a storage repository for highly Toxic material that will be toxic for the next two million years is rediculous. The technology is ever changing and the political climate is too. Seriously attempting to debate two million year storage can be seen as a scare tactic. If there is a way for alteranate disposal lets make use of it.
Steve,
Breeder reactors could be useful to reduce the amount of waste and half life of waste created during commercial power generation. Unfortunately, that alone would not eliminate our need for storing waste we already have.
The waste we currently have stored at Hanford, Savannah River, Oak Ridge and other former weapons productions facilities is not stored in a form that can be used in a breeder reactor. While unfortunate, we either need to put this stuff on a rocket and vault it into outerspace or store this stuff for an unimaginably long time. ( I have been to meetings where the pros and cons of sending it to outerspace has been discussed. )
Lucia:
Thanks for pointing that out. I was remiss in not accounting for weapons grade nuclear material. And yes there are ways of dealing with that also but as you said it is different. It all takes money and commitment and an ability to counter some of the NIMBY effect.
Steve
Yes those NIMBY housewives in tennis shoes are so enormously powerful that they can stop massive governmental agencies and multi-national behomeths (GE is/was very big in nuclear power) with billions of dollars at stake by scare-talk. I wish it were so.
Nuclear power has failed so far in the USA because of its own internal contradictions…principally its inability to solve the nuclear waste storage issue. (Interestingly enough, as I have been googling on the subject, neither have the Frnech solved the waste problem — but they have more faith in technology so they plunge blithely ahead.)
Seattle,
The French haven’t solved the waste problem with nuclear power, but they have solved the most dangerous and problematic problem–what to do with high-level waste (spent fuel rods). The problem is that the lower-level waste will break down fairly fast (in the hundreds of years), while the higher-level waste contains plutonium and will not break down for hundreds of millenia. The French answer is to re-process spent fuel rods, and separate out the plutonium, which can then be re-used as fuel. Thus, the French don’t have to deal with waste of as high a level as the US.
Steve,
Wow Steve! The way that’s worded, it sounds like given a big enough budget, you know of ways to deal with the waste. Bearing in mind that we were discussing dealing with it without having to store it for thousands of years, could you suggest some ways of dealing with this weapons waste?
I already mentioned putting it on a rocket and vaulting it to outerspace! You’re turn now.
Lucia:
Why, we could ship it to France, of course.
Duh.
.
.
(yes, that was a joke)
Well heres a list. Pick it apart as you wish I enjoy intellegent debate.
One. Subduction Zones.
Take the waste and bury it in the ocean bed in places where the continental plate is subducting. This will carry the waste deep into the mantle and melt it in with the mantle rock having the added bonus of diluting the radioactive material with the rock of the mantle.
Two. Dilution:
The stuff came out of the ground as ore. Dilute it and mix it with ordianry material to such a low concentration that it will be similar to background radiation. (Not the best I know)
Three. Nuke built gas storage.
The Russians used Nuclear bombs to create underground natural gas storage. It is an idea. But I do agree before pointed out that even were one to whole heartedly go with this it wouldn’t do more than make a dent in stockpiles.
Four (Really Un-PC & Un-Green)…. Project Orion
Quick Quiz, what would weigh more than an Aircraft Carrier, Use the biggest shock absorbers in history and go in miles per second rather than miles per hour?
Project Orion. Concieved in the 50’s to get really massive amounts of stuff into space all at once. A little scary and highly unlikely in this hyper safe, don’t hurt the animals age. But it is a solution and probably wouldn’t do as much damage to the environment as some would initially fear. (what are the current rad counts of Bikini Atol?)
Five Status quo
Do nothing much more than we are doing now. A little more guarding, a slow motion nibbling form of cleanup for the next however many years. But mostly just nothing and hope nothing worse happens than has already happened which is not much but you are whistling past the graveyard and betting with a busted flush.
Anyway those are some. Not great but they are ideas.
Steved, you counted to 5, but I read only two solutions that meet the criteria for this “game”. You were explaining that we shouldn’t need to store stuff for ages and ages, and I’d already suggested vaulting into space. I challenged to to suggest additonal ones that don’t involve nearly endless storage and aren’t vaulting into space!
