BRC on America's Nuclear Future - Part Three

Blue Ribbon Commission report can be downloaded by going to Final Report January 2012 .



PART THREE - THE NEED FOR GEOLOGIC DISPOSAL

Chapter 4 of the BRC Report leads off with this quote - "The central flaw of the U.S. nuclear waste management program to date has been its failure to develop permanent disposal capability."


My commentary on the subject:
 
Everyone seems to want nuclear energy, that cheap and abundant source of power, yet at the very same time nobody wants to be a host site for the spent fuel that the nuclear energy program generates. We cannot continue to move ahead with the re-licensing of old reactors or license the building of new reactors without first addressing what is going to happen to the spent fuel.



Here in my state of Missouri, Ameren the operator of Callaway Nuclear Plant #1, say they have ten more years of space left in the spent fuel pool which is currently used as storage for this plant. Over the last years the spent fuel storage rods have been re-racked to allow for more storage space. The closer these rods get packed together the more the safety issue increases.


So let's say the NRC and the DOE continues to not convince the President and Congress of the need for one or two disposal facilities, what happens when this spent fuel pool becomes over-filled? Do we just sit back and watch the nuclear explosion as it takes place?

GEOLOGIC DISPOSAL:

Disposal of nuclear waste is needed and the scientifically preferred approach is deep geologic disposal. All spent fuel reprocess or recycle options generate waste streams that require a permanent disposal solution. One of the Blue Ribbon Commission's central recommendations is the "United States should undertake an integrated nuclear waste management program that leads to the timely development of one or more permanent deep geological facilities for the safe disposal of spent fuel and high-level nuclear waste."

Spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive wastes contain elements that present a potentially significant radiation hazard to exposed populations and ecosystems. True these hazards diminish over time but bear in mind the time of rapid decline is the first few hundred years, then gradually - this process taking hundreds of thousands of years or more.

So the challenge is to manage storage and disposal of these materials over a long period of time that will provide adequate protection to the public and the environment.

SOURCES OF WASTE

In the United States there are two major contributors of nuclear waste: (1) The U.S. Government, from it's past nuclear weapons programs and current Navy nuclear fleet and (2) the civilian nuclear power industry.

For more than thirty years the U.S. government has had a general obligation to provide a timely disposal solution. The current law states the federal government was obliged to begin accepting commercial spent fuel by January 31, 1998.

Nuclear wasted generated from the Navy's nuclear fleet is stored in Idaho, awaiting future availability of a suitable repository for disposal of this spent fuel.

Again let me insert from Part One of this review, the definition of terms:

Definition of terms: The term "disposal" is understood to mean permanent disposal; the term "storage" is understood to mean storage for an interim period prior to disposal or other disposition.

SPENT FUEL STORAGE

Storage in some form, for some period of time, is an inevitable part of the nuclear fuel cycle. This is a fact that can neither be denied nor ignored. And beyond the short term storage of spent fuel another fact is the permanent disposal of nuclear fuel for generations and generations.

On-site spent fuel storage exists today by default due to the government's inability to address the issue of finding a suitable disposal facility or facilities. Most storage is in spent fuel pools which continue to get packed more tightly. A temporary solution is to move the spent fuel from pools to dry cask storage when exhausted space in the pools is reached.


STRANDED FUEL

Currently they are nine shutdown commercial nuclear power plants in the United States. At seven of these reactors the spent fuel is in dry storage awaiting removal to a disposal site. The fuel at these sites is often referred to as "stranded fuel".

THERE REALLY IS ONLY ONE OPTION

So whether we shut down all 104 reactors in the U. S. tomorrow or continue to license new nuclear plants, as was recently done by the NRC, the unavoidable fact remains - spent nuclear fuel needs to find a permanent home where it can be safely disposed. Where the harm to humans and the environment is kept at a bare minimum.

I'm afraid the saga of "Not in My Backyard" will continue, in the meantime we have it in 104 of our backyards, residing in something of a less-than-permanent status.