Obama wants more nuclear power, but what about the waste?
The administration is trying to get out of plans for storing waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, at the same time as the president wants more nuclear plants to generate electricity. Attorney General Rob McKenna is dubious about this, and where it might leave Hanford.
Department of Energy, Hanford web site
Let's get this straight: Barack Obama wants to build more nuclear power plants. More nuclear power plants will generate more radioactive waste. The nation doesn't have a place to store that waste long-term. The nation does, however, have a plan to build a nuclear repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain where highly radioactive waste from the nation's nuclear plants, from its plutonium-production facilities at Savannah River in South Carolina, and from Hanford can be stored until hell freezes over.
The Yucca Mountain plan has been in the works for the past 30 years. Nevada doesn't want the repository, but then, neither does anyone else. High-level nuclear waste creates the ultimate NIMBY issue. Now, following up on a campaign promise made in Nevada, the Obama administration has filed a motion to withdraw its application for a license to build the Yucca Mountain repository. "This is great news,"said Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada, adding that the decidion "prevents Nevada from becoming the nation's nuclear dumping ground."
The Department of Energy has asked the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board to dismiss its license application "with prejudice," which would mean the feds could never go back and resubmit it This would create an enormous policy vacuum. The federal government has no Plan B. Without a dump at Yucca Mountain, the nuclear waste generated over half a century at Hanford and all that other radioactive garbage will have to stay more or less where it is, until the feds come up with another place to dump it.
As Washington Senator Patty Murray told Energy Secretary Steven Chu at a March 4 committee hearing, "Congress, independent studies, and previous administrations have all pointed to, voted for, and funded Yucca Mountain as the nation's best option for a nuclear repository. And, in concert with those decisions, billions of dollars and countless work hours have been spent at Hanford and nuclear waste sites across the country in an effort to treat and package nuclear waste that will be sent there. Without a repository, those sites and the communities that support them have been left in limbo."
The utility industry, which would be left in the same position, is very unhappy, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Of course, even critics who live outside Nevada have long pointed out that Yucca Mountain is a flawed site, where over the coming millennia water could get in. Of course it could. Over the half-life of plutonium, nothing can be guaranteed. But still, all that waste exists, and somebody has to make a decision to put it somewhere. Without Yucca, neither the waste to be vitrified during the Hanford cleanup — which is still years away from happening — nor the waste from past, present, and future nuclear reactors has a place to go.
Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna observes that "it seems completely inconsistent to shut down Yucca . .&thinsp'. at the same time the administration is" encouraging the rebirth of commercial nuclear power.
McKenna argues that it's also illegal. His office has filed a petition to intervene in the licensing process. It argues that Congress required the executive branch to start the licensing process for Yucca Mountain, and only Congress can tell it to stop. Administrative agencies have no legal authority to halt the process on their own.
The state will also file a suit in a federal appellate court; it hasn't yet decided which one. Already, the state of South Carolina has filed suit in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, while Aiken County, South Carolina, has filed a separate suit in the D.C. circuit. McKenna says that the attorneys general of several other states are considering legal action, too, but their states are negotiating with the federal government over other energy issues, and they have to figure out whether or not Yucca is an issue worth jeopardizing those negotiations. Washington is just "waiting to see if they come in," McKenna says. If they do, the licensing process seems "the logical place for them to come in to begin with."
Given that the Obama administration seems sold on the virtues of nuclear power, does its decision to scrap Yucca Mountain make any sense? It could if the administration wants spent nuclear fuel reprocessed, rather than entombed. Reprocessing is a proven technology. The French have been doing it for years. The problem is that it pulls out plutonium, which can be used in nuclear weapons. Therefore, it arguably increases the threat of nuclear proliferation.
The Obama administration hasn't discussed reprocessing as an alternative to Yucca Mountain. But George W. Bush touted recycling, pointing to France as a good example. Nuclear boosters reportedly were urging him on. Under the Bush theory, if stable countries such as our own reprocessed waste and gave nuclear fuel to less stable countries on the condition that we get the spent fuel back, it would actually make proliferation less likely. But you'd still wind up with a lot of plutonium; you'd probably wind up building fast reactors that could burn it.
