Present at the Future (15 page)

“Wall Street has no confidence in nuclear power, and although a lot of people are talking about it, nobody’s really ordered a reactor yet. And I hope the government doesn’t get into the business.” That’s Dr. Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Maryland.

The second problem is waste storage. Where will we put all the spent nuclear fuel rods that nuclear plants leave behind? “The real issue is what do you do with this material over the long term, over the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years that it will remain radioactive?” That’s Dr. Kevin Crowley, a geologist and director of the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board at the National Academy of Sciences.

The third is terrorism and nuclear proliferation. In a nuclear society that relies on large quantities of nuclear materials, there is always the threat that terrorists might get their hands on radioactive materials and make a crude nuclear bomb or even a nonnuclear but deadly “dirty” bomb.

“They’re into ‘Will it explode?’ And they don’t care if it’s one kiloton or ten kilotons,” says Makhijani.

There is also the possibility that “peaceful” countries, when faced with newly nuclear hostile nations, may find a way of turning their nuclear power reactors into breeding grounds for nuclear weapons.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION

Searching for answers to these problems, technologists look for similar scenarios where nuclear power appears to be working well: France. France is the poster child for nuclear energy. The vast majority of the electricity in that country comes from nuclear power. Why can’t we just do what the French do and build more nuclear reactors?

“In order to address it to the level of France, we need about seven hundred or eight hundred nuclear power plants here in the next fifty years, if you want seventy-five to eighty-five percent in this country,” says Makhijani. “It’s much bigger than France with a much bigger electricity sector. That’s about maybe two a month, or three every two months, for the next forty years. Not an achievable level.” And even if you could build that many plants and run them for the rest of the century, says Cochran, where would you put all those spent, highly radioactive nuclear fuel rods? “You would need something like another fourteen or so Yucca Mountain–size repositories,” says a skeptical Cochran, referring to a site in Nevada that is being studied as a place to store the spent nuclear fuel rods.

THE STORAGE PROBLEM

Even if you build only one new nuclear reactor, you’re faced with a problem that has not been solved since the first reactor was patented in the 1950s: where to store the highly radioactive, highly lethal, nuclear waste—the used-up fuel rods that are taken out of the reactor?

“The nuclear waste disposal issue has been characterized by some as the elephant in the living room,” says Crowley. “We’ve had a waste
disposal problem since the late 1950s when the first commercial nuclear reactors began operating. We do have a short-term solution to the problem, and that is basically to store it at the sites at which it’s generated. So since the late 1950s, the spent fuel that has been produced by operating nuclear reactors has been stored in the large water-filled pools called spent fuel pools at the nuclear reactor sites.

“And as those pools have begun to reach capacity, at some sites, nuclear power plant operators have taken some of the older fuel out of the pools and put that into large, heavily shielded structures called dry casks. And dry cask storage facilities are now beginning to be built at many plants.”

Crowley says there’s a general scientific consensus that the storage at plant sites can be carried out safely for decades if appropriate attention is paid to managing the waste. “The real issue is what do you do with this material over the long term, over the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years that it will remain radioactive?”

A solution was proposed back in 1957, by the National Academy of Sciences: bury the wastes deep underground. The place currently under consideration as a deep burial site is Yucca Mountain, a ridge line in Nevada. It’s been selected from a handful of potential sites to be the final resting place for high-level nuclear waste, the by-products of nuclear power and nuclear bombs, that are stored now in those casks and pools at 126 sites around the country. The U.S. Department of Energy has been studying the site since 1978. Various political, legal, and scientific controversies have flared up over the decades. Some claim that the site is not suitable—read: not safe—for the storage of nuclear wastes for tens of thousands of years. Other efforts come from the state of Nevada, trying to get the storage site moved elsewhere. The Department of Energy, in 2006, asked Oak Ridge Associated Universities to analyze the scientific basis for storing the wastes there, and to arrive at a judgment about the safety of Yucca Mountain as a storage site.

