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Nuclear Waste Has No Place to Go
Obama budget kills Nevada storage site for used radioactive fuel rods piling up near power plants
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 is waiting for someplace else to spend a few thousand years.
Zion Nuclear Power Station in Illinois has been shuttered for years, but its waste lives on. The lack of a permanent solution for such waste poses a serious challenge to the industry’s plans to build more reactors. (David Trotman-Wilkins / Chicago Tribune) The wait just got longer.
President Barack Obama's proposed budget all but kills the Yucca Mountain project, the controversial site where the U.S. nuclear industry's spent fuel rods were supposed to end up in permanent storage deep below the Nevada desert. There are no other plans in the works, meaning the waste for now will remain next to Zion and 104 other reactors scattered across the country.
Obama has said too many questions remain about whether storing waste at Yucca Mountain is safe, and his decision fulfills a campaign promise. But it also renews nagging questions about what to do with the radioactive waste steadily accumulating in 35 states.
With seven nuclear plant sites, Illinois relies more heavily on nuclear power and has a larger stockpile of spent fuel than any other state. Besides Zion near Lake Michigan, plants storing waste are sited along the Illinois, Rock and Mississippi Rivers.
Customers of ComEd and other nuclear utilities have shelled out $10 billion to develop the Yucca Mountain site in spare-change-size charges tacked on to electric bills. Most of that money will have been wasted, and experts forecast that billions more will be spent on damage suits from utilities that counted on the federal government to come up with a burial ground.
Reversing course from previous administrations satisfies critics in Nevada, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, but triggers another round of maneuvering and regional bickering in Congress.
"We are drifting toward a permanent policy of keeping extremely toxic waste next to the Great Lakes, and that cannot stand," said U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.).
More than 57,000 tons of spent fuel rods already are stored next to reactors, just a few yards away from containment buildings where they once generated nuclear-heated steam to drive massive electrical turbines. More than 7,100 tons are stored in Illinois, including at the Zion facility in Chicago's northern suburbs.
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 already 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.
But containment pools never were intended to store all of the spent fuel that a reactor creates. The idea was that the cool water would stabilize the enriched uranium until it could be sent to a reprocessing plant or stored in a centralized location.
Instead it keeps piling up. And though industry officials insist the waste is safely stored in fenced-off buildings lined with concrete and lead, concerns remain that a leak or a terrorist attack could create an environmental catastrophe.
As power companies run out of space in their containment pools, they increasingly are storing the waste above ground in concrete and metal casks; the Zion plant's spent fuel rods eventually are to be moved into casks a little farther away from Lake Michigan.
"We continue to ask the federal government to provide a clear solution for what the long-term storage of spent fuel will be," said Marshall Murphy, spokesman for Exelon Nuclear, which owns Illinois' plants.
Until now, the solution was Yucca Mountain, a dusty mountain of volcanic rock about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas that Congress chose in the late 1980s as a permanent repository. Federal officials spent the last two decades-and billions of dollars-preparing to bury spent fuel in a series of fortified tunnels drilled into the mountain.
Without further funding the project will wind up as a very expensive hole in the ground.
The repository's apparent demise is part science and part politics. Recent studies have shown that water flows through the mountain much faster than previously thought, raising concerns that radioactive leaks could contaminate drinking water supplies. More than anything else, though, the project is opposed by two powerful politicians: Reid and Obama, who is calling for more study to find a better solution.
Chicago-based Exelon Corp., the parent company of ComEd and Exelon Nuclear, is seeking to extend the life of its reactors, most of which were built in the 1970s. It also wants to build a new reactor at the Clinton Power Station south of Bloomington. Company officials have said that won't be possible without an alternative to Yucca.
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15 Comments so far
Show AllDisposal of nuclear waste has been an issue since before the first reactor was built. It should be the province of each state and municipality that uses nuclear produced power to arrange their waste disposal logistics before producing even one KW. If people are so keen on such a source than they should be directly responsible for the entire cycle - living not only with the benefits of using nuclear energy - but also with it's liabilities.
The Yucca Mountain repository was never a good idea. It not only has water issues, it lies along a geologic fault line.
The only responsibility the FED should have regarding the production of power and it's waste products / pollution, should be to establish safe and enforcable standards and to enhance an educational system that develops thinking minds who can engineer solutions to problems with technology. It is time that citizens take individual responsibilty for their life styles, rather than using and discarding without consideration of the cycle that creates.
Live Simply So That Others May Simply Live
When Yucca Mountain Project started nearly 50 years ago the whole state of Nevada had less than a half million people...its population ranked 49th or 50th among states. There were far more jackrabbits and rattlesnakes and they don't vote.
In recent years Nevada has been one of the fastest growing states. Unlike jackrabbits and rattlesnakes, people vote, and most don't want to live next door to a nuclear waste dump.
If the nuke industry wanted Yucca Mountain to fly they should have bought the whole state 50 years ago when the land was cheap. Who knows, with more than half of Nevada mortgages currently upside-down, the nuke industry may once again have the opportunity to buy the state.
Harry Reid is a very senior senator now. That helps too. As you said, Nevada was No-wheres-ville 50 years ago.
The cost of nuclear is getting worse all the time. Per KWH now it's estimated at 25-30 cents (Craig Severance report). I think it is worth considering the work of the late Walter Russell (whom Tesla said was 1,000 years ahead of his time, and created an atomic table that predicted later discoveries - which easily could have been the 'accepted atomic table of elements). He predicted the ozone hole and said that nuclear radiation would eventually destroy the oxygen in the atmosphere is we persisted with using nuclear power (see www.philosophy.org - "Atomic Suicide?"). His unconventional theories were accepted as worth considering after fierce debate by a scientist in the New York Times in 1937, and never were explained away. Yet today, we 'know' better? I think a review is in order considering the stakes; though the cost of nuclear power is getting prohitibitive anyway, as well as all the many known dangers (and repressed risk exposures).
