That's good news for PFS, which estimates that its power plants can save hundreds of millions of dollars a year in storage costs by dumping their waste in Skull Valley. The project will allow us to continue to operate nuclear power plants, which produce 20 percent of our electrical supply, and which do not produce carbon-based greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, the beleaguered citizen watchdog groups that keep tabs on the nuclear industry are appalled by the prospect that shipments of spent fuel rods could soon start rolling through as many as 43 states on their way to Skull Valley, where they would be stored for decades and then moved again. But the risk to the general public is immeasurably greater when you talk about putting it on the highways and roads and taking it to a place where the workforce will be less well trained than at the plants themselves.
Catastrophic things can happen from accidents during transportation and handling.
If and when Yucca Mountain is approved, it will be able to contain a maximum of 70,000 metric tons of spent fuel rods, which means that if the United States continues to consume nuclear power at the present rate, by 2035 there will be an additional 30,000 metric tons of high-level radioactive waste to be dealt with. Similarly, the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, the geological repository for military nuclear waste near Carlsbad, New Mexico, has room to hold only 2 percent of the weapons-related waste that now exists. According to Hancock and others, handling the rest of these combined materials will thus require the establishment of at least five additional nuclear graveyards in places like Skull Valley. This broader perspective really doesn't concern Leon Bear, who is tenaciously clinging to his vision of staging a Goshute renaissance on a springboard of nuclear trash. It's a dream based on a tortured form of logic, but it is logic nonetheless.