[ RadSafe ] LA Times: Nuclear Waste Outpaces Solutions

[James Salsman]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-waste12jun12,1,3704797.story

Nuclear Waste Outpaces Solutions

Plants use outdoor storage casks while waiting for the government to 
find a longer-term solution. Some fear it won't.

by Ralph Vartabedian
Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times

June 12, 2005

MORRIS, Ill. — Along the headwaters of the Illinois River, engineers at 
the Dresden nuclear power station have erected two dozen steel and 
concrete silos that rise 20 feet above the Midwest plain.

The gray structures are unremarkable except for what is loaded inside: 
Each contains roughly 13 tons of high-level nuclear waste that has been 
accumulating at the plant since the Eisenhower administration. With 
nowhere to go, the waste will most likely remain in place for decades.

Dresden's reactors have produced one of the largest stockpiles — 1,347 
tons — of civilian nuclear waste in the nation. With the plant churning 
out nearly 48 tons more waste each year, engineers are preparing to 
double the size of the outdoor storage pad this summer.

The plant has the same problem as nearly all of the nation's 103 
commercial reactors: They were never designed to store waste long-term 
and are now forced to deal with large quantities of spent uranium fuel 
rods that produce high levels of radiation.

The problem reflects decades of miscalculations and missteps by the 
federal government, which promised at the dawn of the nuclear age to 
accept ownership of the waste. The plan to build a waste repository at 
Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert has faced so many political, legal 
and technical problems that it's impossible to project when — or even if 
— it will be built.

As a result, the most lethal waste product of industrial society is 
being handled outside any federal policy and without any roadmap for how 
it will be managed in the future, according to industry officials, 
nuclear waste experts, lawyers and academicians.

"It is a statement of reality," acknowledges Clay Sell, deputy secretary 
of Energy. "Is it the right policy? No."

The deep storage pools traditionally used to safely keep nuclear waste 
are filling up at most plants. Utilities have turned to outdoor storage 
in so-called dry casks as the de facto standard for dealing with waste.

 From California to South Carolina, utilities have loaded 700 of the 
steel and concrete casks, and scores of additional casks are scheduled 
to be filled this year.

It is a stopgap measure that has averted a shutdown of the nuclear power 
industry. But it means leaving all of the roughly 50,000 tons of 
civilian nuclear waste spread across the nation for the next 
half-century or more. And storing the waste at power plant sites is 
creating significant economic, environmental, legal and security 
challenges — including the potential for it to become a terrorist target.

A recent study by the National Academy of Sciences found that the waste 
stored in pools was most vulnerable, but the outdoor casks also were 
potential targets. Such an attack could trigger an environmental 
catastrophe.

"These are the ultimate dirty bombs," said Bob Alvarez, a senior scholar 
at the Institute for Policy Studies and a former Energy Department 
official. "Let's not pretend the way we are storing this waste is safe 
and secure in an age of terrorism."

Utility executives and government officials sharply dispute such 
allegations, saying the plants have multiple layers of protection from 
any attack. Exelon Corp., the nation's largest nuclear utility, has 
erected heavy barriers and security towers at Dresden that are staffed 
around the clock by guards with automatic weapons.

Though the nuclear industry has a good record for preventing radiation 
leaks during normal operations and dry casks are widely regarded as 
safe, many outside experts say their biggest fear is that future 
generations may lack the willpower and financial capability to safeguard 
tons of radioactive waste dispersed across the nation. Waste is already 
stored in casks at five shuttered nuclear plant sites.

"We are muddling into an alternative plan by default," says Joe Egan, a 
longtime attorney for the nuclear industry who now represents Nevada in 
fighting Yucca Mountain.

Nuclear waste has also created a legal mess. The Energy Department is 
facing more than four dozen lawsuits by the utility industry for its 
failure to take the waste. Damages could reach $56 billion over the next 
three decades, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, a powerful 
trade group for nuclear utilities.

At the Department of Energy, Sell argues that deep geologic storage of 
the waste at Yucca Mountain would be the best technical solution. He 
believes the project will eventually be completed. But the loss of a key 
court case last year and political resistance in Congress have put the 
dump at least 14 years behind schedule.

Without a dump, utilities have few options short of shutting down their 
reactors and eliminating 20% of the U.S. electricity supply that comes 
from nuclear power. And without a solution to waste, the proposal by 
President Bush to start a new era of nuclear plant construction could go 
nowhere.

Indefinite storage of nuclear waste at current reactor sites is a bitter 
pill for many politicians, particularly those from environmentally 
fragile areas such as Lake Michigan, which is ringed by nuclear plants.

"I want the waste off the shores of Lake Michigan," said Rep. Fred Upton 
(R-Mich.), whose district includes two nuclear plants built on the 
lake's eastern boundary. "Ultimately, there is a safety problem."

Nuclear waste at power plants will remain radioactive for hundreds of 
thousands of years. The fission of uranium inside reactors produces heat 
for electricity production. Afterward, the uranium fuel rods are far 
more radioactive than when they entered the reactor.

To maximize storage capacity for the spent fuel rods, the nuclear 
industry devised a way to pack them more closely in the 50-foot-deep 
storage pools than initially planned. Critics say this kind of dense 
packing poses a safety risk, however. If terrorists were to puncture the 
pool wall and drain the water, the rods could ignite and disperse lethal 
amounts of radiation, according to a recent report by the National 
Academy of Sciences.

