Nuclear Power Creates Long-Lasting Radioactive Waste

In addition to being uneconomical, nuclear power also produces nuclear waste that remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. After half a century of commercial nuclear power, no country in the world has solved its nuclear waste problem. The US government is currently pursuing three non-solutions: Yucca Mountain, reprocessing, and interim storage.

Although the United States has spent about US$9 billion dollars and more than 20 years studying Yucca Mountain, research has shown that the site is not suitable for safely storing the radioactive waste for the hundreds of thousands of years that it will remain dangerous. A US Senate Committee report argues that Yucca Mountain is “the most studied real estate on the planet”; this claim is a non sequitur. Yucca Mountain is located in an active earthquake zone near volcanos, in porous soil, and atop an aquifer used for drinking water and irrigation. Moreover, DOE’s flawed scientific and quality assurance practices have cast serious doubt on the validity of its work performed at the site.

DOE has yet to even submit a license application to the NRC. In July, DOE announced that it will submit its application in June 2008 and will start accepting waste in 2020. This estimate is highly optimistic because it does not factor in delays due to funding limitations or litigation and ignores the scientific problems with the site. Nor does DOE have a current estimate of how much the project will cost. As the New York Times reports, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman commented in February 2006 that DOE “may never have an accurate prediction of the cost.”

The capacity of the Yucca Mountain repository is legally capped at 77,000 metric tons. Even if licensed, the repository cannot hold all the waste that US nuclear reactors will generate in their licensed lifetimes. The DOE predicts that currently operating commercial reactors alone will generate more than 105,000 metric tons of waste. Once Yucca Mountain is full, DOE has estimated that there will be approximately 42,000 metric tons of commercial irradiated fuel at 63 sites in 31 states. Extending the operating lifetimes of existing reactors and constructing new ones would result in even more waste in excess of the repository’s capacity. Several legislative proposals to “fix Yucca” have been introduced that would, among other things, pop this cap. None, however, address the fundamental problems of the program or the site.

In February 2006, the Bush Administration proposed a new program, called the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, to restart reprocessing of nuclear waste in the United States. The program was presented to Congress largely as a research and development program to develop “advanced recycling technologies” and thereby postpone the need to license additional geologic repositories for the nation’s high-level waste until the next century. DOE is now proposing to skip the demonstration facilities using “advanced” technologies, and go straight to building commercial-scale facilities. The key components of a reprocessing and reuse program include reprocessing plants, fuel fabrication facilities, and fast reactors, none of which have proven to be commercially successful technologies in the United States or abroad.

US and international experience clearly shows that reprocessing is not going to solve our nation’s radioactive waste problem. Reprocessing is expensive and polluting, and poses a serious risk to the global non-proliferation regime. More than US$100 billion has been spent globally trying to commercialize plutonium. The results have been failed technologies, contaminated land and water, and 250 metric tons of separated plutonium—equivalent to more than 30,000 nuclear bombs—that remain vulnerable to theft.

Without a permanent repository available in the near-term, attention has turned to dry cask interim storage of spent fuel. Interim storage away from reactor sites will not even temporarily relieve the waste problem, because it would not meaningfully reduce the number of locations where high-level radioactive waste is stored and would unnecessarily increase transport risks to the public. With no additional repositories on the horizon, these sites would become long-term storage for high-level radioactive wastes.

In addition to the waste at the back end of the fuel cycle, the front end requires the mining, milling, and enrichment of uranium for fuel. These processes cause environmental contamination, health impacts, and security threats. For example, uranium milling results in large piles of tailings that are contaminated with radon and are often abandoned aboveground. Twelve million tons of tailings, for instance, are piled along the Colorado River in Utah, threatening communities downstream. Native American communities have been particularly devastated by illnesses that result from uranium mining. The enrichment process also results in large amounts of waste, particularly depleted uranium that should be disposed of in a geologic repository. Moreover, enriched uranium can be used to make nuclear weapons and the spread of this technology remains a global concern, as evidenced by United Nations efforts to prevent Iran from operating its enrichment facility.

Nuclear Power Poses Security and Safety Threats

The reactors that industry is proposing to build are called Generation 3.5, which are considered “first of a kind” because they have never been built and tested. They are not so dramatically different from existing reactors , however, that the nuclear industry would be willing to build them without Price-Anderson limited liability in the case of an accident or an attack.

More than five years after 9/11, no nuclear plants are required to be protected against an air attack. The Committee to Bridge the Gap, a California-based organization, petitioned the NRC to require the construction of shields consisting of I-beams and cabling, called Beamhenge, around reactors and fuel pools that would protect them in the event of an aircraft crash. Seven Attorneys General supported the petition. Yet the NRC has rejected this sensible and relatively inexpensive proposal for existing reactors. Instead, the NRC relies on “mitigation” factors (measures taken once the attack has occurred) and on evacuation of the public. Thus far, the NRC has not required security design improvements for new reactor designs that it has licensed or is in the process of licensing, even though a nuclear industry panel made recommendations in 1980 for feasible design improvements that would reduce the risk of air attack.