“The current plan is to submit a license application to the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission by the end of 2008,” says Crowley, “and then to begin operation of the repository no later than 2020. At this point, we’re still waiting for the Environmental Protection Agency to issue health and safety standards for Yucca Mountain. And until they do that, the Department of Energy cannot complete its license application.”

Once again, scientists are wading into unfamiliar territory, trying to make decisions about events they can’t possibly foresee thousands of years into the future. Crowley continues, “This is a first-of-a-kind endeavor, and it’s a very technically difficult endeavor, because the Department of Energy has to demonstrate with a high degree of confidence that the repository that they would build and eventually close at Yucca Mountain could contain the radioactive material for very long periods of time. And it’s really establishing that long-term confidence in the performance of the repository that is the challenging technical issue.”

Has is been established? “It has not been established yet,” says Crowley. But…“I think that there’s a strong consensus in the scientific community that it’s possible to establish that basis.”

The debate over the future of Yucca Mountain and the disposal of nuclear waste can get as heated as the nuclear fuel itself. Even some people who believe in the technology believe that the waste can and should be buried, deeply underground, do not believe that Yucca Mountain is that place.

“Yucca Mountain just happens to be the worst single site that has been selected or studied in the United States,” says Dr. Makhijani, who says he has studied the repository problem for the past 25 years. “I say this as a supporter of a repository as a least-worst solution to a very big problem that we’ve created.” He is most vocal about the potential problem for drinking water being contaminated thousands of years from now.

“In 1983, the Department of Energy-commissioned study from the National Academy of Sciences projected drinking-water doses. The department’s own studies, its own contractors, have published graphs
and charts” showing that according to the standards that the National Academy of Sciences has advocated for more than twenty years, “Yucca Mountain would not meet existing repository standards. In fact, rules have been changed four different times to accommodate Yucca Mountain because Yucca Mountain simply can’t meet the standards. And I say this—unlike many environmentalists who don’t support repositories, I do think we need one. I think we’ve rushed into site selection.”

Rushed? It’s been studied for decades!

“Unfortunately—and here I sympathize with the utilities and even with the Nuclear Energy Institute—the government has wasted most of this money. It’s wasted it on a site that it knew could not really meet the standards. Instead of going to a new repository, we created another standard. I call it the double standard.”

Even if Yucca Mountain were certified as a repository, certainly somewhere down the road another Yucca Mountain would need to be opened; more sites would need to be considered. How many more would we need? Crowley says the jury is still out on this one. “If we proceed down the path that we’re going down now, which is to simply put the spent fuel into a repository, Yucca Mountain, the currently legislated limit is about seventy thousand metric tons. At present, we have about fifty-five thousand metric tons of commercial spent fuel in the United States. So we will soon fill up Yucca Mountain at the present rate of generation of commercial spent fuel, about two thousand metric tons a year. However, the capacity at Yucca Mountain is a legislated limit, and Yucca Mountain can be expanded if Congress would choose to do that. Some studies suggest that it could be expanded by a factor of five to ten in capacity.”

Another possibility is shrinking the size of the nuclear waste. Scientists are looking into the future to do that by technologies that remove the “unburned” nuclear material that is normally thrown out with the spent fuel rods.

“It’s like having a log in your fireplace, and we burn three percent off of one side, three percent off the other side. Then we take that log
and throw it into a mountain and bury it,” says Judy Biggert, Republican congresswoman from Illinois and chairperson of the House Subcommittee on Energy. “With recycling and reprocessing, we’ll be able to reduce not only the size of it but also the toxicity of it so that it won’t last so long in its radioactivity state.” The idea is that if you can shrink the size of the waste, you won’t have to find more disposal sites, says Biggert. “It’s been said now that if we have the recycling, we won’t need another Yucca Mountain until the next century, which is quite a far way away.” This is the school of thought that says that if we put off the problem long enough, someone will invent a technology in the future that will make it go away. It’s quite common among politicians who like to leave very difficult problems for our children to solve. See Social Security. See global warming. You can supply your own problem here…. But I digress.