And you'd still have all that radioactive garbage left over from a half-century of producing plutonium for nuclear bombs. "I think reprocessing ought to be developed in this country," McKenna says, but "at the same time, we have a lot of waste that's beyond the reprocessing stage.”
Under the Tri-Party Agreement that the state signed with the the Department of Energy and the EPA in 1989, Energy must get all that high-level radioactive waste out of Hanford storage tanks and embed it in glass at the Waste Treatment Plant currently under construction. The original agreement didn't require or even mention Yucca Mountain and neither does the amended agreement, negotiated last year and still not final. The Tri-Party Agreement therefore isn't an issue in the state's Yucca Mountain licensing case or its pending challenge in federal court.
But the death of the Yucca project might very well have an impact on the agreed-to cleanup schedule — if the intent of the schedule is to get all the high-level waste not only out of the old rusty tanks but also out of the state. "The cleanup would proceed," without Yucca, McKenna says. "The only question is where the high-level waste would be stored. We have always had the understanding that it wouldn't be at Hanford."
The new timeline calls for all the high-level waste at Hanford to be treated by 2045. If the administration succeeds in withdrawing its license application, waits for the recently established Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future to come up with an alternative, and relies on future administrations to navigate the scientific, legal and political labyrinth that will confront any new choice, then — if the history of the Yucca Mountain project is any guide — McKenna says, it "sets us back a minimum of 30 years."
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Comments:
Posted Tue, Mar 9, 9:07 a.m. Inappropriate
The easy answer: let's just continue to store our nuclear waste "on-site," at temporary repositories all over the United States and the rest of the world, as we have continued to do for decades, and pawn the problem off on future generations to figure out. In the meantime, there is the potential for a number of our very own "Chernobyls" should the structure of the temporary facilities be compromised by decay, seepage, erosion, earthquake, whatever.
But then, there are no easy answers. Much of this nuclear waste, spent reactor fuel rods, medical/commercial waste, waste from weapons testing and manufacture, etc. will remain "hot" for longer than recorded human history. What sort of a facility can be built to safely contain it? We cannot duplicate the engineering capable of building a structure that can withstand the test of time comparable to the Great Pyramid at Giza; yet, the Pyramid has not existed for the amount of time that the spent nuclear fuel rods we already have will continue to generate dangerous levels of radioactivity.
And, even if such a facility was capable of being built, who or what would maintain it? The US government? Some other world power? As we look back over the course of history, we see kingdoms, governments, empires rise and crumble. Our accumulated mountain of radioactive waste will still be around and hot long after today's civilizations have vanished.
Will we be able to develop a group of caretakers, governed by some authority outside of the purview of any temporal government (which history tells us will pass away at some point in time), with specialized knowledge and resources that can be passed on to succeeding generations which will carry on the sacred work of protecting the earth and its inhabitants from radioactive destruction? A sort of nuclear "priesthood" with its own transcendent set of rites, obligations, responsibilities, and protection able to survive for eons?
And, what about transportation issues? How will the nation's, and possibly the world's, nuclear waste, especially the spent fuel rods, be transported to any "permanent" facility, such as Yucca Mountain in Nevada? Currently, the plan is to use railroad. But getting the rods to the railroad poses a challenge. Will railroad sidings be built next to every nuclear facility so that spur lines can connect them to the main rail trunk lies? Or, will spend nuclear fuel rods be shipped by truck to a loading dock somewhere?
Just imagine if you lived in a community through which those trucks or railroads regularly passed through bearing their radioactive loads, and your neighbors find out about it? And if the general population finds out, if given notice as would likely be required by law, how would terrorists not find out? What community or state would agree to the installation of a permanent paramilitary corridor within its borders? How likely is it that such plans would be kept secret, at least temporarily, without the knowledge of the general citizenry, for "national security" purposes?
