Nuclear waste stuck on California beach with nowhere to go

HOW A NUCLEAR STALEMATE LEFT RADIOACTIVE WASTE STRANDED ON A CALIFORNIA BEACH, Nuclear waste is all dressed up with nowhere to go, The Verge By Rachel Becker @RA_Becks Aug 28, 2018 When I got to the San Onofre State Beach about 60 miles north of San Diego, the red sun of fire season was sandwiched on the horizon between a layer of fog and the sea. Surfers floated in a line off the shore. It looked like any other California beach — except for the row of signs that warned “Nuclear Power Plant Exclusion Area,” and the twin reactor domes rising above the bluffs.

I was there to see the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, a shuttered nuclear power plant right next to the Pacific Ocean. It once supplied electricity to Southern California, but was permanently shut down in 2013. It’s now scheduled to be dismantled, but even when that happens, more than 1,700 tons of spent nuclear fuel will remain — interred in enormous concrete casks behind a seawall. There’s nowhere else to put it.

On the beach, perspectives on the plant ranged from resignation to frustration. “It’s part of the landscape now,” said one man walking his dog. A woman who was roasting marshmallows in the sand with her family said it’s eerie to see the plant when she’s out surfing: “You turn around and take a wave, and you just see these nuclear boobs staring out at you.” Her husband wondered what will happen with the spent nuclear fuel now that the plant is no longer operating. “No citizen wants it here permanently, but nobody wants to take it,” he said. “So we’re just in a really hard spot. What are you supposed to do with it?”

It’s a question that nuclear power plants around the country are reckoning with as low natural gas prices, costly repairs, and political pressure have driven a half dozen reactors to retire early since 2013, according to the Department of Energy. More are slated to shut down in the next ten years — including Diablo Canyon, California’s last nuclear power plant, Rob Nikolewski reports for The San Diego Union-Tribune. That leaves communities that are no longer benefiting from nuclear power saddled with its waste — cooling off in gigantic pools of water made out of reinforced concrete or steel and concrete containers called dry storage.

All those containers of fuel left behind mean that no one can use the land for anything else. And the problem is widespread: spent fuel from commercial reactors is scattered across roughly 80 sites in 35 different states, according to the Government Accountability Office. It wasn’t supposed to be like this: for decades, the plan has been to bury highly radioactive nuclear waste underground. (There were also proposals to bury the waste in the ocean or shoot it into the sun — but those weren’t as practical, according to a report by the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future.)

The idea is that a geologic repository would keep the waste away from people as the radioactivity decays — which can take hundreds of thousands of years, depending on the material. In the 1980s, the government settled on Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the most likely spot and planned to start taking shipments of spent nuclear fuel in 1998. In return, the deal was that utilities — really, their customers — would start paying ahead into a fund that would cover the costs. But Nevada politicians like Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) hated what became known as the “screw Nevada bill,” and the project has hit delay after delay ever since.

Now, utilities like Southern California Edison, which operated San Onofre, are stuck in a holding pattern: guarding the waste, and suing the government for billions of taxpayer dollars to pay for it. “The federal government has not fulfilled their obligation to come take the fuel from this plant site, or any commercial plant site,” Ron Pontes, team manager of decommissioning environmental strategy at San Onofre, told me. “So, until they do so, the fuel is here and we are charged with taking care of it.”

Verge Science’s video team and I went on a tour of the plant to see what it means to take care of that fuel. ……….

There are a few possible fixes. Two different private companies have applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for licenses to construct interim storage facilities in Texas and New Mexico. But the key word there is interim: these sites would be temporary holding areas for fuel that will eventually move to a permanent repository — like Yucca Mountain, the controversial site in Nevada that’s about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, and across the state line from Death Valley in California.

At first, the list of possible long-term repositories for highly radioactive waste was longer than just Yucca Mountain. Hanford in Washington state and Deaf Smith County in Texas also rose to the top, according to a report by the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future. Plus, there were supposed to be two repositories, so that one state wouldn’t be stuck with an entire nation’s nuclear waste. “And then the idea was you couldn’t do this quick and dirty, you’d spend several years and a billion dollars at each of those three sites,” says Robert Halstead, executive director of Nevada’s Agency for Nuclear Projects……….

Now, a bill introduced by John Shimkus (R-IL) that passed the House in May proposes to clear the way for the licensing to proceed and would authorize interim storage facilities. It would let Nevada negotiate compensation in return for hosting the repository, ensure the DOE has the land rights it needs for the site, and increase the amount of waste that could be stored in the Yucca Mountain repository.

The bill probably won’t get anywhere. “Historically, the Senate’s not going to move,” Shimkus said in an interview with The Verge. Senator Dean Heller (R-NV) called the bill“dead on arrival” in the Senate. But Shimkus says the bill shows the House’s collective support for funding Yucca Mountain. That’s key as the House and the Senate haggle over the budget for fiscal year 2019. “We’re waiting to see how this final dance happens,” Shimkus says.

Halstead, over at Nevada’s Agency for Nuclear Projects, said, “The bill is a declaration of war on the state of Nevada.” There are two big things wrong with it, according to Halstead: “They think that they can force this down Nevada’s throat, and they’re not going to be able to — and secondly, they think the Department Of Energy can carry out the program,” he says, adding that the state of Nevada can “whup the Department of Energy. So bring it on.”………https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/28/17765538/san-onofre-nuclear-generating-station-radioactive-spent-fuel-waste-yucca-mountain