Even in this down economy nuclear waste still presents many employment opportunities...opportunities that one nuclear waste worker told me, will be there for the next 50,000 years...now that IS job security. There are no lay offs at Rocky Flats, Colorado or Hanford, Washington.
If you do a real cost/benefit analysis, that's job security with permanent and rising costs to the taxpayer that will rapidly overwhelm any energy benefits.
It's idiotic to spend unlimited amounts on guarding and maintaining nukes forever, not to mention the permanent rising costs of cancers from nuke leak accidents.
Nuke energy has to be phased out now and green alternatives given the much higher federal funds now given to carcinogenic nukes.
"We continue to ask the federal government to provide a clear solution for what the long-term storage of spent fuel will be," said Marshall Murphy, spokesman for Exelon Nuclear, which owns Illinois' plants.
Yet the nuke industry says that the waste problem can be solved. The clear solution is to not generate any more nuclear waste. We have a toxic waste problem that will last hundreds of generations and people want to call nuclear energy GREEN!!
thanks shadowdancer,for your excellent post.
Even if the only problem with nuclear power was that its wastes could be turned in to powerful and/or dirty bombs, that would be enough for me to not want to keep spreading the technology. Long-lived radioactivity and being terrorist magnets just adds to an already bad problem.
Every lobbyist and Utility official and the board of directors and the
members of congress who promote nuclear, should be made to live next door to the nuclear waste..
Mainestay is right and tnmoderate is the one with your head in the sand. The Yucca Mountain site was ALWAYS scientifically questionable and politically driven.
Storing nuclear waste where water flows into a major river basin supplying millions of people the way the Colorado does is simply not a bright idea. And if that 'tn' stands for Tennessee, someone living that close to the New Madrid fault has a serious need to get themselves a whole lot better informed on the subject of geologic fault lines. Glassification of spent nuclear waste is the most likely technique currently available to prevent the water problem alone, but all bets are off when mountains move.
Think of the weight of one cinder block. Remember how pulverized things were when the Twin Towers came down? Now try to wrap your mind around this. During the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the Santa Susanna Mountain range gained 6 inches in altitude and moved 18 inches west. Do you REALLY want nuclear waste storage to be exposed to that kind of force???
Here is some perspective on the current state of nuclear power 'safety' from credible sources (including discussion of the Gen-IV/fast breeder reactors):
http://www.citizen.org/documents/FatalFlawsSummary.pdf , http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/nuclear_power/nuclear-power-in-a-warming-world.pdf , http://climateprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/nuclear-costs-2009.pdf , http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/reactor-map/embedded-flash-map.html . Then the book by Ernest Sternglass, Secret Fallout, 1982. He currently is with a group collecting baby teeth to track the concnetration of Strontium 90: http://www.radiation.org/ . Sternglass tracked the effects of low level radiation and incidents that were spun to the public (on-going).
This is what happens when you act before thinking things out to it's last detail. I would have thought we as a people would have learned our lesson a long time ago. But no, we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. It's like we have this endless supply of people and land to contaminate. We are suppose to be leaders of the free world, When are we going to take this responsibility seriously and start doing what's best for us all and not just for us few. NUCLEAR WASTE, Depleted Uranium, no matter what you call it, it's still radioactive waste. We have no where to store it, so we decided to give it away to the ARMS Manufactures, because we found it could be molded into a weapon, a very effective weapon, but there is one catch, it's still radioactive so what do we call it so people want be alarmed, That's it Depleted Uranium, (not having, less than). A great name for the people peddling this stuff, but not for us soldiers who have to handle it or live in the areas where it has been deployed. After the first gulf war the military knew that Iraq was contaminated with Depleted Uranium particles was is floating around in the air, on sand particles, waiting to be breathed in. Well that's just what is happening to our soldiers, and I'm one of them who tested positive for exposure. When I asked my government about depleted uranium, they tell me that it's very safe, so safe that you can put it on your breakfast cereal in the morning and eat it. Another lie. This is the Agent Orange of today, it causes cancers, multiple types, can be passed on to your spouse and unborn children, causing death and deformities, but it's safe enough to eat. I have been traveling around the United States speaking about this issue and about all the plants that are manufacturing these poisons. I have been lobbing in Washington for a hearing on DU health effects on our soldiers and the environment. I just attended a conference in Costa Rica where we are trying to set up an export operation for depleted uranium. This is a very lucrative business and the people behind it don't care who gets hurt, as long as the money keeps rolling in. A Factory in Colony New York was shut down after it was found burning strap pieces of DU at night. The radioactive particles traveled over twenty miles away and was found logged in the air condition filters of a hospital. The factory was closed down in the eighties and millions was spent to clean up the site. Just last year a test was conducted of this site in Colony New York and of it's residences, and the soil, water and the people who lived around the factory still are testing positive for DU radioactive waste. People this stuff has a shelf live of 4.5 billion years. About the life of our planet. What have they gotten us into this time. No wonder the Military doesn't want to admit DU is harmful to it's soldiers and want properly test us upon request. I am asking our congress and senate to hold hearing on the harmful effects of DU and the health treatment myself and other soldiers need immediately. We can no longer allow the people we put into office just do what they want to without precautions and our approval. Too long have we given our elected officials, local,state, and federal5 a blank check to cash.