When I was in college, we worked on a project as a group of geoscientists and engineers to try and select the best possible disposal option for nuclear “waste.” As I remember, our favorite idea was geologic disposal beneath subducting plates that would carry it into the earth’s core. Dumping it into outer space was maybe not so nice and impractical because it would take about 8 pounds of rocket fuel just to get a pound of “waste” into low orbit, and if a rocket blue up during ascent its contents would potentially spread out. At that time, Yucca Mountain still seemed like a viable disposal spot[1], the use of self-healing salt diapirs seemed advisable, and Sweden was trying a unique underground design based on bentonite clay. It was a simpler time…
Anyway, I now view “waste” disposal as a trivial problem, that was made to look larger than it is by the political disaster at Yucca Mountain. The DOE’s website quantifies the problem as follows: U.S. commercial reactors have generated about 90,000 metric tons of spent fuel since the 1950s. If all of it were able to be stacked together, it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards. It is true that some of the spent fuel will remain radioactive for 10,000 years or more, but the risk posed is mitigated by several factors (listed in descending order of importance):
- Spent fuel is not actually “waste,” but has been treated that way since the Carter administration limited U.S. exploitation of the complete nuclear fuel cycle to discourage nuclear weapons proliferation. France and Russia have used commercial-scale reactors to reprocess this spent fuel into additional fuel and electricity and to reduce the volume and toxicity of the residual material significantly. The U.S. could begin doing this at any time to reduce their “waste” stockpile, but it is probably advisable to put that off until industrial-scale proliferation-resistant fission technologies are mature enough to avoid having to do the reprocessing under high security.
- Geoscientists can identify disposal locations with a high degree of probability to be stable and dry until the “waste” is no longer radioactive.
- Both methods of spent fuel storage currently used in the U.S. appear to be workable, long-term options for spent fuel storage. Dry cask storage is possible after 5 years generally and does not require the presence of cooling water to remain safe. It is extremely cheap relative to geologic disposal, and it has proven to be robust against environmental and other risks[2].
- Various disposal technologies exist (e.g., vitrification, blending) that do not require long-term geological disposal or dry storage, although they could be used in conjunction with these options.
- Several other countries have effectively solved this problem by managing final disposition of their spent fuel based upon public consensus (e.g., Finland, Sweden, France).
When I was studying Environmental Engineering in college, we learned that NIMBYism (Not in My Back Yard) is a predictable facet of human nature. This point is best illustrated by professors describing the rejection of the Yucca Mountain spent fuel disposal site and is generally accepted without much critical thought. I think a more accurate model of human behavior was articulated by my Uncle Mark. I will render a PG version of it here, as this is a family blog😊
Nobody Wants to Live in a Dump!
Yucca Mountain was selected from a short list of three sites in what later became known as the “Screw Nevada Deal.” The rest goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway. The federal government decided (top-down) that Nevada would receive the spent fuel, ostensibly because it was the scientifically determined optimal location. Nevada had no good reason to let the country “dump” all its “waste” in their backyard. But we have hazardous waste landfills that receive dioxin and methyl-ethyl-death-containing wastes – those are presumably in someone else’s backyard. How can they exist according to the NIMBY model of human behavior.
People are made to feel that they are optimizing their economic utility by the relative safety afforded to them from careful management of materials that pose a hazard to them, and by the economic benefit bestowed upon them by the disposal industry. Land is cheaper by the landfill. They have liners, and leachate control systems, and stormwater management. Things are covered with impermeable clays and synthetic fabrics and topsoil is seeded with groundcover.
One interesting fact about Nevada: they don’t have any nuclear power plants. Perhaps the government that spent $15 billion on the project could have thrown in four APR-1400s in that hole in Yucca Mountain to provide Nevadans and their industries with the cheapest electricity in the U.S. It seems like it was the “Screw Nevada Deal.”
[1] This was during the ascent of Barack Obama. Shortly after I finished college, he made a promise to Harry Reid, who had made a promise to the people of Nevada, that he would kill the Yucca Mountain Project.
[2] Although there is no urgency to the removal of spent fuel in dry cask storage from power plants across the country, the power companies paid fees to the U.S. government for the fuel’s final disposal, in accordance with U.S. regulations. The political disaster at Yucca Mountain resulted in the U.S. government effectively stealing these fees from those companies. I believe the U.S. government should pay this debt by negotiating plans with communities willing to host a long-term storage site in exchange for incentives to grow their local economy. Removing dry casks from the power plants and placing it all in offsite locations will show that we are actively and successfully managing the spent fuel storage in a manner that is fair to everyone. This is part of the public relations strategy necessary to reverse the damage caused by the Yucca Mountain issue. These locations need not be centralized as long as they are secure.