The Nuclear Waste Policy Act Of 1982 (NWPA)

The 20th century was the dawn of the nuclear age. With nuclear energy’s appearance on the world stage, the problem arose of how to regulate storage and disposal of the waste products. With nuclear byproduct having a half-life of 24,000 years, the need for a productive and safe plan to store the nuclear waste was vital (“Backgrounder on Radioactive...”). The United States’ response to this growing issue was the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (NWPA) was a pioneering piece of legislation, that fell short of providing a solution due to the government’s failure to uphold obligations outlined in the NWPA, including poor planning of a realistic timeline, bad decision making that burned through taxpayer dollars

Nuclear waste has a 24,000 year half-life, so finding sites that could store mass quantities of a radioactive substance was exceedingly difficult (“Nuclear Waste Policy…"). Adding to the concern that new waste material was being generated every day, was the growing application and new uses-- all without a working policy to contend with the radioactive waste material. It is estimated that by the end of 1983, almost 10,000 metric tons of fuel was stored by the reactor plants themselves, growing to an estimated 21,000 metric tons by 1991 (Martin). Keeping that in mind, that was 20 years ago, it is even larger now and continuously growing while the government still has to pay private companies to store on site instead of having a separate storage location. Nuclear waste itself has two classifications: high or low level waste (“Backgrounder on Radioactive...”). High Level waste is primarily from reactors that power electricity, while low level waste is from reactors supporting medical, and commercial uses (“Backgrounder on Radioactive...”). The special containers used to conceal the high level waste are referred to as “dry casks,” which

Clear and simple, it never made a dent in the nation’s need for a designated storage facility and now Yucca Mountain has been shut down for the last five years by orders of the Obama administration (Gentilviso). The NWPA outlines that there be a Nuclear Waste Storage Facility at Yucca Mountain for it fit the criteria, being that it must one, not leak into environment or in the vicinity of humans, and two, be simple to defend against any terrorist who may want to use the waste for harm, and thirdly, to outlast the history of civilization (“The Yucca Mountain…”). Despite those rules being outlined in the NWPA, congress decided to forgo the “science with respect to Yucca Mountain” to the power of politics back at Washington, D.C. (Sandoval, Bryan). Billions of dollars subsequently are poured into Yucca Mountain over years for research and development of facilities, all the while nuclear waste is still being stored at de facto locations on site at 121 reactors across the country at the rate of 2,200 tons per year (“Nuclear Waste Policy Act”) (Gentilviso). Factors that lead to Yucca Mountain’s eventual downfall were the reports of possible groundwater contamination that then could not be contained, in addition the issue of earth stability as in the case of earthquakes (Lawrence). So, now the Yucca Mountain Repository is just another part of the seventy five operating and shutdown reactor sites harboring 71,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel