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USA’s practically unsolvable dilemma about nuclear wastes

 The Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future’s report is arriving in an election year, a time when Congress has traditionally been unwilling to take decisive action. And the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, which instructed the Energy Department to pursue a repository, has historically been interpreted to forbid establishment of an interim storage place until a final site is established.

But with a final resting place more elusive than ever, the three groups believe that Congress or the Energy Department should be moving in that direction.

Wanted: Parking Space for Nuclear Waste  http://green.blogs.nytimes com/2012/01/24/wanted-parking-space-for-nuclear-waste/   NYT, By MATTHEW L. WALD,  January 24, 2012,   When the Obama administration killed a plan to create a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, the government established a “blue-ribbon commission” to study what to do next. Its final report is due on Sunday, and this week three organizations began a public lobbying campaign for several of the recommendations that they assume the commission will make.  Yucca was supposed to store nuclear waste, but the emphasis now is on “managing” it, especially the waste at scattered locations where reactors no longer operate.

At places like Maine Yankee, Connecticut Yankee andRancho Seco in California, reactors have been torn down, but the fuel remains in small concrete-and-steel silos that require maintenance and monitoring by a guard force. Sometimes the presence of nuclear waste prevents re-use of the sites by industry. The Nuclear Energy Institute, the trade association of the reactor operators, joined with the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners and the Nuclear Waste Strategy Coalition, another utility group, to endorse the idea of centralizing such wastes.

They also want a new entity to look for a permanent disposal site and to reform the use of a nuclear waste trust fund into which the Energy Department funnels 0.1 cent per kilowatt-hour of the energy made at reactors.

Even though it spent billions of dollars making way for the Yucca Mountain repository, the fund still has more than $27 billion on hand, some of it from interest income. Yet the effort to find a disposal spot has sometimes been starved by Congress for cash.

“I’m sure in terms of scope and size, its attributes are exactly the kind of thing we would look for, but we want a willing host to step forward and express an interest in storing fuel,’’ said Brian O’Connell, who follows nuclear waste policy for the utility commissioners. He suggests that a host site should be prepared to store waste for at least 40 years, with the possibility of several extensions.

Mr. O’Connell and others pointed to Lea County in southeastern New Mexico as a possible candidate, given enough financial inducements. A waste isolation pilot plant that stores plutonium-contaminated wastes from bomb production is located there in salt beds near Carlsbad.

Separately, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been studying whether waste can be stored in dry casks for a century. The blue-ribbon commission’s draft report emphasizes that the burden of disposing of the wastes should be borne by the generation that benefited from the electricity. In a century, however, the wastes will have lost most of their ability to generate heat, making disposal somewhat easier.

The commission’s report is arriving in an election year, a time when Congress has traditionally been unwilling to take decisive action. And the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, which instructed the Energy Department to pursue a repository, has historically been interpreted to forbid establishment of an interim storage place until a final site is established.

But with a final resting place more elusive than ever, the three groups believe that Congress or the Energy Department should be moving in that direction.  http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/wanted-parking-space-for-nuclear-waste/

January 25, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, wastes