A recent New York Times article revealed that the U.S. government has paid millions of dollars to utility companies because it is unable to bury nuclear waste according to contractual agreements.
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Given that no solution to the problem of the nuclear waste is in sight, the payments will continue and are expected to add up to at least $11 billion; some have estimated it will be as much as $35 billion.
The U.S. government had planned to build a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Yucca Mountain is located in Shoshone and Paiute land and is sacred to the Shoshone.
For more than 20 years, the Shoshone and the Paiute, in alliance with scientists and environmentalists, have fought to stop the plan to store high-level nuclear waste. They are also fighting against government attempts to sell the land in order to give access to multinational corporations eager to exploit the area’s mineral resources. This struggle has taken many forms including lawsuits and direct action.
Western Shoshone territory—60 million acres in Nevada, Idaho, Utah and California—was never deeded to the U.S. government. Today, the U.S. government is using parts of the territory for nuclear weapons testing and proposed nuclear waste storage and is claiming ownership of 80 to 90 percent of the area. This means the Shoshone are unable to control what happens on their ancestral land.
By the late 1970s, the government began researching Yucca Mountain as a potential repository for nuclear waste. Since 1987 it has been the only place identified by the government to store as much as 77,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste.
Yucca Mountain repository not a solution
If the government’s plans succeed, 98 percent of all the waste from U.S. nuclear reactors will go to Yucca Mountain. However, there is already more waste now than the repository can hold. The reactor waste now sitting in pools of water around the country would fill Yucca Mountain’s tunnels and leave 15,000 canisters, or 7,500 metric tons, of radioactive waste without storage.
Even if the Yucca Mountain facility becomes operational, commercial nuclear power plants produce 2,000 tons of high-level waste per year. By the time Yucca Mountain were filled up in 2035, there would be at least 42,000 tons of newly generated waste. The estimated cost of construction and maintenance of the facility for the first 100 years of operation is $58 billion. The waste is lethal for 10,000 years and dangerous for 250,000 years.
What is wrong with storing the waste at Yucca Mountain? First of all, it is a violation of Native American sovereignty: Native people should have control over their ancestral lands.
Second, scientists are coming to understand that the mountain is not a good place to store nuclear waste. The waste will be stored in canisters and buried deep in the mountain. In theory, the mountain is so dry that the canisters will be protected against leakage and migration.
However, that is a dangerous assumption, as surface water percolates into the mountain and can carry radioactive particles into the water table. The water table supplies water to local communities and farming regions, which produce milk and other foods for the whole country.
In addition, there are fault lines and a volcano near Yucca Mountain, posing the danger that an earthquake could fracture the repository and send even more water to mix with the nuclear waste. The Shoshone are already experiencing the dangers of radiation exposure from nuclear weapons testing on their land, suffering from high rates of cancer, leukemia and other diseases.
This situation is a prime illustration of the environmental crimes of the capitalist system. The United States and its allies hypocritically attack oppressed nations for their relatively modest efforts to develop nuclear energy as a means to overcome underdevelopment. Yet the imperialists, craving more energy sources and horrendous weapons of mass destruction, have generated tons of dangerous waste.
Back in the 1980s, the capitalist government promised its cronies in the utility companies that the nuclear waste would be dealt with. Now, the government is unable to deliver on its promise and the utilities are suing, winning millions and soon to be billions of taxpayer dollars.
In the meantime, the only solution the government can come up with is to store the waste on sacred Native land, endangering the health not only of the Shoshone and Paiute peoples but also of all people in the United States.
Nuclear power has been touted as a solution to global warming because it does not create greenhouse gases, yet it is still a dangerous way to generate energy. The real solution is a planned economy in which conservation measures are implemented and development to meet human needs is carried out in an environmentally sustainable fashion.
