What is the current status of the geologic repository in Yucca Mountain Nevada?

What is the current status of the geologic repository in Yucca Mountain Nevada?

On The Ground Accomplishments: Today the Yucca Mountain site has been abandoned and nothing exists but a boarded up exploratory tunnel; there are no waste disposal tunnels, receiving and handling facilities, and the waste containers and transportation casks have yet to be developed.

Is Yucca Mountain geologically active?

These issues include hydrology, inadequacy of the proposed waste package, repository design and volcanism. The Yucca site is seismically and volcanically active, porous and incapable of geologically containing the waste.

How deep is the Yucca Mountain repository?

The repository at Yucca Mountain was planned to be located about 350 m below ground surface, within a thick unsaturated zone (UZ) above the water table.

What attributes make the Yucca Mountain site a good location for the federal radioactive waste repository what attributes make it a poor location?

Sparsely populated Federal land, a low water table, with long paths to clearly identified discharge points, high ion absorption potential (including the presence of zeolite minerals), low rainfall and infiltration rates, make the Yucca Mountain site a good location for the federal radioactive waste repository.

Is Yucca Mountain on a fault line?

The site is near the Nevada town of Mercury, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Evenden, the technical division administrator at the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, said all three earthquakes and Yucca Mountain are located within the same Walker Lane fault line.

What is the environmental significance of Yucca Mountain?

The Yucca Mountain Repository is a proposed Department of Energy (DOE) site that would be the United States’ first geologic repository for the permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste.

What features about Yucca Mountain make it particularly suitable for nuclear waste disposal?

One of the sites that have dominated the search for geological disposal sites is the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository in Nevada (Rebak, 2008). Yucca Mountain was found suitable because it is located in a desert location and surrounded by federal land away from population centers.

Who runs Yucca Mountain?

The Yucca Mountain repository would be a Department of Energy facility, however, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses the site and the waste packages used in transportation.

What does Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository mean?

What is the Yucca Mountain repository? The Yucca Mountain repository is the proposed spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level radioactive waste (HLW) repository where both types of radioactive waste could be disposed. If constructed, it would use a tunnel complex approximately 1000 feet below the top of Yucca Mountain and about 1000 feet above the aquifer underlying the repository.

Why is Yucca Mountain not being used?

The state’s official position is that Yucca Mountain is a singularly bad site to house the nation’s high-level nuclear waste and spent nuclear fuel for several reasons: GEOLOGY and LOCATION: There are many unresolved scientific issues relative to the suitability of the Yucca Mountain site. These issues include hydrology, inadequacy of the proposed waste package, repository design and volcanism.

Why was Yucca Mountain cancelled?

a Yucca Mountain repository could not accommodate all the waste projected to be produced, it is inaccurate to characterize the project as a proposal for nuclear waste consolidation. Problems with the Yucca Mountain Project

How to pronounce Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository?

GEOLOGY and LOCATION: There are many unresolved scientific issues relative to the suitability of the Yucca Mountain site.

  • LIMITED SPACE: Yucca isn’t big enough to store all of the nation’s nuclear waste.
  • TRANSPORTATION. : Transporting waste to Yucca Mountain puts the American public at risk.