My previous articles on nuclear energy dealt with the scientifically
established, statistically irrefutable fact that modern nuclear power stations
are one of the safest forms of energy at our disposal:
There are four categories of nuclear waste:
- Spent nuclear fuel—solid metal cylindrical pellets
- High-level waste—goop with the consistency of honey (primarily from cold-war weapons production)
- Transuranic waste—mixture of solid debris and goop (primarily from cold-war weapons production)
- Low-level waste—contaminated protective shoe covers and clothing, wiping rags, mops, filters, reactor water treatment residues, equipment and tools, luminous dials, medical tubes, swabs, injection needles, syringes …
The United States actually already has a deep geologic repository called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (which needs renamed because it is no longer a pilot plant) that is now accepting waste.
Many think it would be unwise to put used nuclear fuel into a repository you can’t retrieve it from because it could be a source of fuel for other types of reactors, like the BN-800 fast reactor that went into commercial operation in Russia last year. That reactor is being used in a “burner” fuel configuration to consume stockpiles of plutonium from decommissioned warheads but it could also be used as a “breeder” reactor. Breeder reactors could create enough fuel to power civilization for many centuries from used fuel.
A much wiser idea for storage of our used nuclear fuel, which presently is sitting in parking lots at nuclear power stations in nearly impervious bomb shelters for fuel rods (commonly known as dry casks) would be to put all of these casks into a single secure parking lot just in case we need what is inside them to help save the world from climate change.
These casks are good for about 160 years, so there’s no big hurry on that count. And the cost to build and run this secure parking lot could be paid for with just the interest on the money already put into the Nuclear Waste Fund by nuclear power stations.
Thanks to anti-nuclear groups, the Department of Energy has paid roughly $4.5 billion in damages to various utilities for failing to create a permanent repository for used fuel with the money in that waste fund.
The largely successful effort by antinuclear groups to prevent the creation of permanent storage may be what saves us in the end because it has kept that future supply of zero carbon energy available. Not sure which law that falls under, Murphy’s Law or the Law of Unintended Consequences.
In addition, according to James Conca, this delaying action has made Yucca Mountain largely irrelevant. Most high-level waste has cooled enough to go into the existing Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and our used nuclear fuel really should be kept readily available for future use in an interim storage area.
Please note that most of the above information was gleaned from articles by an expert on the subject, James Conca, writing for Forbes.
Engineers love graphs but the general public, not accustomed
to seeing them every day, tend to ignore them. There have been many attempts to
convey without graphs how little waste is produced. In the documentary Pandora's
Promise, they showed a football stadium that would contain all spent fuel used in
the United States since the invention of nuclear energy. But to some people,
this seems like a lot of waste. Images of Coke cans or a hand holding a
vitrified glass disc of waste as examples of how much waste would be generated
to provide an American with a lifetime of electricity fail because it requires
the reader to trust whatever numbers were used to make this claim.
Which is why I created the graphic below. No trust required. All you need are your eyes. And anyone is free to borrow this graphic to help reverse the decades of misinformation created by antinuclear energy groups.
