Still seeking a home for nuclear waste

As anti-nuclear activists celebrate victory in the closing of the aging Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant Station in Plymouth in 2019, a larger and potentially more important battle has begun to take shape over what to do with the spent nuclear material that now sits at Pilgrim and other nuclear facilities around the country.

During the past few decades, the absence of a cohesive national approach to the issue has forced many power plants, including Pilgrim, to stockpile spent fuel rods and other radioactive materials on site, creating a situation as dangerous as it is foolish. Pilgrim and other nuclear power stations in the U.S. have become de facto nuclear waste dumps.

The U.S. Department of Energy recently held a meeting in Boston to solicit local thoughts on something called consent-based siting, a plan to create interim storage facilities around the country in communities that are willing to host the waste while Washington continues to fiddle its way through the development of a comprehensive solution.

At stake is some 70,000 metric tons of radioactive waste that has been generated by plants such as Pilgrim during the past few decades. At one point, the federal government appeared to be closing in on a solution to the problem with a plan to store the byproducts at a massive facility in Nevada. But the Yucca Mountain site, which had long been thought of as an ideal location for the spent fuel rods and other waste, was removed from consideration in 2010, with no plan B in sight.

The truth is that there are few communities in the U.S. that would welcome the introduction of highly toxic waste, much of which could also be a desirable target for would-be terrorists. Although the spent fuel could not be used to create an actual nuclear weapon, the fear is that it could be employed to build a so-called dirty bomb. Under this scenario, a conventional explosive device would be embedded with nuclear material, creating a more destructive weapon that could result in contamination that lasts long after the initial destruction.

The fear among some is that there are those who may exploit the potential financial gain and seek to build a storage facility in a low-income area. There is a precedent for such concerns, as communities often relegate such undesirable, but often highly profitable, endeavors to those areas where there is little political will to stop such development. Chemical plants and hazardous waste facilities, for example, seldom find themselves built in posh neighborhoods. It is instead the poor and disenfranchised who are more likely to discover such facilities in their back yards.

With Pilgrim slated for closure in 2019, and with tons of nuclear waste sitting in communities across the country, the federal government must move beyond the status quo with a plan that deals with the problem comprehensively, and which does not simply move it from one vulnerable community to another.

http://www.energycentral.com/functional/news/news_detail.cfm?did=39196103