U.S. senators agonise over nuclear waste debacle, (but with no thought of stopping producing radioactive trash)

SENATORS TRY—AGAIN—TO SOLVE THE NUCLEAR WASTE DEBACLE, WIRED, RIC NIILER, 28 June 19

ON THURSDAY SENATORS tackled the radioactive question of the nation’s nuclear waste, this time with a new plan to circumvent the hot-potato politics that doomed Yucca Mountain and other proposals. A combination of new legislation that spreads out the nuclear waste burden and perhaps new technology could offer a new way forward.

Everyday, the Department of Energy sends $2.2 million to the nation’s electric utilities to store spent nuclear fuel that has nowhere to go. Under a 1982 law, the federal government was supposed to pick up the nuclear industry’s waste and put it in a safe place underground for the next few hundreds of thousands of years (the half-life of some radioactive isotopes). That deadline passed in 1998, and after more than two decades of lawsuits and political delays, there’s still no permanent location to put the nasty stuff. Instead, spent fuel rods are sitting at 95 nuclear plants around the country in either “fuel pools,” where the waste cools down for a few years after the rods finish producing energy, or in special steel-and-concrete casks that sit above ground like nuclear garbage cans.

Pretty much everyone—utility industry leaders, environmentalists, nuclear engineers, and local mayors—knows the status quo isn’t working. Nobody wants to invest in an industry that can’t deal with its waste (even if it’s carbon-free); and nobody likes the idea of these nuclear-rod-carrying casks multiplying ad infinitum.

The place that the government picked to store all the nuclear waste back in 1987, a repository in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, was canceled in 2009 by the Obama administration. Since then, the project has been in a bureaucratic limbo. The Trump administration moved to take another look at Yucca Mountain and restart the licensing process, but Congress removed funds to do that from last year’s budget.

“It is long, long past time to figure this out, and the sooner we find a path the better,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski (R–Alaska) as she opened a hearing on the issue Thursday in the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Murkowski is sponsoring a bill that would both create a new agency in charge of handling nuclear waste and develop a way for local consent to become part of the decision-making process, although insulated from pressure by members of Congress. That means that the local residents living near a selected site—either temporary or permanent—would get some say in the matter, although perhaps not a veto.

At the hearing, experts testified that without some kind of storage facility, the nuclear industry will continue its slow decline. Nearly all of the nation’s plants were built in the early 1970s. Five are scheduled to shut down by 2025. Plans for two new nuclear reactors in South Carolina got scrapped in 2017 after contractors ran over budget and locals were forced to spend $9 billion to dig a hole in the ground and then fill it back up. A new plant under construction in Georgia has been tied up in contractor fights and court battles.

Murkowski’s bill would set up a new agency outside of Congress to pick a place for a new temporary nuclear waste site to take the spent fuel right away (well, within 10 years). The big holdup is “consent.” While some local communities or native tribes might want the money or jobs that go along with hosting a nuclear waste site, state politicians have blocked such attempts in Nevada, Utah, and Tennessee.

Geoffrey Fettus, senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, agreed that the stalemate will continue unless Congress changes the process of who gets to decide. “We have a higher chance of states getting to yes if they don’t have to take the entire burden” of all the nuclear waste, Fettus said. Fettus says the burden and the costs should be shared among states, with perhaps several smaller interim disposal sites in different parts of the country rather than a single facility.

West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin wanted to know if the fuel casks could just stay where they are for awhile, and perhaps the fuel could be recycled. France and Japan, for example, reprocess spent fuel to squeeze out more energy. France then converts the twice-used fuel into glass logs that are awaiting a final burial.

Congress has banned nuclear reprocessing since the Carter administration because of fears that it can be turned into nuclear weapons material. Steven Nesbit, head of nuclear policy for Duke Energy and the American Nuclear Society, which represents nuclear scientists and engineers, says uranium is so cheap and plentiful that it doesn’t make economic sense to reprocess spent fuel. ………. https://www.wired.com/story/senators-tryagainto-solve-the-nuclear-waste-debacle/