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Per Peterson on Yucca Mountain's Storage Capacity

By Eric McErlain
Following up on a post we did last week about Yucca Mountain's storage capacity, Per Peterson, an engineering professor at UC-Berkeley, wanted to clarify his comments that appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal:
I saw the blog today on the EPRI study on Yucca Mountain's technical capacity. The quote from my longer email to Steve Tetreault, which appeared in the Las Vegas Review Journal, is being misinterpreted. I agree with John Kessler at EPRI that the performance-based capacity limit for Yucca Mountain is much larger than the statutory limit, likely substantially above 200,000 metric tons. But the science and technology base for an expanded repository design is clearly not yet in place, and it is important that DOE proceed on its current schedule to submit a license application based on its current design.

But I call this a "baseline" design, because it can then provide a starting point for subsequent license amendments to implement improvements to increase capacity, reduce cost, and adapt the repository to accept advanced waste forms from reprocessing that may be performed in the longer term.

The political motivations for the original 1982 capacity cap of 70,000 metric tons of heavy metal no longer hold. As for other important environmental issues such as sulfur emissions, the correct and modern approach to meet environmental goals is set performance requirements, but not prescribe the technology used to meet these requirements. The new 1-million-year EPA safety standard for Yucca Mountain is far more rigorous than anything EPA requires for chemicals, and thus it clearly provides sufficient protection for public health and safety. We want to have improved repository science and technology, advanced fuel designs for existing reactors, and reprocessing and recycle compete on an equal playing field to meet a performance-based standard for Yucca Mountain. Removing the 70,000 MT cap will create the incentives to do this.

Best regards,

Per Peterson
Thanks for the clarification.

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