There’s a burger joint near Georgia Tech called “The Varsity” and when I was a grad student there people (not students) often mentioned it as part of some Georgia Tech “tradition” I dimly understood. No students seemed to ever talk much about The Varsity other than to tell me that the food was greasy and the service was bad. So I wasn’t terribly interested in eating there.

So I never did.

Until this last week. I went there and had lunch with my family, and guess what?

The food was beyond greasy, the service was bad, they botched my order, things were overpriced, and the whole place had a bad smell. People had told me these things, and they were basically right.

In a similar manner, I learned some things about the situation with Yucca Mountain and spent nuclear fuel (sometimes mistakenly called “nuclear waste”) that were as other and wiser people had told me.

At the American Nuclear Society conference in Atlanta this week, Ward Sproat spoke after lunch on Monday and talked about the REAL situation with Yucca Mountain. In short, it isn’t much like you’ve been told in the media.

Yucca Mountain isn’t dead, he told us, and can’t be until the Congress passes a new version of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982. He says that there are 39 states that like that act the way it is right now, and so that is why it won’t be changing soon. He also dispensed with a few other myths and alternate hopes that many of us have carried for some time:

Myth #1: There’s more than $20B in the “Nuclear Waste Fund”

There is not really any such thing. The money that is taken in from utilities every year to cover disposal (1/10th of a cent per kilowatt-hour sold) is used to defray the Federal deficit each year. It’s not sitting in an account somewhere, or drawing interest, or even being used to pay for Yucca Mountain. If/when Yucca is built it will be built from “then-year” funding, which gives the Congress every incentive to keep costs lower than expenses. I had kind of suspected this for a long time but Mr. Sproat confirmed it.

Myth #2: We could use “Yucca-money” to pay for interim storage somewhere…

Nope. The money collected (and let’s pretend like it’s really in a pot somewhere) can ONLY be used for the building of a federal repository. Nothing else. Not without changing the NWPA.

Myth #3: Recent judgments against the government by utilities are being paid out of the Yucca-money

Nope. They are being paid for out of a Department of Justice-fund meant to pay for judgments against the government, and the DOJ isn’t so happy about paying for DOE’s problems, especially when those judgements are some $500M a year and climbing.

Myth/hope #4: We could use the Yucca-money to develop advanced, closed-fuel-cycle reactors like LFTR.

As you might already guess, the answer is no. Not without a change in the NWPA.

Some smart people (like Per Peterson) told me things like this a long time ago, and like the people who warned me about the food at the Varsity, they were right.