One. Subduction Zones. (A qualifying idea.)
I always tended to like this suggestion when made at meetings. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem popular with the international community who is under the impression the US doesn’t own the deep oceans. It takes more than money to convince them. (Go figure.)
Two. Dilution: (A qualifying idea.)
“The solution to pollution is dilution?” Classic solution that has been tried and failed with many other forms of pollution. We generally try to get nature to do our dilution for us. Unfortunately, nature doesn’t always dilute quickly enough– people, animal or plants are exposed to toxic quantities.
Equally unfortunately, engineering a solution to speed the solution that doesn’t put people in danger prior to achieving the dilution is very difficult. (It also requires massive amounts of mixing with raw materials before spreading!)
(Doesn’t qualify for the challenge. )
Yucca mountain is already an underground storage facility. You were grumbling we shouldn’t need long term storage when we got onto the issue of storing the weapons waste.
(Doesn’t qualify for the challenge. )
I already suggested propelling into outerspace. There are major safety difficulties with this idea. Hurling it instead of strapping it to rockets doesn’t solve the problems. I’m not sure why you think the fact that Bikini Atol has high rad counts means it’s ok to risk having large chunks break off during said hurling and drop on other places like– oh say Bismark, ND?
Um, isn’t using subduction zones a “store for a very long time” solution (subduction isn’t exactly a fast process: ~10 cm/year = 1km/10,000 years = 100 km/1 million years = minimum time for storage facility to move from surface of ocean bed to magma zone), and one that has ridiculously huge storage problems, like corrosion in water of the containers being a significant issue and getting vast quantities of junk off shore and deep under water without ever spilling any in a storm (probably a much more serious risk than train transportation of hardened containers of hardened materials), oh and storage facility rupturing and releasing plumes when it isn’t all that deeply buried due to the massive massive pressure. Heat plus water plus salt was what nixed the salt domes as a potential storage site, but deep under sea seems like a good idea instead? Color me puzzled.
Oh, and radioactive volcanoes sounds like a fun possibility too (although, since it will take a million years to get to the melted stage, probably irrelevant, but if we pretend that we are melting the stuff much earlier (maybe we are burying the stuff in many km deep holes under the ocean that we are digging with what technology?) then they become relevant). Imagine the 1980 Mount Saint Helens eruption, but with Mount Saint Helens having incorporated the majority of the US high level radioactive waste supply. Very exciting.
Charles,
I think of subduction as “not storing” because it’s dumping! When I said “go figure” I was beign satirical.
The potential hazards are not insignificant, and many of these would need to occur in international waters.
The relative risk of sea transportation and ground transportation is an issue that has been studied– though not by me. However, I’m pretty sure you are correct that transportation on surface ships is much more hazardous than transportation on trains or even trucks. Handling contaminated material just off shore is also a problem– particularly since shorelines tend to be heavily populated and polluted water is much more difficult to cordon off isolate than polluted land.
If things do go as planned, you get to the subduction layer and drop the waste in correctly, corrosion *will* happen. The idea is it wouldn’t matter because — at least when I heard advocates discuss this idea– the plan was to vitrify the high level waste into glass logs, then put the logs in containers, then ship them out. Radioactivity doesn’t leak or leach from vitrified logs.
So, (I think) according to “the plan” container corrosion is a “non-problem”.
Of course, it’s difficult to discuss all the hazards associated with all details of the subduction idea precisely because it’s not a plan. It’s just a really cool sounding idea to present on animation of ideas. (Ever notice how fast these subduction layers move in animation? Faster than luggage handling converyer belts! )
I tend to lean toward Yucca mountain storage because it’s so much less wretched than the status quo storage methods. I also entirely understand why people in Nevada would fight to stop the project, and I’d never go so far as to say the project is “fair” to people who live in Nevada or that the project is absolutely safe and will remain so for 2000 years. (Heck, I don’t think Seattle is absolutely safe for the next 2000 years. One of these days Ranier is going to blow!)
As one who lives close to the proposed site, I am not happy about it. and as such, we’ve just started a site at http://www.N2YM.com or http://www.No2YuccaMountain.com.
