Debating the Nuclear Waste Problem

March 9, 2010, 3:16 pm

By MATTHEW L. WALD

With Nevada’s Yucca Mountain facility apparently out of the picture as a nuclear waste repository, government nuclear experts say interim measures might be needed for a very long time.

In a speech Tuesday delivered to about 2,700 industry executives, nuclear regulators and other experts gathered for a nuclear energy conference in Washington, Gregory B. Jaczko, the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said that his agency needed to determine just how many centuries such fuel can be safely stored above ground, and that it should come up with a policy that would not require amendment for many years.

The commission currently allows reactors to operate and accumulate waste under a “waste confidence” policy that anticipates that the federal government will have a repository in place by the 2020s. But with the demise of the plan to bury the waste at Yucca Mountain, the commission is working on a new policy.

Nuclear fuel can be stored safely for long periods, Mr. Jaczko said in remarks to reporters, and the commission will “work to see what that time frame is really like — 100 years, 200 years, 400.”

The commission was supposed to hear a license application brought by the Department of Energy to open Yucca, but that agency said last week that it wanted to withdraw the application. A court may have to rule on whether the administration can do that, under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which laid out the procedure for selecting a site.

Earlier this month the Energy Department convened a “blue ribbon commission” to evaluate all options, including new kinds of reactors that could run partly on waste from the old ones, and convert some of the most toxic and longest-lived materials into less troublesome materials. But there is no clear path forward at this point.

A new policy, said Mr. Jaczko, should not predict when a repository will open, but show, “what are the limits of safe and secure storage of fuel.”

Fuel is now stored in dry casks — steel-lined concrete silos that require no liquid cooling or forced ventilation — and those are licensed for 20 years.
At three plants, the licenses have been extended for another 20.

Metal parts of such casks can begin corroding in weeks if salt hits them, the N.R.C. has found. Whether this happens depends partly on the temperature of the cask (it is heated by the waste) and the humidity in the air.

The engineer who headed the Yucca program under the Bush administration, Edward F. Sproat III, also attending the conference, said, “you can’t keep that stuff in those canisters forever. They’re not designed that way.”

Dale Klein, a member of the commission whose term will expire as soon as the Senate confirms a replacement, spoke bluntly about the decision by the Obama administration to drop the license application for Yucca.

A year ago, Mr. Klein said, Mr. Obama suggested the public should have confidence that government policy was driven by “scientific integrity.”

No scientific judgment was made about Yucca, Mr. Klein said. That is what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was supposed to do, he said.

Conventional Energy, Energy Business, Energy Economics, Energy Politics, Environmental Politics, General Business, General Pollution, Government Policy, Nuclear Energy, jaczko, nrc, Washington
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Oak Ridge, TN
March 10th, 2010
6:22 amOften the first objection people have to an expansion of nuclear power is, "where do you put all the waste." However, nuclear power is perhaps the only energy source that actually captures and contains all of the by-products rather than dumping them in to the air and water. By contrast, fossil fuels users only dream of capturing their wastes. Only after carbon sequestration becomes technologically feasible (if ever) can the fossil fuel industries be concerned about "where to put all the [carbon] waste". The volume of carbon waste would dwarf the volume of nuclear waste and it be pumped directly into the ground.

Yucca Mountain was nixed because of legitimate political reasons (Nevandans are against it), but it was well engineered and scientifically sound. The current blue ribbon panel has the opportunity to solve the political impasse while moving the US toward nuclear recycling.

All experts (including the NRC) agree that the current process of storing spent fuel in casks is adequate for decades, perhaps even centuries. Therefore the issue of "where do you put all the waste" is not a crisis, but a distraction from expanding one of the cleanest and most reliable energy sources the world has ever known.

