Glimmer of hope for Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository project

and the government set a 2022 deadline for closing the country’s seventeen nuclear reactors (eight aging reactors were shut down in the immediate aftermath of Fukushima, and will not be restarted).

Even without the Fukushima shock, though, there has been one persistent problem for which the nuclear industry is yet to offer a satisfying solution: what to do with nuclear waste.

Nuclear plants generates large amount of waste which remain highly toxic for hundreds of years. Nuclear waste in the United States is currently being kept in cooling pools on the site of the plants. After a period of cooling (typically between five and twenty years, depending on the radioactive material), the still highly radioactive, cool fuel is stored in steel-reinforced concrete casks which sit out in the open on concrete slabs. There are about 15,000 tons of it currently sitting at nuclear power plants across the United States.

There are two problems with this combined pool-dry casks solution:

First, nuclear waste continues to accumulate, and if more nuclear reactors are built, even more waste will be generated. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) estimates that many of the nuclear power plants in the United States will be out of room in their spent fuel pools by 2015, thus requiring the use of temporary storage of some kind.

Second, keeping dangerous waste on the grounds of more than a 100 nuclear plants is a security nightmare:

• Different plants are located in different parts of the country and are thus exposed to different natural dangers (earthquakes in California, tornadoes in the Midwest, etc.). The NRC stipulates that cooling pools should be able to withstand earthquakes which occur within a 200-mile radius of the plant, but some security experts point to a combination earthquake-tsunami which wrecked the Fukushima plants as an example of how nature may surprise us. Moreover, some plants sit near powerful fault lines – for example, the Diablo Canyon facility near San Luis Obispo in California, and the San Onofre plant about halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego – and may thus be exposed to powerful tremors which exceed design specifications.
• Terrorist may find these exposed cooling pools an inviting target. Nuclear reactors are surrounding by sturdy, 4-ft thick concrete containment vessels which, the industry argues, may be able to withstand a 9/11-like attack by terrorists (some security experts dispute this assertion). The pools, though, are housed in more conventional buildings which are conceivably more susceptible to aircraft strikes or explosives, according to Time Magazine’s Mark Benjamin.

Benjamin quotes a 1997 study by the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, which estimated that a massive calamity at one spent-fuel pool could ultimately lead to 138,000 deaths and contaminate 2,000 sq. mi. (5,200 sq. km) of land.