Waste Not, Want Not

Feedback from yesterday’s blog referencing the need for environmentalists to reconsider their aversion to nuclear power as the price and environmental impacts of fossil fuels become ever more burdensome held one major question, “What about the waste?” Having worked on the disposal of nuclear waste for a number of years, I know this is not a simple issue, and I can’t cover it all in one posting.

To begin, we must recognize that the waste from the more than one hundred nuclear plants operating in the country is with us to deal with, and thus far we’ve punted. The government has by necessity been dealing with the waste since the first days of the Manhattan Project and has not yet found an answer that is satisfactory to powers sufficient to resolve the problem.

It was with high hopes for an easy answer to wastes disposal that the nuclear power industry embarked on its way to producing some twenty percent of the electricity used in the United States, but half a century later, we find ourselves still debating the problem. That the spent fuel rods used to power the commercial reactors are highly radioactive and dangerous is not in dispute; they are. But the government and the industry have been unsuccessful in getting the rods moved from the plant site to temporary storage or permanent disposal sites.

After an exhaustive study of all aspects of the problem – so says the government but not nearly to the satisfaction of many environmental and political opponents – Yucca Mountain in remote Western Nevada was identified as the site of the permanent repository of high level nuclear waste. Scientists on both sides have sung of the benefits and dangers of Yucca Mountain like so many dueling banjo players. Unfortunately, the resumes of both sets are distinguished and bureaucrats and politicians have been unable to settle on the answer of safety of the site; someday I suppose the Supreme Court with its nine highly qualified nuclear engineers in black robes will have to decide among the competing arguments.

I’ve been retired for many years so some of these points may be dated, but the government is now approaching nuclear power and its waste problem with a many pronged approach. The feds and the industry are picking up support for the idea – but not the reality – of more power plants. Siting one of those behemoths takes years and is arduous in the extreme. The Not in My Back Yard cries on any such plant can be heard from the field or forest selected for the facility all the way to Capitol Hill in Washington.

To counter the waste problem, President Bush is pushing the idea of reprocessing the spent fuel. Thus, waste from all of the plants would be reprocessed and much of it would be repackaged into new rods and used over again and the total amount of waste to be dealt with would thus be reduced significantly. That sounds great until one examines the impact of this on the possible proliferation of the weapons grade residue throughout the world. Again very distinguished expert scientists have weighed in for and against the idea. Naturally, the Department of Energy and the president assure us that this is a problem that can be managed while the opponents shake their heads.

Another prong is that of temporary - but decades long - storage of the waste. Again, the Department of Energy is working on gaining approval of storage of the material in addition to the final repository at Yucca Mountain. Without a resolution yet in sight, it still appears that progress on storage is being made. But opponents rightly claim that success in this would merely postpone the day of reckoning and hesitate to approve. This leads to the `Riley Rule of Nuclear Waste Disposal.’ To paraphrase former Governor Richard Riley of South Carolina whose state is home to a low level waste disposal facility and who learned through long experience that: “Nuclear waste deposited temporarily at a site soon turns out to be permanently ensconced.” Once placed, it’s political hell to move the stuff; it’s the ultimate tar baby.

The most important thing to understand about the high level rods of nuclear waste is that despite all the rhetoric about how dangerous they are to move, store, and dispose of doing nothing is perhaps the worst course. And that’s the road the United States has taken since 1942. While this posting is about commercial waste, the dangers of doing nothing are doubly scary when it comes to military waste, but that’s a subject for another time.

The situation we have today is that more than a hundred plants in all regions of the country are producing high level waste every year. That waste is in the form of long metal rods. When they are removed from the reactors, they are as radioactive hot as hot can be and they move directly into open cooling pools on the grounds of the plants. When this process began, it was assumed that after the initial cooling period of several years, the somewhat less dangerous rods would be transferred to the ownership of the federal government and disposed of in a safe manner.

Naturally, all of the problems cited earlier and hundreds of others stopped the process, and the rods remain at the plant sites. The original pools were not designed to store the vastly increased number of spent fuel rods, and the owners of the reactors have worked overtime ever since to store the rods safely on their sites. In some cases the pools have become dangerously overcrowded and despite re-racking the rods closer and closer together, they’ve run out of room. Now the companies have had to remove the coolest but still plenty hot and dangerous fuel rods from the pools and store them in huge dry casks. These casks are highly engineered to suffer massive impacts and explosions from the outside without failing; none the less the fuel is stored without all needed protection at the plants.

The bottom line is that waste in place at the existing plants is about as dangerous as can be. The government proposes to transport that waste using the safest system they can conceive of, but this system does not meet the standards of some people, especially opponents of nuclear power. If that question is resolved to the satisfaction of the public and the courts, then nuclear power is likely to become a viable option again. With the increasing cost of fossil fuel in economic and environmental terms, more people formerly opposed to commercial use of nuclear power are looking seriously at the prospect.

The same goes for reprocessing, long term storage, and permanent disposal. With the cost, availability, and security concerns for petroleum looming before politicians and the public, it is possible that the industry will be revitalized.

BUT REMEMBER, DOING NOTHING ABOUT NUCLEAR WASTE IS THE WORST COURSE, AND THAT’S THE ONE WE’RE ON.

Sorry that this posting is so long, but I could have expanded on many of these points and will in the near future. Another article appeared in today’s Washington Post, and it’s linked here for your review.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/26/AR2006042602460.html

Blog on!

Wild Bill