Nuclear wasteU.S., industry grappling with a growing nuclear waste problem
Thirty years ago congress voted to fund the building of centralized nuclear waste repository at the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada. Four years ago to Obama administration pulled to plug on the project, and nuclear wasted has continued to accumulate on the grounds of nuclear plants – active and shuttered – around the United States. As of May 2013, the U.S. nuclear industry had 69,720 tons of toxic nuclear waste to deal with. The administration strategy calls for a short-term centralized storage facility by 2025, and a permanent national geological repository by 2048.
American nuclear power plants are building or expanding storage facilities to hold their nuclear which, by now, was supposed to be transferred to a centralized national repository. Steel and concrete containers were introduced in the 1980s to store waste on-site, but this was meant to be a short-term solution. Now industry and government officials are considering how durable the containers will be for long term storage.
The Miami Herald reports that the Energy Department (DOE) intends to build a new centralized nuclear waste storage facility, since the plan to build such a repository at the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada were abandoned four years ago. New Mexico, Texas, and Mississippi are potential hosts, but a new legislation needed for plans to proceedhas stalled in Congress. Peter Lyons, assistant secretary for nuclear energy at DOE, said the department cannot make plans for individual sites until Congress creates a new framework for waste policy. The Obama administration’s strategy calls for a short-term storage facility by 2025, and a permanent geological repository by 2048.
In the meantime, nuclear power plants are storing high-level nuclear waste on-site. Most waste remains in storage pools, but more and more nuclear waste is being stored in dry casks containers.
In 2011, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) began offering 40-year license renewals for dry cask storage containers — previous licenses were for twenty-years. Tests have raised new question about how to monitor degradation inside the containers, environmental requirements for storage sites, and the durability of the containers to support “high burn-up,” or longer-burning fuels which are now widely used by American plants.
“Now that we’ve shown that the national policy is shifting, we’re having to relook at these systems to make sure they still meet the regulations for longer and longer periods of time,” said Eric Benner, an NRC official who manages the transportation and nuclear waste storage inspection program.
At the Millstone Power Station in Waterford, Connecticut, nineteen containers filled with nuclear waste are positioned on a concrete pad which was expanded last October to make room for an additional 135 containers by 2045. The U.S. nuclear industry had 69,720 tons of uranium waste as of May 2013, with 29 percent stored in dry casks and 71 percent in pools, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute. Nuclear waste is about 95 percent uranium, and 1 percent is made up of curium, americium, and plutonium-239, all elements with long half-lives, requiring thousands of years to lose radioactive potency.
Dan Steward, the first selectman in Waterford, is concerned about Millstone’s plan to store more waste on-site. “We do not want to become a nuclear waste site as a community,” Steward said.
DOE’s planned short-term storage facility will accommodate nuclear waste from closed nuclear reactors in California, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Wisconsin, Connecticut, Colorado, and Oregon.