I can't wait for more nuclear power, less coal, cleaner air, and a livable climate.
Recommend Recommended by 1 Readers 2.Patrick
Long Island NY
March 10th, 2010
6:22 am Yucca Mountain is only about 100 miles upwind of Las Vegas, near where the nuclear bomb testing took place many years ago. Someone consider scientifically, the dangers to past, present, and future travellars and residents there. I've already done some looking myself. I'll bet the land was dirt cheap when they started building there. So, you really want nuclear power?
Recommend Recommended by 1 Readers 3.Jim Baird
Nanaimo, Canada
March 10th, 2010
6:22 am The main problem with storing spent nuclear fuel underground is heat which can over the long-term break down the crystalline structure of the rock in which it is placed and induce hydrothermal convection that can transport hazardous material back to the biosphere.

In accordance with the First Law of Thermodynamics the way to reduce this heating effect is to convert heat into work. Preferable to produce North America's unconventional oil deposits.

Alberta's Bitumen is produced with an energy return on investment of 5.2/1 and bitumen has unprecedented capacity to sequester radionuclides as was noted by a recent international study by American, French, Australian and Canadian scientists.

Close to 6 billion barrels of Alberta's bitumen can be produced annually using the global inventory of spent nuclear fuel at a savings of about $15/barrel.

Capitalizing on the economic potential of the back end of the fuel cycle is the best way to offset the high front end cost of reactors.
Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers 4.Matt
Reno, NV
March 10th, 2010
6:22 am Chu wants to reprocess spent fuel, thereby reducing the radioactivity of the high-level waste to 500 years (see http://www.seattlepi.com/specials/eternity/d3.html). But he's only considering this tech because Yucca won't last ONE MILLION years!

Keep Yucca open, reprocess and store the non-recyclable waste there, otherwise it's a giant waste of money and only hurts the Nevada economy. You're never going to find the ideal storage solution, so you need a balanced approach. Why not leverage what taxpayers & utilities have already paid for?
Recommend Recommended by 1 Readers 5.Wang Suya
Japan
March 10th, 2010
6:22 am Nuclear power plants are defficult issue, we need energy without fossil fuel. Rnewable energy can not satify our demands so soon. Maybe nuclear can be one instand energy of fossil fuel to promise the earth temperature raise under 2 degree C.
Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers 6.Russ Finley
Seattle
March 10th, 2010
10:17 amHuh. Five reasonable comments in a row. Some leading independent environmentalist thinkers, George Monbiot, Steward Brand, James Lovelock, and Steve Kirsch, to name a few, have changed their minds about nuclear. Nuclear could actually be an ally of renewable energy rather than a competitor:

http://biodiversivist.blogspot.com...

The point that only nuclear is charged with its own clean up is valid. Imagine the cost of coal if it had to pay to clean up its waste and environmental damage.

Recommend Recommended by 1 Readers 7.AIG
Nashville, TN
March 10th, 2010
10:45 amThe spent reactor fuel, which contains plutonium, is currently stored on site secured only by a chain link fence. The French on the other hand have armed guards and an anti-aircraft battery securing their plutonium separated from spent fuel. Why can't we be more like the French? The NRC needs to join the war on terror.

Barrier strips and blast shields will be insufficient to protect us from an enemy with ingenuity to bring down the World Trade Center using box cutters as their only weapon. Imagine what they can do if they step up to the new technology of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). A Newsweek article "Will Foreign Drones One Day Attack the US," suggests we won't have to imagine for long.

Until then, IEDs can be flown into the spent fuel casks by low tech suicide bombers just as the plane flew into the IRS building in Austin, Texas. Each cask contains as much spent fuel as was released into the atmosphere in Chernobyl. This is something the NRC should consider in their three day global conference this week in Bethesda.
Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers 8.abevanluik
Las Vegas, NV
March 10th, 2010
10:59 am It is hubris of the first order to suggest that a government will be around for several centuries to guarantee safety and security at well over a hundred locations around the nation.

This is the main reason that publications by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Energy Agency (both international safety-related agencies) have repeatedly said that storage without a disposal program with a well-defined endpoint is irresponsible: Rock can be trusted to last thousands of years, even millions of years, but nations, their governments, and their institutions have never ever lasted that long.

