DRY CASK: Steel and concrete casks encase more than 9,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel rods in the U.S.--and a more permanent solution for the radioactive waste appears no closer.
Courtesy of IAEA

[This is Part 3 of an In-Depth Report on The Future of Nuclear Power.]

A 98-foot-wide, two-mile-long ditch with steep walls 33 feet deep that bristles with magnets and radar reflectors will stand for millennia as a warning to future humans not to trifle with what is hidden inside the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) outside Carlsbad, N.M. Paired with 48 stone or concrete 105-ton markers, etched with warnings in seven languages ranging from English to Navajo as well as human faces contorted into expressions of horror, the massive installation is meant to stand for at least 10,000 years—twice as long as the Egyptian pyramids have survived.

But the plutonium ensconced in the salt mine at the center of this installation will be lethal to humans for at least 25 times that long—even once the salt walls ooze inward to entomb the legacy of American atomic weapons. And WIPP will only hold a fraction, though a more deadly fraction, of the amount of nuclear waste the U.S. plans to store at Yucca Mountain in Nevada or some other site designated to replace it as a permanent repository for the residue of nuclear reactions.

The Desert Space Foundation, an arts group in Las Vegas, Nev., sponsored a contest to come up with a similar warning system for that site. The winner: genetically-modified yucca cacti turned cobalt blue that would be planted across the entire Yucca Mountain site—to serve as a warning to future civilizations of the radioactive waste within the mountain fastness.

But eerie blue cacti or massive monoliths in the desert may attract rather than repel future explorers—the warnings of the Egyptians did little to deter modern archaeologists. There already are those who see what would be hidden inside Yucca as a resource rather than a curse—after all, as much as 95 percent of the energy in fissile uranium remains in the waste. "The majority of the energy is still in the spent fuel," says Rod McCullum, director of the Yucca Mountain project at the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), an industry group. "With Yucca Mountain, you can pull [the nuclear waste] out and reprocess it."

Lonely mountain
In 1987 Congress passed legislation that required the Department of Energy (DoE) to take possession of and properly store the spent fuel from the nation's 104 nuclear reactors by the then far-off date of February 1998. Now 11 years behind schedule, the DoE's primary response—to bury it deep within Yucca Mountain—is no closer to being a permanent solution.

The Energy Department last June finally applied to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the federal government agency that oversees the nation's nuclear power plants, for a license to build the repository at Yucca. But taxpayers still spend roughly $1 billion a year in fines paid by the federal government) to utilities to compensate them for the delay.

All told, the nuclear reactors in the U.S. produce more than 2,000 metric tons of radioactive waste a year, according to the DoE—and most of it ends up sitting on-site because there is nowhere else to put it. "When we remove fuel from the core after its final usage, we store it in a pool on site. We have the capacity to store it there for many years," says Bryan Dolan, vice president of nuclear development at Duke Energy Corp., which operates three nuclear power plants in South Carolina. The amount of space required to store it, after all, is "incredibly small."