FEATURE - Home for spent fuel is key to new US nuke plants
Date: 22-May-01
Country: USA
Author: Vibeke Laroi
So say utilities - stuck holding spent fuel in temporary storage until a central deposit can be found - and environmentalists, who are in rare agreement on the need to contain this dangerous waste before heaping more on the pile.
Although the most highly radioactive spent fuel declines the most rapidly, some of the radiation will stay around for thousands of years.
"The Bush energy plan can urge utilities to build new nuclear plants, but the government needs to look to its own responsibilities on the waste issue," Thomas Neff, senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Reuters.
"The main reason for opposition to nuclear right now is the nuclear waste problem," he said.
Green groups promise to block any new nuclear units partly because of the spent fuel problem, while utilities say lack of a waste dump remains a key barrier to building more reactors.
Last week President George W. Bush laid out a plan to attack "the most serious energy shortage" since the 1970s, calling for, among other things, heavier reliance on nuclear power and recommending speeding the approval process for new reactors and providing tax breaks for nuclear plant purchases.
His energy policy task force said the U.S. could boost its use of nuclear power by doubling the number of reactors at many nuclear sites already licensed by the federal government.
There are currently 103 nuclear reactors operating at 64 sites in 31 states, accounting for some 20 percent of all U.S. electricity generation. Although these sites were designed to host four to six reactors, most operate only two or three.
The reactors have produced about 42,000 metric tons of spent fuel - enough to fill one football field 15 feet (4.6 meters) deep - and continue to generate some 2,000 tons a year.
YUCCA MOUNTAIN
Over two decades, scientists have spent close to $7 billion studying and testing Yucca Mountain, in a remote corner of a nuclear weapons' test site in the Nevada desert, as the nation's permanent underground nuclear waste repository. No country has yet built or operated one.
Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles (144 km) from Las Vegas, is the sole site - of an original nine candidates for a U.S. nuclear waste repository - to undergo extensive studies.
"It is the most studied piece of real estate on the planet," Rod McCullum, senior project manager for used fuel at the trade group Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), told Reuters.
Under federal law, the Department of Energy is supposed to have constructed a site and taken title to the waste.
Some power generators have sued the federal government for breaking an agreement to store nuclear fuel starting in 1998. If approved, Yucca Mountain could begin storing fuel in 2010.
Although impatient utilities may build new nuclear plants anyway, they are certainly going to put more pressure on the government to solve the waste problem, Neff said.
"The government has been collecting money from utilities for decades now to do something with this waste and it has not done it. So the answer back from the utilities to the Bush enthusiasm about nuclear is, 'Well get your job done guys.'"
So far utilities have put over $17 billion into a nuclear waste fund. Yucca Mountain, designed to store about 77,000 metric tons of nuclear waste, is expected to cost some $49.3 billion to build, excluding money already spent on research.
ENERGY PLAN, STORAGE LINKED
No U.S. nuclear power plants have been licensed since the 1979 accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island plant effectively halted the U.S. nuclear industry in its tracks.
It was not a high priority for the federal government to make a decision on the controversial nuclear waste issue when it was assumed nuclear units would shut down after their 40-year licenses expired and store spent fuel on-site, either in water pools or in dry casks, Nancy Messer, an electric utility analyst with Standard & Poor's, told Reuters.
"Tha