Even with dense packing, the pools are running out of space. Twenty 
years ago, nuclear plants began removing the oldest fuel rods, which 
have radioactively decayed somewhat, and started storing them in massive 
outdoor storage casks like the ones at Dresden.

Officials at Nuclear Regulatory Commission "anticipate that there will 
be an increase in the number of casks being loaded over the next few 
years," said E. William Brach, director of the commission's spent fuel 
project office.

The logistics of nuclear waste ensure it will be around a long time. 
Even if the federal government gets a license to operate Yucca Mountain, 
the earliest it could accept waste shipments would be 2012. By that 
year, more than 60,000 tons of civilian nuclear waste would be spread 
across about three dozen states.

It would take about 50 years to work down the backlog, according to 
Frank von Hippel, a nuclear expert at Princeton University and former 
White House national security advisor. That's because under current 
plans Yucca could process a maximum of 3,000 tons of waste annually, 
while nuclear power plants would be generating 2,000 new tons of waste 
each year. That means a net reduction of just 1,000 tons each year, he said.

"We have to assume that these casks will be around for a very long 
time," Von Hippel said. "It will take quite a while to move them, even 
if we had someplace to send them today."

In any case, "on the day Yucca Mountain opens" it would be too small to 
handle all the waste, acknowledges Sell, the Energy Department official. 
There is no Plan B. Under federal law, the department can pursue only 
Yucca Mountain.

Further complicating matters are the divided lines of authority between 
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Energy Department. The 
commission regulates waste at plant sites and authorizes dry cask 
storage but has no role in national policy for disposing of nuclear 
waste. That policy responsibility rests with the Energy Department, 
which has no voice or authority in the use of dry casks.

In the vacuum, a private consortium is planning to build an above-ground 
storage site for hundreds of casks on an Indian reservation in Utah. 
Despite state opposition, it is getting approval from the nuclear 
commission.

Meanwhile, utilities see dry cask storage as a cheap and safe, if not 
permanent, solution.

Holtec International, one of the leading suppliers, says its casks can 
safely store waste for at least 100 years without leaking, according to 
company marketing manager Joy Russell.

The regulatory commission typically licenses the casks for 20 years but 
last year renewed Dominion Electric's license for 40 years, another 
signal that the waste would remain in place for a long time.

Holtec's casks are constructed of two concentric rings of 1-inch-thick 
steel, separated by 27 inches of concrete that is poured at the power 
plant site. The casks sit on 2-foot-thick concrete pads, requiring no 
electricity, water or instrumentation. Inside, the spent fuel continues 
to radioactively decay, generating heat that is vented out the sides.

The only maintenance involves periodic painting and keeping up the 
radioactive warning labels on the steel shells.

On the inside of the casks, the waste is so radioactive it would deliver 
a fatal dose in minutes, but the outside can be touched.

"An individual can stand right next to the cask," Brach said. "There is 
a dose, but it is a minimal dose."

There have been some relatively minor accidents around the nation 
involving the casks, including one case in which a welding spark ignited 
hydrogen gas inside a cask. The ignition dislodged the cask's lid but 
did not cause other damage.

Antinuclear groups, such as the Washington-based Nuclear Information and 
Resource Service and the Chicago-based Nuclear Energy Information 
Service, say the casks should be better protected. In Germany, for 
example, the casks are inside hardened buildings.

Government tests at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland 
showed that a shoulder-fired missile could penetrate a cask wall, 
causing some radioactive fuel to disperse.

"We don't want this 10-pin bowling alley out in the open," said Dave 
Kraft, an antinuclear activist for more than 20 years. "Anybody with a 
shoulder-fired missile could hit one of these things from outside the 
plant."

Though utilities defend the safety of the casks, they also are demanding 
that the federal government take the waste.

Exelon, formerly Commonwealth Edison, filed one of the 56 suits against 
the Energy Department when the agency failed to meet its legal 
commitment to open Yucca Mountain by 1998. It is the only company to 
settle so far, accepting $600 million for its costs over the next 10 
years, according to Adam H. Levin, Exelon director of spent fuel.

"We expect at some time that the Energy Department will perform," he said.

Across the river from the Dresden plant in the Village of Channahon, a 
residential building boom is occurring, attracting people who make the 
hour-and-a-half commute to jobs in Chicago.

"You can see the nuclear waste right across the river," said Joe 
Petrovic, who lives in a subdivision near the plant and builds homes in 
the area for a living. "The plant hasn't scared anyone from buying a 
home there."

The plant is in Grundy County, which has three nuclear power plants as 
well as a large independent waste storage pool operated by General 
Electric Co. It probably has more nuclear waste than any county in the 
nation, though such statistics are not kept by the Nuclear Regulatory 
Commission.

"I don't see the casks as a problem," said Grundy County Administrator 
Alfred Bourdelais. "Maybe in 200 or 300 years, but today there isn't any 
more risk from those casks than there is from the plant, and it has a 
really low risk."

Such local acceptance of cask storage worries experts who say that in 
the future the casks will become a poor permanent solution.

Kevin Crowley, a nuclear expert at the National Academy of Sciences who 
helped guide an investigation into the vulnerability of spent fuel 
storage, said the casks would become a risky legacy if left in place too 
long.

"The major uncertainty," he said, "is in the confidence that future 
societies will continue to monitor and maintain such facilities."