Nuclear Waste Connundrum

The Nuclear Waste Conundrum 50,000 Tons without a Home

By Lisa Rainwater, Riverkeeper

…politicians and nuclear barons must come up with a plan for not only existing waste, but for the waste of their ‘pending’ next generation plants.

Dry cask storage units at the James A. Fitzpatrick nuclear power plant in Scriba, NY.

»Th e ind ustry and federal government have yet to come up with a viable plan to secure the 50,000 tons of commercial spent fuel that is building up across America. As rumors of a nuclear renaissance continue to percolate throughout the halls of Congress, in corporate boardrooms and across the pages of newspapers, politicians and nuclear barons must come up with a plan for not only existing waste, but for the waste of their ‘pending’ next generation plants. Meanwhile, radioactive rods from reactor cores continue to be dropped into overstuffed spent fuel pools, many of which are now leaking radioactive poisons.

There are three plans on the table, all of them controversial in their own right.

Plan One: Yucca Mountain The original plan – to bury it deep in a Nevada mountain – has been delayed for decades. The Department of Energy’s plan is to bury the nation’s nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain – sacred Shoshone land approximately 100 miles from Las Vegas. But the Yucca Mountain repository faces many serious hurdles. The site has been found to be prone to seismic activities and is marred with geological problems that could allow nuclear waste to escape the site. In 2005, news broke that U.S. Geological Survey hydrologists working on water infiltration issues at Yucca Mountain had falsified data results. The plan faces growing public opposition, including lawsuits by Tribes and government bodies, and bipartisan legislation by western Congress members. Despite the Department of Energy’s recent announcement that Yucca Mountain will open by

I nternational

2017, many experts have concluded that the site will never open.

Plan Two: Onsite Dry Cask Storage A second plan for the nuclear waste conundrum involves storing the spent fuel rods in dry casks on site at nuclear plants across the country. While environmental groups are, in general, supportive of dry cask storage, they argue that casks should not be stored above ground in close proximity to one another. They have proposed safety and security measures such as Beamhenge (an intricate batting cage-like system that would shield the casks from attack) and onsite dispersal of casks in earthen berms, but so far the proposals have been rejected by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Plan Three: Reprocessing Nuclear Waste Though England, France and Japan have been reprocessing their waste for decades, President Jimmy Carter banned the reprocessing of spent fuel – which creates weapons-grade plutonium as a byproduct – in the U.S., out of concern over nuclear proliferation. But now, even with the U.S. in the throes of a global war on terrorism, President Bush and key U.S. Senators, including Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, are pushing hard not only to bring reprocessing back to the U.S., but to the global marketplace as well.

President Bush has earmarked $250 million in his 2007 budget for a new program – Global Nuclear Energy Partnership – to set up a global network of nuclear fuel exchanges, whereby the United States and Russia would accept shipments of highlevel nuclear waste from other nuclear countries, reprocess it at commercial facilities and then resell the plutonium-enriched fuel back to countries to feed their nuclear reactors.

Bush contends that the plan is actually “promoting non-proliferation,” but many scientists are critical of his proposal. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS), formed in 1945 by nuclear scientists from the Manhattan Project, issued a statement in May 2006 challenging the federal government’s assertions: “FAS agrees that proliferation is a grave threat but the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership will not solve any proliferation problems and will make some worse.”