AP IMPACT: US spent-fuel storage sites are packed
By JONATHAN FAHEY and RAY HENRY, The Associated Press
The nuclear crisis in Japan has laid bare an ever-growing problem for the United States — the enormous amounts of still-hot radioactive waste accumulating at commercial nuclear reactors in more than 30 states.
The U.S. has 71,862 tons of the waste, according to state-by-state numbers obtained by The Associated Press. But the nation has no place to permanently store the material, which stays dangerous for tens of thousands of years.
Plans to store nuclear waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain have been abandoned, but even if a facility had been built there, America already has more waste than it could have handled.
Three-quarters of the waste sits in water-filled cooling pools like those at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex in Japan, outside the thick concrete-and-steel barriers meant to guard against a radioactive release from a nuclear reactor.
This is my favorite part:
Spent nuclear fuel is about 95 percent uranium. About 1 percent are other heavy elements such as curium, americium and plutonium-239, best known as fuel for nuclear weapons. Each has an extremely long half-life — some take hundreds of thousands of years to lose all of their radioactive potency.
A 1982 law gave the federal government responsibility for the long-term storage of nuclear waste and promised to start accepting waste in 1998. After 20 years of study, Congress passed a law in 2002 to build a nuclear waste repository deep in Yucca Mountain.
The federal government spent $9 billion developing the project, but the Obama administration has cut funding and recalled the license application to build it.
Here's the beautiful (read: really sick) part:
Despite his Yucca Mountain decision, President Barack Obama wants to expand nuclear power.
Wait. Wha?
So, anyway, no, I'm not saying panic or that this is time to panic (Sevesteen), by any means.
All I'm saying is that maybe this would be a good time to coldly, calmly evaluate the 104 reactors in this country and all that has to do with it to see if we're doing all the safety checks we're supposed to be doing and all our i's are dotted and t's crossed.
I think we'd all like to avoid any real problems with our nuclear reactors.
Right?
Link to original story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110322/ap_on_bi_ge/us_japan_quake_us_spent_fuel
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5 comments:
Yucca mountain is central planning gone wrong, as usual. Nuclear facilities were directed to plan for Yucca Mountain as their only option for permanent storage, then had the rug pulled out as their their temp storage filled up. This is compounded by not allowing reprocessed uranium in the US unlike most other countries, drastically increasing the amount of radioactive waste.
Claiming to support nuclear energy without sopporting realistic waste disposal is political doubletalk.
I agree on all those points, for what it's worth.
What else can you possibly have, however, on the issue of national storage of nuclear waste than government planning or, as you put it derogatorily, "central planning"?
What else could it possibly be? (rhetorical question).
I don't know exactly what should have been done here--but one single central government run site that isn't ready 30+ years later isn't it. The government should set and enforce reasonable safety standards, but other than that get out of the way.
The government setting and enforcing reasonable safety standards and then "getting out of the way", but for the monitoring and enforcing is a great idea. But they can't let up on the monitoring and enforcing or the safety standards mean nothing, as we're finding out in Japan.
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