US Freezes Nuclear Power Plant Permits Because of Waste Issues

KindMind writes "The U.S. Government said it will stop issuing all permits for new plants and license extensions for existing plants are being frozen due to concerns over waste storage. From the article: 'The government's main watchdog, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, believes that current storage plans are safe and achievable. But a federal court said that the NRC didn't detail what the environmental consequences would be if the agency is wrong. The NRC says that "We are now considering all available options for resolving the waste issue, But, in recognition of our duties under the law, we will not issue [reactor] licenses until the court's remand is appropriately addressed." Affected are 14 reactors awaiting license renewals, and an additional 16 reactors awaiting permits for new construction.'"

Comments

Re:pump it into the air

[Immerman]

In fairness all the highly radioactive (= short half-life) fission by-products with half-lives less than several months (or even years) isn't really an environmental issue - you need to be careful with it initially, but it disappears on it's own in short order. And most of the rest of the high-level "waste" is actually perfectly good fuel which could be reprocessed to remove the fission-damping contaminants (or just used in a more efficient reactor to begin with). Add in the fact that all your waste remains neatly fused into your spent fuel pellets where it's easy to deal with and the waste problems are pretty minor. (if handled intelligently)

Coal on the other hand releases all that uranium and thorium directly into the environment, whether in the smoke or the ash.

As for meltdowns - yeah, ugly things. But offhand I can't think of a single modern reactor that has even had a major containment breach - TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima were all designed in the 60s, and fission wasn't even theorized until the late 30's, with the first experimental reactor achieving criticality in '42. That's only about 20 years of experience to go into their design, without any major catastrophes having occurred to inform their risk-management - compared to the 70 years and multiple accidents worth of paranoia going into modern reactor design. Probably the biggest problem with fission reactors is that the vast majority are still based on designs driven by weapons research (i.e. goal #1 was extraction of weaponizable byproducts). CANDU is the only in-use design family I can think of offhand that was designed from the ground up to be a power plant - and while a "meltdown" in such a reactor would be costly to repair it's highly unlikely that anything particularly radioactive would escape the core.