Tunnel vision: there are perhaps safer alternatives for burying dangerous spent fuel than Yucca mountain in Nevada Bryan Chan/Getty

The Trump administration last month revived controversial plans to bury the US’s growing stockpile of highly radioactive spent fuel from nuclear power plants and weapons factories in tunnels dug into Yucca mountain in Nevada.

But, with local opposition to the plan axed by President Obama undimmed, scientists at the Department of Energy are already hedging their bets.

They are pursuing an alternative scheme to drop the hot radioactive waste down hundreds of deep shafts across the US, where it can mix with molten granite in the Earth’s crust. Next month, they are expected to announce the site for the first test drilling.


The US currently has some 79,000 tonnes of spent fuel in at least 76 power-station cooling ponds and secure dry stores across the country. Another 2000 tonnes are added each year. The stores contain an estimated 444,000 petabecquerels of radioactivity, which is some 50 times more than released from all atmospheric nuclear weapons tests.

“US spent fuel pools are densely packed and at severe risk of a fuel fire in the event of an earthquake or terrorist attack that drained cooling water from the pools,” says Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington DC.

Dry air-cooled stores are safer. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says such stores could act as a stopgap for up to 160 years. But all agree that geological burial is eventually needed for waste that will be dangerous for tens of thousands of years. The question is where?

Desert fuel dump

Yucca Mountain, which is part of the former atomic weapons testing grounds in the Nevada desert near Las Vegas, has for 30 years been earmarked as the sole burial ground for spent fuel, the most dangerous radioactive waste. A tunnel was dug 500 metres into the mountain in the early 1990s.

The plan was to start taking spent fuel in 1998. But local opposition blocked the plan, and some geologists questioned its safety, warning of the risks of local volcanoes erupting magma into the storage tunnels and blasting radioactivity to the surface.

President Obama effectively abandoned the $100-billion project in 2010 by pulling funding for the licensing process. But he failed to find a replacement site, and Washington is already liable for an estimated $30 billion to compensate power companies for its failure to deliver a final burial ground for their waste fuel.

Last month, President Trump asked Congress to approve $120 million to resume licensing for Yucca Mountain. But the state’s governor and senators vowed to continue blocking the plan.

Quietly, since 2010 the Department of Energy (DOE) has established an alternative disposal route. The idea is to bury the spent fuel in hundreds of narrow shafts drilled 5 kilometres down into solid granite.

Up to 40 per cent of the US might have suitable bedrock, but the technique has still to be tested. In December, the DOE selected four companies to find somewhere with the right geology and local support for test drilling.

And last month, at a conference in Phoenix, Arizona, Tim Gunter, the DOE’s head of spent fuel management said he expected to announce a test site in May. One site being discussed is in granite bedrock beneath Haakon County in South Dakota. Others are in Texas and New Mexico.

Fergus Gibb of the University of Sheffield, UK, who first came up with the idea 15 years ago, says the radioactive waste would generate so much heat it would melt the surrounding rock and then slowly solidify into a ”granite coffin”. Yucca may soon be yesterday’s news.

Read more: Radioactive waste dogs Germany despite abandoning nuclear power; Shocking state of world’s riskiest nuclear waste site