Scientists Say Nuclear Fuel Pools Pose Safety, Health Risks (nbcnews.com)

mdsolar quotes a report from NBC News: Ninety-six aboveground, aquamarine pools around the country that hold the nuclear industry's spent reactor fuel may not be as safe as U.S. regulators and the nuclear industry have publicly asserted, a study released May 20 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine warned. Citing a little-noticed study by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the academies said that if an accident or an act of terrorism at a densely-filled pool caused a leak that drains the water away from the rods, a cataclysmic release of long-lasting radiation could force the extended evacuation of nearly 3.5 million people from territory larger than the state of New Jersey. It could also cause thousands of cancer deaths from excess radiation exposure, and as much as $700 billion dollars in costs to the national economy. The report is the second and final study of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi power plant, which was pummeled from a tsunami on March 11, 2011. The authors suggest the U.S. examine the benefits of withdrawing the spent fuel rods from the pools and storing them instead in dry casks aboveground in an effort to avoid possible catastrophes. The idea is nothing new, but it's been opposed by the industry because it could cost as much as $4 billion. The latest report contradicts parts of a study by Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff released two years after the Fukushima incident. The NRC staff in its 2014 study said a major earthquake could be expected to strike an area where spent fuel is stored in a pool once in 10 million years or less, and even then, "spent fuel pools are likely to withstand severe earthquakes without leaking."

Comments

Re:This is what happens...

[ShanghaiBill]

There is no perfect solution for storing nuclear waste, but for the next few decades, the pools are our best option from a technical perspective, and our only option from a political perspective. Despite the alarmism in TFA, the water cannot simply be "drained out" by, say, pulling a cork at the bottom of the pool. To drain a pool takes several days of pumping, which a terrorist would be unable to do. The water itself is not radioactive. Maintenance workers go into the pools with scuba equipment, and we know this is okay because Randall Monroe said it is safe.

In the next few decades, we are likely to make a lot of progress in robots to handle radioactive materials much more inexpensively and more safely that we can do today. We are also likely to find uses for many of the isotopes, which will have economic value and no longer be considered "waste". A few decades hence, we will almost certainly be in a better position to make long term decisions about what to do with the spent fuel. In the meantime, the fuel rods are getting less and less radioactive every day.

Re:This is what happens...

[MrKaos]

No, you learn some science.

I was speaking specifically of fast burner

You'll need to learn some politics too. Specifically the Integral Fast Reactor was a burner reactor prototyped in the US that showed promise with a burn up rate of 19%. It promised to replace coal and oil but Clinton shut it down and W.Bush funded its demolition in Sec 628 of the 2005 US Energy policy act. Oil and coal companies don't want something around that will replace their product, you see. To rub salt into the wound, the same act fund pilot programs to replicate some of IFR's hydrogen production functionality in Sec. 634 - as far as we know the funds haven't been accessed.

Of course the issue with the burner technology you suggest, apart from using sodium as a coolant, is that these reactors will be insanely radioactive at the end of their service lifespan. The only proper way to deploy them would be to build them inside a mountain where the reactor could be disposed of in-situ to cool and they simply would not be economically viable unless you could make one with a service life that exceeds 100 years. You won't get that without a significant advancement in materials technology.

I hoped burners would work too as it looked like promising technology for nuclear disarmament, however I'm afraid we are still a long way off.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of NIMBYs and anti-nuke environmental activists, we are storing spent waste in absolutely the most dangerous possible way.

You nukkers should stop blaming NIMBYs all the time because they have no political power in the placement of nuclear facilities. Yucca is not being used because it is about as effective at storing radio-isotopes as a sponge is to carry water. Hopefully some geologists here will chime in with some more details but getting the geology right for storing nuclear materials is very difficult in granite (the DOE's prefered choice) due to the way the rock fractures, let alone the pumice Yucca mountain is made of.

Yucca was selected because one of the representatives from Nevada didn't show up for the vote that placed it - nothing to do with science, it was placed inappropriately *because* of NIMBYism. There are probably more approriate sites in the US to choose from if science is applied to selecting one instead of politics. Once you do place it you are going to be building a lot of railways to move the spent fuel and NIMBYs and environmentalists have no control over investment funding for that.

You nukkers should start to look at how the oil and coal industry affects the nuclear industry with their lobbying power instead of blaming environmentalists and NIMBYs who have very little influence. It's all there (and more) in the laws that govern the way the taxpayer and government interact with funding of all of the energy industries. A core component of the US 'New Deal' the PUCHA is repealed in the 2005 energy act (see Subtitle F—Repeal of PUHCA in the same act) so that oil and coal interests can access taxpayer funding via accessing provisions in Sec 638 of the same act. They were *exactly* the conditions that created the US depression in the first place only this time oil and coal are using the nuclear industry to access the taxpayer's rates instead of other utilities.

"NIMBY" is a tired accusation that ignores how coal and oil interests are the main face of lobbying power that determines how these laws are shaped to distribute funding.