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New NRC Rule Supports Indefinite Storage of Nuclear Waste
mdsolar writes in with news about a NRC rule on how long nuclear waste can be stored on-site after a reactor has shut down. The five-member board that oversees the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Tuesday voted to end a two-year moratorium on issuing new power plant licenses. The moratorium was in response to a June 2012 decision issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that ordered the NRC to consider the possibility that the federal government may never take possession of the nearly 70,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel stored at power plant sites scattered around the country. In addition to lifting the moratorium, the five-member board also approved guidance replacing the Waste Confidence Rule. "The previous Waste Confidence Rule determined that spent fuel could be safely stored on site for at least 60 years after a plant permanently ceased operations," said Neil Sheehan, spokesman for the NRC. In the new standard, Continued Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel Rule, NRC staff members reassessed three timeframes for the storage of spent fuel — 60 years, 100 years and indefinitely.
Which is the bargain and which is the stupid, shortsighted compromise?
The compromise is the bargain, and it isn't stupid or shortsighted. A central repository would be extremely expensive. Billions were spent on Yucca Mountain, just on analysis and legal fees. On-site storage is "good enough" for now, and nukes will require security guards regardless. We can build the centralized storage facility in a few decades when our understanding of geology, robotics, engineering, etc. will have progressed. Or even more likely, by then we will have figured out economic uses for many of the waste components, and the "waste" will no longer need to be disposed of.
Yucca mountain is a no go for political reasons, not scientific ones, so what else can we do?
The really sad thing is that there still is a lot of useable fuel in all that if we here allowed to reprocess it. Not to mention that reprocessing would greatly reduce the size of the high level waste. Carter really messed up with that decision...
So, for now, it's store in place and guard the stuff. But this is only really a problem until it cools enough to not require being under water anymore. After that guarding it isn't that hard or expensive. It can be packaged in such a way that getting into it would take hours and industrial equipment. Guarding it just means walking by every day or so and making sure nobody is messing with the containers.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Let's blame the people responsible- Nevada voters. The politicians are just representing their constituents. I supported the Yucca Mountain project before I moved to Nevada and I would be an asshole to change my opinion afterward.
The proposed site is over 100 miles from Vegas in the absolute middle of nowhere. Even if they stored the waste in a big open pit above ground, it still wouldn't affect anyone.
But people here are terrified about transporting the waste along the rail lines through town. There is a freight train that goes literally 100 feet from my office every day with tanker cars full of ammonia and sodium hydroxide. Nobody bats an eye.
I'm quite aware of how radiotoxicity of spent nuclear fuel works. There are in fact graphs detailing it. Fast reactors and actinide burners prevent the actinides from entering the waste stream in the first place, hence why their waste is below original uranium ore radiotoxicity levels after a few hundred years. After that, you can essentially throw the stuff back into the pit you got it out of, knowing that you've actually lowered the overall radiotoxicity of the original material. For current LWRs on a once-through cycle this doesn't occur until some hundreds of thousands of years in the future.
Not far from Yucca Mountain you will find hundreds if not thousands of craters under which are buried the fission and activation products of decades of US nuclear testing. They're not reprocessed and contained in silica glass, they were simply mixed (quite violently) with the soil and rock. And yet they don't seem to go anywhere. There is no need for Yucca Mountain to contain reactor waste for even a hundred years because it will surely be removed and burned as fuel in fast reactors. Once people wake up to the fact that global warming is a vastly greater threat than nuclear power, and that nuclear power is just as essential as wind, solar, geothermal and hydro in combating it, people will realize that "spent" fuel from light water reactors is far too valuable to just throw away.