nuclear-news

USA no nearer to solving its huge nuclear waste problems

Three decades after the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act said the federal government would handle disposal of high-level radioactive waste, the United States still has no agreed-upon solution for where and how to dispose of about 70,000 metric tons of it. About 10 percent is from the military’s nuclear weapons programs; most of the rest is piling up at commercial reactor sites around the country……

Nuclear waste site hunt could point to granite, WSJ, 18 Dec 11, MONTPELIER, Vt. — The likely death of a planned nuclear waste site at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain has left federal agencies looking for a possible replacement. A national lab working for the U.S. Department

of Energy is now eying granite deposits stretching from Georgia to Maine as potential sites, along with big sections of Minnesota and Wisconsin where that rock is prevalent.

Three decades after the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act said the federal
government would handle disposal of high-level radioactive waste, the
United States still has no agreed-upon solution for where and how to
dispose of about 70,000 metric tons of it. About 10 percent is from
the military’s nuclear weapons programs; most of the rest is piling up
at commercial reactor sites around the country……
Exposure to high-level radioactive waste can be lethal, and the
material needs to be isolated for at least thousands of years while
its radioactivity dissipates. One court decision related to the
decadeslong controversy over Yucca Mountain specified an isolation
period of 1 million years — about five times as long as homo sapiens
has existed on earth, according to the American Museum of Natural
History…..
John Keeley, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry
group, said there is also no effort in Congress to break the logjam.
The situation currently is characterized by “inertia,” he said….
The nation’s only active deep underground waste site is the Waste
Isolation Pilot Project near Carlsbad, N.M., which is mainly storing
plutonium from bomb-making…..
Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear industry engineer who is now a
Vermont-based consultant on nuclear-related issues, called the report
on granite sites “ominous.” He pointed to factors that he said raise
the likelihood of the massive granite outcroppings in rural parts of
the Northeast attracting attention as potential waste sites……
Vermont is no stranger to the nuclear waste storage debate. It was one
of the places Department of Energy surveyed for potential waste sites
in the mid-1980s — before Congress targeted Yucca Mountain.

At one public hearing in Wells River, more than 2,000 people turned
out to voice their outrage at the idea……
Madeleine Kunin was governor the last time a nuclear waste storage
site search focused on Vermont. The letters she got and wrote in
opposition — one resident said the proposal would “use Vermonters as
guinea pigs” — fill more than a half-dozen folders in the state
archives.

Kunin said recently she doubted the state would be any more welcoming
now to the idea.

“Absolutely not,” she said. “My gut reaction is this would not be a
good place.” The waste should go “somewhere really isolated from
inhabited land … somewhere in the middle of nowhere.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/AP83791e202f4d425b9e21045969e96fa9.html

December 19, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, wastes