The US government's plan ultimately to dispose of the spent nuclear fuel piling up at US nuclear power plants by storing it at the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada was effectively abandoned earlier this year when the Obama administration halted funding, saying the Nevada site was "not an option." Congress is reported to be drafting legislation that will finally kill off the plan. Nevada state officials have contended throughout that the Yucca Mountain site is dangerously flawed because of geologic hazards from earthquake faults and potential volcanic activity, among other reasons.
This has prompted a group of university experts on nuclear waste policy to explore another plan that would lead to a new national nuclear waste strategy.
President Obama's plan calls on Congress to change the law so that the $23 billion Nuclear Waste Fund is used to pay utilities to keep the waste secure for decades in states where it is now, without relying on Congress to appropriate money for above-ground storage of the waste.
A new report ('Plan D' for spent nuclear fuel by Rodney Ewing, University of Michigan, Clifford E. Singer, University of Illinois, and Paul P. H. Wilson, University of Wisconsin-Madison) by experts from these three Midwestern universities examining alternatives (based on a consensus of scholars who attended workshops at the University of Illinois earlier this year) describes this as a substantial task,involving changing the Nuclear Waste Policy Act but " a far less formidable one than either trying to license promptly a second U.S. repository or forcing the radioactive material produced in US reactors in this century to fit into Yucca Mountain."
The report describes another plan, dubbed Plan A, as reprocessing spent fuel for use in breeder reactors. Plan A is purely hypothetical because no such reactors have been licensed or built in the United States and they're not likely to be built in the near future.
A prototype, the Clinch River Breeder Reactor in Tennessee, was authorised in 1970. But after cost overruns and other setbacks including concerns for nuclear weapons proliferation, Congress terminated the project in 1983.
Plan B is the Yucca mountain solution. Plan C involves reprocessing used fuel through burning plutonium and other long-lived isotopes in reactors to reduce the space needed for deep underground storage.
As designated by the report, plan D is holding 77000 tons of spent fuel in dry casks above ground "until it becomes clearer whether reprocessing will precede permanent disposal" while Plan E is to build no more nuclear power reactors and abandon spent fuel reprocessing altogether.
Nuclear utility advocates have argued that the $23 billion that ratepayers put into the Nuclear Waste Fund for building a repository should be returned if Yucca Mountain won't be licensed. Ratepayers have been paying one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour since 1983 into the fund for the government to begin disposing of the waste, originally scheduled to start in 1998.
The report favours Plan D, and lists five reasons why the Nuclear Waste Policy Act should be changed, including the probability of lawsuits, the prospect of fuel being stranded at inoperative reactor sites, the need for research and development of used fuel recycling, the dangers of sabotage or accident with spent fuel densely packed in wet pools, and to allow the building of new reactors. But the Yucca plan seems to be too flawed to survive. Even if licensed, Yucca Mountain would not start accepting spent fuel for many years. Nuclear reactors will soon produce more spent fuel than the repository would be licensed to receive. And it may be difficult to license Yucca Mountain at all, even more so to amend the licence so that it can take more spent fuel.
Linkedin
