Japan crisis renews U.S. nuclear fuel storage debate

ShareThis

Tens of thousands of uranium-laden spent fuel rods, like those at risk of meltdown in Japan, have piled up at Southern California's San Onofre nuclear power plant and other U.S. facilities as government leaders haggle over a solution for long-term storage of the radioactive waste, experts say.

Despite operators' assurances that the plants are built to withstand more than the worst-case threat posed by earthquakes and tsunamis, nuclear researchers contend that a disaster like that unfolding at Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi plant could happen in the United States.

"The meltdown occurring at Japanese reactors can happen. ... San Onofre is near (earthquake) faults that could trigger such an event," or the plant could be breached by an equipment malfunction or terrorism, said Daniel Hirsch, a nuclear policy lecturer at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a member of the nonprofit Committee to Bridge the Gap, a nuclear watchdog group.

"The risk is not trivial," he said.

Hirsch is among critics of continued nuclear power generation when the United States has no permanent storage solution for the waste. It takes millions of years to lose potency.

At the U.S.'s 104 nuclear plants, spent fuel rods are cycled out of reactors every 18 months or so and placed in deep pools of circulating water to cool. The process takes seven years or more. As the pools reach capacity, the rods are moved to dry-cask storage on site, since there is no national repository.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has estimated that spent-fuel pools in the United States will run out of capacity in 2015.

California's nuclear power plants are at Diablo Canyon near San Luis Obispo and San Onofre in San Diego County.

At San Onofre, cooling pools contain 2,452 fuel assemblies. When they are cool enough, they are moved to dry casks and sealed in concrete vaults. The plant began using dry storage in 2003.

Diablo Canyon started using dry casks two years ago and so far has stored 256 fuel assemblies inside the containers, said a spokesman for operator Pacific Gas & Electric. The storage program has cost the utility $100 million.

More than half of the U.S. plants use dry storage now, an indication of the pileup of spent fuel rods, said Dennis Beller, a nuclear engineering professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

"Those pools have filled up because we never intended to store them this long. It's very expensive," he said.

Hirsch, of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, advocates abandoning nuclear for more solar power plants that would not suffer much in an earthquake and aren't vulnerable to terrorism.

In a 2008 speech to the nuclear trade industry, Nuclear Regulatory Commission head Gregory Jaczko recommended requiring plants to transfer spent fuel to dry casks rather than letting it accumulate in wet pools.

A large radiation release from a wet pool fire could result in thousands of cancer deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars in decontamination costs and economic damage, according to a 2004 study published in the journal Science and Global Security. An attack on a dry cask storage area would cause a much smaller release of radioactivity and much less severe damage, the study showed.

"We have produced something for which we have no safe way of storing or disposing," Hirsch said.

In 2002, Congress approved Yucca Mountain, at the government's old atomic bomb test site near Las Vegas, Nev., as the repository.

The Yucca Mountain proposal initially was tied up by lawsuits from the state of Nevada, which claimed a nuclear repository would damage its tourism industry. More recently, several states and utilities have sued to reclaim money they have spent on storage.

It also has sparked a battle between President Barack Obama and some members of Congress. Obama has won bipartisan support for his campaign to reinvigorate the country's nuclear program to meet clean energy goals. He has pledged $8 billion in loan guarantees to build the first plant in 30 years.

But he has run into opposition for his 2009 action to take Yucca Mountain out of consideration as the central disposal site for spent fuel.

Obama has ordered the Department of Energy to establish a blue-ribbon commission to find storage alternatives. But some lawmakers have vowed to continue funding, and fighting for, the Yucca Mountain project.

It "was designated as a national repository by law," said Rep. Richard Hastings, R-Wash., a nuclear power supporter whose state was an alternative to Yucca Mountain, "and no president can undo a law he doesn't like."

(Contact Janet Zimmerman at jzimmerman(at)PE.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)

Must credit The Press-Enterprise of Riverside, Calif.