Black smoke rising from reactor No. 3 at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex.
Image: daveeza via Flickr
The nuclear crisis in Japan provides an impetus for Congress to confront a failed national policy on dealing with spent fuel from U.S. reactors, witnesses told a Senate subcommittee yesterday.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Ernest Moniz called for an accelerated transfer of spent nuclear fuel rods from storage in water-covered pools at reactor sites to concrete and steel "dry" casks. Secondly, Moniz said, the federal government should create several regional facilities to store the containers for an extended period until a new strategy for managing nuclear waste fuel can be put in place -- a position he and MIT colleagues have argued for since before the emergency at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex.
"The Fukushima problems with spent fuel pools co-located with reactors will undoubtedly lead to a re-evaluation of spent fuel management strategies," Moniz told members of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development.
"We should really think hard about consolidated storage, presumably at federal reservations," Moniz said.
"I agree with you," replied Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the subcommittee chairwoman.
Congress voted to create a permanent spent fuel repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., and the Energy Department has spent $10 billion on research and construction of the facility. But under pressure from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the Obama administration has shelved the project.
The Energy Department seeks to withdraw "with prejudice" the government's license application submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission -- a decision that Yucca Mountain project supporters are challenging in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Temporary storage for a century?
Having no permanent waste fuel repository in sight, the NRC has concluded that spent fuel may be safely stored at reactor sites for as long as a century, if necessary. Feinstein challenged Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko on that conclusion at yesterday's hearing.
"We must begin to rethink how we handle spent fuel," Feinstein. "I'm amazed at the idea of storing it there for 100 years."
Two other witnesses before Feinstein's subcommittee, representing the nuclear industry and one of its frequent critics, differed on the implications of the reactor crisis on the safety of spent reactor fuel stored at the 104 U.S. nuclear power plants. But both agreed it was time to confront the stalemated issues surrounding the spent fuel.
"For unfathomable reasons, reactor fuel is considered benign after it is taken out of a reactor but before it is placed in a repository," said David Lochbaum, head of the nuclear safety program for the Union of Concerned Scientists. While irradiated fuel inside reactors is protected by multiple layers of shielding and redundant systems for preventing the overheating of fuel rods and release of radioactive contamination, spent fuel pools are typically covered with sheet metal roofs, "like that in a Sears storage shed," he said.
One of the spent fuel pools at the top of Fukushima reactor No. 4 suffered a hydrogen explosion and lost all or most of its cooling water during the emergency, permitting the fuel units to ignite and release radioactive elements into the atmosphere through the shattered metal roof.
"The irrefutable bottom line is we have utterly failed to properly manage the risk from irradiated fuel stored at our nations' nuclear power plants," he said. He, too, called for faster transfer of fuel units from pools to dry cask storage, after the required five- or six-year initial cooling period in the water-filled pools. Systems and procedures to deal with spent fuel pool accidents for must strengthened, as well, he said.
See what we're tweeting about
27 Comments
Add CommentResearch could take decades?? Why not ask the French what they're doing with the fuel?? Look into reprocessing the stuff!! For Petes sake, 80% of the usable fuel is still left in the spent fuel rods. If we used that for new fuel rods, and stored the remaining lump of non-fuel elements, we'd end up with a very small amount of high-level waste that could easily be stored anywhere. We're talking about a few refrigerator sized lumps instead of train car loads of material. And the refrigerator sized lumps would be inert in several thousand years instead of millions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe don't reprocess because President Carter decided back in the 70's that having a bit of extra plutonium around (one of the waste products which would be separated out) would be too dangerous to handle. Like we're too stupid to know how to keep an eye on it, but not the 10,000 nuclear weapons we have laying about.
Give me a frickin break. Get yer heads out of the sand people and start reprocessing the stuff. We already have enough uranium to triple the nuclear capacity on this country and run for 100 years on what we have in the spent fuel inventory now, we don't have to dig another gram of uranium out of the ground. And the plutonium, by the way, is fuel just like the uranium. We could use it too in the plants to keep lights on, carbon free for centuries.
Or should we just build more coal plants and kill thousands of people each year with those like we do now??? There isn’t a risk free way to make power folks. Wind and solar can never be primary sources of energy due to the nature of it, (look it up before you try and disagree) so we need something to keep the lights on until we can come up with a “Mr. Fusion” means of turning matter into energy.
Geothermal is another great source of energy, a few big power plants located around large volcanic features in the western United States could keep half the country lit for a billion years fossil and nuclear free. But can you imagine how much the Sierra Club et al. would freak out if you try and build a multi gigawatt power production facility near Yellowstone? What!!??? Where will the elk and buffalo sleep now!!!???