In this case, scientists have already found a way of shrinking the waste by recycling and extracting the useful material. Which brings us full circle, back to France. “Everybody points to France, because it’s the center of the reprocessing industry in the world,” says Makhijani. “Well, I’ve studied the French nuclear industry quite a bit. They don’t actually use all of the plutonium they separate. There’s eighty tons of separated plutonium stored at La Hague. There’s eighty tons of separated plutonium stored at Sellafield in Great Britain. This is an invitation to proliferation problems. La Hague supplies separated plutonium to Japan, which hasn’t used a single ton of it as yet, and a couple of years back, their Labor Party leader, Mr. Ozawa, suggested that Japan should use or could use, if China starts acting up, their commercial plutonium for thousands of bombs.”

Biggert agrees. The Japanese produce pure plutonium in their recycling program, which makes it useful for making bombs. But the American scientists at the Argonne National Laboratory, which happens to be in her district, have developed a recycling process that does not make pure plutonium.

“It’s mixed with other nasty elements, americium, neptunium,
and curium. And these are things that would make it practically impossible to sort out any plutonium for proliferation, so that there would be no chance of nuclear proliferation.”

Makhijani does not agree. He is familiar, he says, with the Argonne separation method called electrometallurgical processing. He says she’s right about the end product but wrong about its impact.

“It’s true that it has neptunium and curium and americium mixed with it, so that no nuclear weapons state would want to use that plutonium. However, americium-241 and neptunium-237 are also fissile materials. And terrorists, for instance, or states who don’t have nuclear weapons–useable materials could quite easily make nuclear weapons, especially if you’re not worried about radiation doses.”

PLANT SAFETY

Plant safety—whether nuclear material will escape from a plant during an accident such as the one at Three Mile Island—used to be at the top of the list of nuclear energy worries. It no longer is, but it’s still there. To hear lifelong nuclear watchdogs like Tom Cochran talk, the change is almost palpable.

“In the United States, today, reactors are safer than they were a couple of decades ago. We haven’t had a core melt accident since Three Mile Island.” That is not to say there is no cause for worry. “In 2002, we had a major precursor at the Davis-Bessie plant, where there was discovered a football-sized hole had corroded in the reactor head because of lack of regulatory oversight over that reactor and utility oversight.” Which leads Cochran to believe that the biggest challenge to plant safety comes from whether a good “safety culture” is instilled at the site. He says that the safety culture at U.S. plants has improved.

Makhijani is not so sanguine about the prospects. Take the Davis-Bessie plant corrosion. “We were not far from a very, very serious accident. And it turns out the French had warned the Americans about this problem. There were corrosion problems at a number of plants that were similar, from boric acid. And the Nuclear Regula
tory Commission [NRC, which regulates the nuclear industry] simply wasn’t paying attention. What we’ve got is a situation where the NRC is much more lax than in the ’80s. I think [that since the early ’90s] we’ve been asking for trouble. The industry isn’t necessarily safer. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a smaller technical staff, and it is allowing self-inspection and self-regulation, and there have been many problems where we’ve been very, very close.”

NUCLEAR ENERGY IN THE AGE OF TERRORISM

Terrorism—individual and state-sponsored—has added an extra dimension to the nuclear energy equation. (Consider that fuel recycling problem we mentioned a short while ago.) When the Soviet Union fell, there were fears that some of the nuclear material in the warheads of the thousands of Soviet missiles might find its way into the hands of terrorists, either by being stolen or by being sold. That fear has not gone away; it has only been compounded by the fear that a worldwide move toward nuclear energy might make it easier for terrorists to obtain the uranium and plutonium fuel that powers these reactors. With such radioactively lethal material—and it doesn’t take a whole lot of it—terrorists might fashion crude nuclear weapons or dirty bombs.