Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
stored “temporarily” at 130 nuclear power plants and military instal-
lations.
So far, about $8 billion has been spent studying Yucca Mountain in
the more than twenty years since the project was started under President
Ronald Reagan. But in March 2009, President Obama cut off funding
for the Yucca Mountain repository, fulfi lling a campaign promise to shut
the site down. The president is not a fan of increasing the nation's reli-
ance on nuclear power, and Nevada is no longer powerless in the nation's
capital. Harry Reid (D-Nevada) is the current Senate majority leader and
objects to placing the radioactive fuel rods in his state. Whether the
planned storage site is permanently dead or might be resurrected under
a future administration is not clear.
Should There Be a Global Nuclear Waste Repository?
The United States is not alone in its search for a suitable million-year
resting place for its high-level radioactive nuclear waste. As of 2010,
none of the world's nuclear power nations has settled on a location and
built a repository for their high-level waste. But a potential savior arrived
in 2001: President Putin of Russia offered an area in a remote and
sparsely settled area near Krasnoyarsk in south-central Siberia as a world
repository.
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Russia has immense nuclear experience and technical know-
how, plenty of sparsely populated territory, and a government quite
willing to negotiate terms for the acceptance of the world's more than
200,000 tons of waste. Experts estimate that the amount of spent nuclear
fuel increases by about 5 percent a year.
Nevertheless, many nations have serious concerns. Given Moscow's
notoriously poor record on the management of nuclear materials over
the past fi ve decades, the extensive and continuing nuclear contamination
of Russian territory, a poor security record in controlling access to
nuclear materials since the collapse of the USSR, continuing secrecy and
corruption within the nuclear sector, and a tendency to ignore or squash
unwanted public opinions in Putin's ever-more centralized Russia, the
international community has thus far not taken up the offer.
Even after a decade of international efforts to promote better security,
nuclear sites in Russia continue to be plagued by severe security short-
comings that would not be tolerated in Western European countries:
security alarms routinely ignored or deactivated, doors left open and
unguarded, fences in need of repair, widespread corruption and account-
ing irregularities, and, most alarming of all, rampant theft of valuable