Yucca promised very likely to be safe over a million-year period. It has sat there pretty much as it is today for about 9 million years after the mountain-building of the nascent Basin & Range stretching did its thing and made what were flat layers of tuffs into tilted mountains radiating away from the now dead sources, the collapsed calderas just to the north.

Was Yucca ideal or perfect? No, but what ever is? We drive our cars daily knowing they are not perfect, but we keep them inside their design bounds and assure safety to the extent we can. Yucca Mountain promised a safe operation, transporting nuclear fuel has been shown by the National Academy of Sciences to be orders of magnitude safer than transporting some of the chemicals we transport across the country continually, and whatever species dominates Earth at a million years were likely to get an almost undetectable increase in their background radiation if they happened to live relatively close to Yucca Mountain.

The only reason to reconsider Yucca was its cost to this generation, it can perhaps be done cheaper in a clay, clayey shale, granite or salt site. But safe is safe, and there are other issues related to such sites such as sealing out aquifers (technical) and relative nearness to populations (political). The County hosting Yucca Mountain, by the way, was in favor of the project. After all, they had absorbed almost a thousand nuclear bomb blasts, this was a boring project in comparison.

Other American, European, Asian and African countries planning their repositories in clays, salt bodies, granites and other rock types are showing that sealing out aquifers and dealing with local populations are not insurmountable problems, we can learn from their mistakes and imitate their successes.

Some commenters in this blog opined that the heat and radiation were going to damage the repository. Heat is about a 300-year issue, then things are relatively cool, and initial heat loads are controlled by spacing waste packages to prevent geochemical changes that may not be desirable. Radiation has not been shown to affect the selected rock types in any significant way. It produces oxygen by decomposing water at or very near the waste packages and waste forms, but that is a minor problem readily handled through design and site-selection (in Yucca, with an already oxygen-rich environment it was a rather moot process).

I hope that the Blue Ribbom Panel recommends moving forward with disposal of the "legacy" (existing) wastes as soon as possible.

Even if in 20 or 40 years we have the capacity to reprocess and maybe even transmute, we will then do very well just to treat our new annual arisings with any facilities we build. We'll likely never return to work on the legacy wastes now being stored, and we will certainly never try to re-reprocess what has already been turned into glassified high-level wastes (nor will we ever touch some of the "cats-and-dogs" from experimental and weapons-production reactors). Those wastes alone will fill a 'small' repository (about half Yucca's legally limited -not physicaly limited-size).

I also hope the Blue Ribbon panel will take note of the instability of governments and be in a hurry to at least start up a new repository project. Seeing the sea-change in this government, apparently now having killed a planned repository at one location and in the process ignoring several laws duly passed by Congress and signed by sitting Presidents over several decades. The administration may have the right to impose a new policy, but it is a policy not voted on by Congress or signed into law. This ought to be a giant reminder that governments are not to be trusted or taken seriously when they imply they will be there to assure safety for centuries at over a hundred specific locations.

I would put my century-and-beyond trust in a competent rock body before I would ever put that trust in any government body, no matter how currently competent that body is (the US NRC is a very competent organization).

Saying we can store for centuries shows a total disregard for history. Suggesting we can trust in our current institutions for centuries is high-risk-hubris.
Recommend Recommended by 3 Readers 9.James
Northern Nevada
March 10th, 2010
12:24 pm The Oklo nuclear reactors show that it is possible to safely store nuclear "waste" for upwards of a billion years.

However, the fundamental problem here comes from thinking of the products of a first-stage fission reaction as waste, when in actuality they are valuable materials that can readily be reprocessed, and used in the next stage of the cycle.

As for storing the waste - temporarily, one hopes - near Las Vegas, that seems by far the best place for it, since nothing you could do to Las Vegas would make it worse that what the developers already do.
Recommend Recommended by 2 Readers 10.JimHopf
San Jose, CA
March 11th, 2010
8:27 amAIG,

I find your scaremongering to be disgusting. I work in the field of dry cask storage, and I know that the risks to the public from such casks is negligible. Even a full breach of the cask, as a result of a severe, successful attack is unlikely to cause a single death among the public.

