Security fears, cost at issue in storing nuclear waste
Date: 12-Aug-02
Country: USA
Author: Vibeke Laroi
Last month, after 12 years of protests and legal wrangling, U.S. President George W. Bush signed legislation to make Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert the permanent storage site for the nation's used nuclear fuel.
But even if Yucca Mountain opens on schedule in 2010, which some doubt, 70 of the nation's 103 nuclear reactors will have already run out of space in on-site water pools used for waste storage, the Washington, D.C.-based industry group Nuclear Energy Institute said.
As a consequence, utilities have been scrambling to build special large canisters, known as dry casks, at their reactor sites.
The problem is the dry casks present even a worse security risk than the water pools, heightening security concerns during America's declared "war on terrorism" in the wake of last September's attacks on New York and Washington
"You still have the reactor as a hazard, you still have the spent fuel in the pool as a hazard, and you're adding spent fuel in dry casks as a third hazard that increases the headaches for plant security," said David Lochbaum, a former nuclear plant engineer now with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
"Because spent fuel storage was always viewed as an interim measure in this country, we've never given it the same consideration from a safety or security standpoint as the reactor. It's always taken a back seat," he said.
The storage problem is not new. Every 18 to 24 months, about a third of the radioactive fuel rods at U.S. nuclear plants are replaced with new ones. So far, that has added up to about 45,000 metric tons of spent fuel - enough to bury a football field under 15 feet (4.6 meters) of waste material. Some 2,000 metric tons are being produced every year.
When most of the nation's nuclear reactors were designed in the 1960s and 1970s, it was assumed their waste would be shipped off to a central repository or reprocessing facility.
But commercial reprocessing never fully developed in the United States, and plans to open a permanent disposal site have been delayed. The only option for nuclear plants has been to store the waste on site.
COST, SECURITY CONCERNS
Water pools traditionally used for temporary storage of spent rods are steel-lined, concrete vaults filled with water. The water cools the fuel, which gives off heat and radiation for years after it is removed from the reactor.
Dry cask storage is "a substantial expense" - and an expense that gets passed on to ratepayers, said NEI spokesman Steve Kerekes.
Building dry storage at a plant site requires an initial investment of $10 million to $20 million. Once operational, it costs about $5 million to $7 million a year to maintain the facility and add containers as storage needs grow.
Since 1983, utility customers have been paying a surcharge on their monthly bills for the government's nuclear waste management program. The fund has collected about $18 billion.
Because the government defaulted on its obligation to begin moving used fuel from nuclear power plants when Yucca Mountain failed to open in 1998 as planned, electricity consumers are paying millions of dollars for additional on-site storage over and above the billions already committed to the federal fund.
As a result of the government default, utility customers may have to pay an additional $5 billion to $7 billion, assuming the repository is available in 2010, the NEI said.
Massachusetts Rep. Edward Markey, a Democrat and longtime critic of the nuclear industry, has warned that depleted radioactive fuel stored at U.S. nuclear plants is "extremely vulnerable" to attack. He has said an aircraft attack on spent fuel depots could release the same amount of radiation as a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb, more than half the strength of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
Reactors, housed in special containment vessels designed to contain the equivalent of a small nuclear explosion should things go badly wrong in the core, have more barriers protect