The site is in the begining stages BUT we welcome comments. The free update box is posted but not yet operational, that should change later this week. In the mean time you can contact us at BruceFeher@37com until the email for the site is set.
8/1/06
There is no safety, short of the grave.
But we can be realistic about things, too. Nuclear waste is dangerous. It’s radioactive. Radioactivity is like reality TV; harmless in small doses, but deadly to life in mass quantities.
Which means that to safely dispose of it, you reduce the quantities. Pick out 50,000 acres of scrub in west Texas somewhere. Grind up the radioactive waste into particles the size of sand, and mix the particles with sand at ten thousand to one. Spread it over 50,000 acres. You now have a patch of land where you wouldn’t particularly want to site a daycare, but which is basically harmless.
Yucca Mountain seems to be the opposite approach – put all the eggs in one basket, and then take great care of the basket. It’s not a bad philosophy when it comes to finance, but when lives are at stake it’s a bit riskier. Better to share the risk among twenty square miles than to create a point source of death.
My .02.
Actually, the reason Yucca mountain is under consideration is it is thought that it would be safe even if we stopped watching it. However, it needs to be maintained and watched during operations– meaning while filling with waste.
Of course, the fact that ‘it is thought’ doesn’t mean those who think it must be correct. But analyses are done to try to figure out if that’s true, and policy makers are supposed to only implement the plan if they believe it to be true.
Actually one of the best sbduction Zones is the Marianas Trench East of Guam. If you check there are very few problems with this site -vs- other sites. The trench is within our resouce rights limit and is the deepest trenchs in the world. It is also a place difficult to visit for any reason and would therefore most likely be left alone until subducted
Check this link:
http://ns.gov.gu/geography.html
The length of the trench makes picking multiple spots to dilute the effect ideal.
There’s apparently a new technique for dealing with waste that seems promising.
http://www.whatsnextnetwork.com/technology/index.php/2006/07/31/new_technique_renders_nuclear_waste_harm
It reduces the half life of waste by a factor of one hundred.
Siobhan, if the government was trying to protect the poor among us from salmonella, the flu and broken bones, then your analogy might hold. But, since the government isn’t trying to do that (and the agencies that would be responsible are different from the ones that handle regulation of nuclear waste), it’s failure to do so doesn’t indicate how good of a job it would do handling nuclear waste.
The last I remember happening with Yucca Mountain was that some e-mails from USGS employees discussed falsifying some of the modeling data DOE needed for the NRC license application. I think this was in Spring 2005.
The thing is, there are so many holes in the approval process even among the various government agencies that it’s no wonder the whole process feels massively unfair – just a few of the ones that stick out in my memory include: 1) the EPA ground water standard for radiation should prevent the facility from being built at Yucca Mountain, but the government has managed to find a way around that. 2) A draft DOE site characterization report on Yucca Mountain revealed collaboration with the nuclear power industry to promote the project, yet an investigation revealed no substantial conflict of interest (yeah, right). 3) An estimated 96,000 shipments will be required to get all of the waste to Yucca Mountain, which increases the odds for an accident dramatically, and I’m pretty sure DOE wants to send all of the shipments by rail, so how hard would it be to figure out the transportation routes and help the accident rate increase some? 4) The corrosion issue for the transportation casks and the storage casks won’t go away, since gold and lead are probably the only materials that would last 10,000 years, to the best of my limited knowledge on the subject.
James Gibbons, a member of the Nevada Congressional delegation at the time (I don’t know if he is still in office), said in 2001 or 2002 that Nevada would almost certainly lose in its efforts to find a different site for the repository because of NIMBY politics – lawmakers from other states are sympathetic but relieved the project will not be in their states. I think that’s really the bottom line.
UPDATE:
The DC Circuit (A court of the US Appellate court system, which system is one level down from the U.S. Supreme Court) has just released a ruling on Yucca Mountain. Nevada had, in essence, challenged some of the procedures by which Yucca was found to be an acceptable site. Nevada appears to have lost the appeal.
I haven’t finished reading it yet. But for those who wish to do so, here is the direct link to the opinion.
(the opinion was released on August 8)