Mind boggling, isn't it? Given these questions, and more, the "easy answer" above seems to be the most politically attractive course. Lots of clean energy now, lots of jobs, the creation of booming economy, and slim chance that anyone alive today will ever have to worry about the consequences.
Posted Tue, Mar 9, 9:18 a.m. Inappropriate
Why is the writer drawing a connection between Yucca Mountain and power generation? The vast majority of the high-level nuclear waste in this country was from the development of nuclear warheads, not power generation.
If one wants to be opposed to nuclear power, or opposed to Yucca Mountain, there's nothing wrong with that at all, but please do so accurately. There is no connection between the massive amount of high-level waste we have today and the generation of power, as this article implies.
Posted Tue, Mar 9, 9:28 a.m. Inappropriate
With all due respect, alexander-craghead, you are mistaken.
"CHICAGO — In a pool of water just a football field away from Lake Michigan, about 1,000 tons of highly radioactive fuel from the scuttled Zion Nuclear Power Station are waiting for someplace else to spend a few thousand years. The wait just got longer...Yucca Mountain project, [is] the controversial Nevada site where the U.S. nuclear industry's spent fuel rods were to spend eternity. There are no other plans in the works, so for now the waste will remain next to Zion and 103 other reactors scattered across the country...More than 57,000 tons of spent fuel rods already are stored next to reactors, just a few yards from containment buildings where they once generated nuclear-heated steam to drive massive electrical turbines. The lack of a permanent solution poses a serious challenge to the industry's plans to build more than 30 new reactors. Existing nuclear plants produce 2,000 tons of the long-lived waste each year, most of which is moved into pools of chilled water that allow the spent -- but still highly lethal -- uranium-235 to slowly and safely decay. Uranium-235 has a half-life of nearly 704 million years -- meaning that half its atoms will decay in that time."
See: http://articles.latimes.com/2009/mar/11/nation/na-nuclear-waste11
Posted Wed, Mar 10, 8:44 a.m. Inappropriate
All previous posters show their ignorance of the state of current nuclear reactor research.
First of all, the reactors you are basing your assumptions about waste on where designed in the 1950s and 1960s. They are first generation and second generation nuclear reactor designs. We have never built a commercial third generation reactor in the US, but there are several at DOE testing facilities around the country, and I'm sure there are a few in operation by the military. We are currently building fourth generation reactors in test facilities around the country as well.
Now, these latter generation reactor designs are much more efficient with the fuel they burn. They can even burn what today is considered waste. Which means that if we build latter generation reactors next to existing reactors, we don't even have to ship fuel to these locations for decades to come.
Finally, the latter generation reactors are so efficient at burning 'waste' that they will generated waste that has a half life of decades instead of 10s of 1000s of years.
Posted Wed, Mar 10, 10:11 a.m. Inappropriate
Wrong. From the DOE itself:
"With the end of the Cold War, the United States has been working to close and clean up obsolete weapons plants and dispose of nuclear weapons materials. This has created a need to dispose of highly radioactive material associated with weapons production. This material is called high-level radioactive waste.
Until the late 1970s, the United States acquired materials for nuclear weapons by reprocessing spent nuclear fuel from government-owned nuclear reactors. Reprocessing is a method of chemically treating spent fuel to separate out uranium and plutonium. The byproduct of reprocessing is a highly radioactive sludge-like residue.
The Department of Energy will not ship such residue to a repository until it is solidified and sealed in stainless steel canisters.
* All high-level nuclear waste is currently stored at government facilities."
http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/factsheets/doeymp0338.shtml
So unless we're going to re-categorize weapons facilities such as Hanford as "power" facilities because they produced power alongside their warhead production, the "high level" wastes the original writer talks about remain a byproduct of a half century of weapons production, not energy generation. They are not relevant to the debate over the future of nuclear power in the United States.
Again, if someone wants to debate and/or oppose nuclear power based on waste issues, that's a perfectly intellectually honest position. Yucca Mountain, however, is not particularly important to that debate, nor is weapons related wastes that go back as far as World War Two.
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