Chernobyl's core contained a much larger amount of nuclear material than that present in the cask, and its core consisted of flammilble graphite (the main mechanism of dispersion) whereas spent fuel casks contain no flammible materials. Also, the fuel in storage casks has decayed for at least 5 years, so the intensely radioactive, short-lived isotopes are gone. Most of the measureable health effect from Chernobyl is due to the release of I-131, which is not present at all in dry-stored spent fuel.

Extracting plutonium from spent fuel requires reprocessing, a very expensive and technically challenging process that is more difficult than simply mining and enriching raw uranium ore (which is found all over the world). Even if the plutionium in spent fuel were extracted, its isotope distribution makes it far less useful for weapons. Thus, spent fuel is even less useful to weapons making than (ubiquitous) uranium ore, and it is therefore not a proliferation risk.

One reason the French sites have so much security is that they contain SEPARATED plutonium. In other words, the difficult reprocessing step I mention above has already been performed. If this plutonium were stolen, it could simply be used directly in a weapon (although the isotope distribution issue would remain). Spent fuel does not require that level of security, for the reasons I give above.
Recommend Recommended by 1 Readers 11.Dr. J. Singmaster
94536
March 11th, 2010
8:28 amWhat about another TMI or Chernobyl incident? Also a recent report on Yankee reactor in New England indicated that it and 20+ other nuclear power plants had ground water beneath the plants contaminated with escaped tritium oxide from the heavy water used in the plant.
BUT the big always-with-us problem is the releasing of trapped energy to add to the overload already in the biosphere to worsen climate change. This adding was detailed in article by Dr. E. Chaisson of Tufts U. in EOS, Trans, Amer. Geophys. Union, Vol;. 89, No. 28, pgs, 253-4(2008). For our children's future we have to get to making the sun just about our sole source of energy including using it to actually remove some of the carbon dioxide and the heat energy from their overloads already in the biosphere. I have detailed actions to get more and better use of the sun's energy in comments on a number of blogs. We are letting large amounts of trapped energy collected by the sun get away along with unneeded reemitting of GHGs from our present handling of organic wastes and sewage.
Dr. J. Singmaster
Recommend Recommended by 1 Readers 12.Anonymous
March 15th, 2010
7:35 amThose who favor nuclear power as a solution are probably those who have not experienced the devastation that the nuclear industry has had on the health of many of us, especially Native Americans. I have worked with Pueblo and Navajo people who were exposed to uranium mining for over 30 years. The environment down gradient from old uranium mines is devastated and irreparable; where once there were orchards and gardens, there is a sick-looking gray soil that remains radioactive. I have a pueblo friend who lived close to one of those mines whose mother and husband died of cancer and whose children suffer from chronic illnesses, illnesses connected with over exposure to radiation. Now, there are many applications for new uranium mines in her area. How can we think that nuclear energy is 'clean' energy when resource-light Native American communities who have already sacrificed their health for the material used in the early atomic bombs will now be asked for further sacrifices to provide the rest of us with our energy desires; I say desires instead of needs because our efforts at conservation of energy seem sporadic at best. If you live in a big city, just look at the skyline at night and you will know what I mean.
Recommend Recommended by 1 Readers 13.Tea Leaf Reader
New Mexico
March 29th, 2010
1:21 pmObserving the yahrzeit for Three Mile Island, March 28, 1979, falling one day before Passover this year, I was reminded that we are enslaved to the fantasy of cheap unlimited energy, reading "Passover Nuclear Pharaohs" online today. Uranium ore mining and milling contaminated the west, and now they want to do it again. Why go with another non-renewable fuel when we have all the unlimited free energy available to us in solar? Why indeed - you can only make money on scarcity.

Comment

I see two main problems with nuclear - One, the upfront costs are considerable. Two, the waste disposal question. What doers France do with ITS nuclear waste? I am all for recycling here, too.