I am about as "Green" as you can get, having served for years on the California Central Coordinating Committee of the California Green Party. I support the massive expansion of geothermal power. I think you need to study up on modern versions of solar power. There is a design which is used here in the California desert which utilizes hyperbolic mirrors to concentrate the Sun's energy onto tubes where water is superheated to produce steam. The superheated water can be pumped or allowed to flow by gravity to underground, insulated tanks where it can be stored until after sundown so that the turbines which generate electricity can be run 24/7. This type of solar generating plant is not quite as efficient as photovoltaic, but since it can work 24/7 it is useful for "base load" power. The largest such installation in the world, over 350 mw, about the generating capacity of one of the reactors at Fukishima, is located not far south of where I live here in the desert of eastern California. Several more large solar facilities are planned for our deserts and some are already under construction. California utilities will be required to obtain 33% of their electricity from renewables by 2020, and some, including my utility, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, have already met the 20% requirement by 2012.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this+1 reprocess it. It's not a question of if, just when. Other green alternatives are good too, but probably can't meet our energy needs alone and we will run out of the other types of fossil fuels. In truth, the prevention of reprocessing to date adds significantly to the benefit of introducing more nuclear plants. Kill two birds with one stone. We can think of the nuclear "waste" as a national asset, kind of like an oil field.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA photovoltaic array that will produce about as much peak power as a medium sized nuclear power plant costs about 1/6th as much, $2 billion vs $12 billion for the nuclear, and will cover about 2,000 acres of desert. Because of the safety and financial advantages once several of these installations are in place and have established a track record nuclear will fall forever off the drawing boards of utilities around the world. The liability of nuclear plants is just too great. No private insurance company will touch them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisReprocessing nuclear "spent" fuel means coming in contact with the most dangerous substances ever known. Reprocessing sounds good, but try inventing means of doing it without exposing your workforce and the biosphere in general to hideous levels of radiation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf it could be done profitably and safely some corporation would already be doing so.
It is not waste. It is fuel enough to power the world for hundreds of years while being destroyed in gen IV reactors like India's new 500 MW first of 5 units. Ironically that is the only way to get rid of it. The tiny amount left is such a low level it can be returned to the mine shaft.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSadly our corrupt politicians have been paid off by Big Oil to ensure that none of the gen IV nuke development being done around the world will happen in the US.
Faint hope but perhaps now somebody in the US (hello Dr. Chu are you listening?) will now get behind the US invented nuke waste burning Molten Salt Reactor. We can spent $100B's on weapons R&D but we have nothing for something as fundamental as the nations power.
David LeBlanc at the U of Ottawa has redesigned the Molten salt reactor as a DMSR which would resolve all safety and cost issues with nuclear. This tech was actually build and ran in a reactor for many years - even flown around on an airplane. By using existing nuclear waste for fuel it could power the world for hundreds of years.
All it needs is $5B, 5 years, and a place to build em , and factory produced units would be streaming out fast enough to eliminate fossil fuels in 5 years.
Nuke wastes could be remanufactered into DMSR fuel right on site.
The Chinese have started a MSR program. They will use our tech abandoned by our attorney politicians to reduce us to a third world nation stagnated by incredible "green" power cost while their economy booms on with limitless clean and green zero environmental impact nuke energy.
"hyperbolic mirrors to concentrate the Sun's energy"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUm, parabolic mirrors, I think you mean?
@ChazInMT - Agree with you wholeheartedly.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@heavyrunner - Peak power is a useless number. The average efficiency of those solar plants is only 20% compared to 90% for nuclear. Then when you factor in the life expectancy of having to replace the panels every 25 years vs 60 years for a nuclear plant, the costs explode. If solar were even remotely cost effective, we would have already made the switch. I recommend you compare the cost of current power plants for both technologies and factor in everything I just said.
This is probably the only time in my life I can agree with Feinstein. Move the fuel to Yucca Mountain and be done with it. Who cares about a mountain in the middle of the desert? Regional storage would be a bigger security risk. We are lucky the US is so large. If we were truly smart, we would start using fast breeder reactors to recycle the fuel.
