Waste From Nuclear Power Plants Requires New Facilities

Oct 19 - Augusta Chronicle, The

In a quiet, air-conditioned room deep inside the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant sits a small pool filled with water colored an unnatural blue. It's packed with radioactive waste.

The pool holds roughly half of all the used fuel ever pulled from the plant's reactors. The other half sits in a second concrete tank nearby, slowly cooling beneath 25 feet of water. Some fuel rods have been there for about 20 years.

Both pools are nearly full. Neither was designed to store this much waste, but there's nowhere else to put it.

The government long ago promised Diablo's owner, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., that it would haul away the waste and entomb it below Nevada's Yucca Mountain. In the face of unrelenting opposition from Nevada residents irate over the prospect of becoming a dumping ground for nuclear waste, the repository never opened.

With the nation's appetite for energy growing, the U.S. nuclear industry appears poised for a renaissance. President Bush has made building nuclear plants a cornerstone of his energy policies. Some former foes are willing to give the technology another look, lured by the promise of generating abundant power without belching greenhouse gases from more fossil-fuel plants.

The industry and its supporters in Washington, however, still have not resolved one of the biggest issues that derailed nuclear power in the 1970s and 1980s - what to do with the waste, which remains radioactive for thousands of years. Yucca Mountain remains bottled up by Nevada politicians.

Nuclear fuel assemblies are groups of metal rods filled with uranium pellets.

One alternative would be to recycle spent fuel rods, extracting radioactive material for reuse and reducing the amount of waste that would need to be stored. The idea has long been blocked by fears that plutonium removed from old rods could fall into the hands of terrorists or rogue countries trying to build nuclear weapons.

Diablo and other nuclear plants must keep their waste on-site - indefinitely. PG&E installed replacement racks that pack more rods into Diablo's pools and has even started building another storage facility on a hillside behind the plant that could cost up to $200 million.

"The government hasn't lived up to its contracts, so what's happening now is Plan B," said David Vosburg, a PG&E project manager. "The extra racks are filling up. The same thing's happening across the country."

Extra storage sites next to nuclear plants, however, won't solve the problem. They will just buy time.

"You just have to hope that there's a national solution, because this won't be a Diablo issue - it will be a national issue," said Richard Hagler, the project engineer for the new storage facility.

Anyone living near a nuclear plant also lives near a long-term storage site for radioactive waste. Those facilities aren't long- term by the standards of engineers, who must consider what happens to radioactive material over centuries.

Without a long-range solution for the waste problem, America's much-heralded "nuclear spring" might never come.

"Obviously, waste storage is the elephant in the room," said Frank Bowman, the president and chief executive officer of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's main lobbying group.

America has roughly 40,000 metric tons of spent radioactive fuel, according to the institute, with another 2,000 metric tons added each year. Even if Yucca Mountain opens, the nation would soon need another facility just like it. Reprocessing the fuel would relieve that pressure, but it's far from clear that reuse will ever happen.

"If we don't recycle, we're going to have to build a new Yucca Mountain every few decades," said U.S. Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell.

Used fuel rods are hot and highly radioactive when they emerge from a reactor. Both the heat and the radioactivity drop substantially within the first several years, the radiation falling by a factor of 1,000 in a decade, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute. The rods remain dangerously radioactive, however, for many thousands of years.