You could cover California with solar panels and you wouldn't equal one large 90% capacity factor nuclear plant. And the cost of solar is much higher than nuclear. That's why is needs direct cash subsidies. And that hot liquid from a CSP plant doesn't stay hot for long. There is no 24/7 solar facility. Wind is even more erratic.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI believe Hyperbolic is correct.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHe was using hyperbole, the trope.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI knew that was wrong when I typed it at 5:00 a.m. this morning. Thanks for the correction.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThose reactors that "burn" the spent fuel until it can be poured on your organic garden sound really great.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow about the Marshall Hydrothermal Recovery System? One plant accessing a 3 metre opening in the earth's service can light up 20 million homes as opposed to the 4 million powered by a typical nuclear plant. Whatever strategy the world seeks out for energy MUST be diversified and not vulnerable to human error, natural disaster, or terrorism. It should not cost billions to dismantle or repair in the event that any of the above should occur. It should be highly efficient and NOT centralized as centralized systems are highly vulnerable where dispersed and diverse interconnected systems if designed well can much less dangerous and much easier to fix and restore. Think of the internet. If one server goes down the whole net does not fail. We need our energy infrastructure safe and networked in a similar fashion. Here in Japan the government offers subsidies to homes installing solar and there are Zero Energy Homes on the market that can sell their excess to the grid. Unfortunately, this policy seems too little too late.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThink out of the box. It is not one system over the other. There are highly efficient and safe energy systems out there and have been for years. They are suppressed just like cheaper and more effective cures for cancer. Why? Because there is more money in inefficiency especially when supported by taxpayer money. When you calculate the costs of nuclear from cradle to grave it is the most costly, inefficient, and dangerous method of producing energy. It is not a matter of choice between solar, wind, and nuclear. It is a matter of putting more effort into ALL forms of non-nuclear systems or small scale nuclear when safe applications are possible as seems to be the case with thorium. ONE Marshall Hydrothermal Recovery System can safely replace FOUR nuclear plants. Why bother with nuclear at all? Hydrothermal, Geothermal, solar, wind, magnetics, hydro, ALL combined would easily allow the elimination of the nuclear dinosaurs IF it weren't for the nuke lobby wanting to milk it to the end.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI told you guys that the only safe method of nuke waste disposal is to freight it to a collection point in space and fire the load into the sun-that was 20 years ago.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have a suggestion to quell the reactor heat problem in Japan. Why not use liquid nitrogen to freeze the unit, just long enough to locate the water leaks and perhaps help id the tunnel leaks as well? What effect does liquid nitrogen have on radiation? If lucky and the Liquid nitrogen contains the radiation it would be easy to remove in chunks of ice rather than liquid water? Clean out the frozen mess ,contain it in lead containers and sink the whole mess in the Marianne Trench via bardge.Than replace the reactors with modern units and get to the business of generating power.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI suggest dropping the spent fuel into active valcanos. What effect will this have on radiation?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this350Mw is only about 76% of the power of Fukushima Dai-Ichi Unit 1, less than half of Units 2-5 and less than 1/3 of Unit 6. What are the long term environmental effects to the atmosphere by the heat, etc. generated by those thousands of acres of hyperbolic mirrors? Don't tell me there isn't any!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere's no need to "invent" the technology. As ChazinMT says, ask the French (for example). The U.S. is the ONLY nuclear nation that doesn't recycle it's waste. For the long term we could encase the waste in borosilicate glass where it would be inert for eons.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCall it hyperbole.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe facilities in California still have to have backup systems. The 24/7 claim is false. None of them will produce more than perhaps a trickle of token power after a few cloudy days. The heat storage & recovery systems are hugely expensive & thermal energy wasteful. The Carnot cycle applies to all heat engines & anyone interested can look it up.
These claims of viable systems already existing are simply false. There have been plenty of claims that they would work but in practice, when they are built, all the problems that any competent engineer could have foreseen come to the fore.
I wish that it was compulsory that all executives & senior engineers on these projects could only receive public funding upon signing a guarantee that if the facility did not meet the performance predicted, that their private assets could be confiscated as partial reimbursement for the long suffering tax payers. Watch the back-pedalling & downward forecasts for performance then.
The best place would be just before a subduction zone deep in the ocean. Eventually, it would recycle into the earth.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNothing we can create can contain it long enough to prevent environmental disaster in the medium to long term future.
@ Thinker...You can't just pour liquid nitrogen on the reactor vessel. 1st off, you'd need hundreds of thousands of gallons which would be practically impossible to gather and dispense. 2nd, the extreme drop in temperature would create a thermal shock to all systems involved and destroy them all entirely, you couldn't do more damage with 2,000 lb bombs. 3rd, the nitrogen would all just evaporate off in short order and not give anywhere near enough time to effect any repairs...in the event it didn't destroy every pipe and valve in the plant.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso, you really could just dump the wrecked reactor cores and spent fuel into a volcano, but you’d kill all the people who are tasked with doing so. And the Sierra Club would pitch a fit for irradiating a few hundred square miles of ocean and/or land with some pretty nasty stuff. Best to just entomb it where it stands for a few decades till a large amount of radiation subsides, then remove it to a permanent storage facility carefully, very expensively, a few chunks at a time away from the ocean shore. I’d bet 2 dollars that the large amounts of contamination we are seeing now are from the spent fuel pools that had fuel damage aka “partial meltdowns”. It isn’t going to melt through the bottom of the plant and end up in Nebraska someday, (we have the “China Syndrome” they have the “Nebraska Syndrome”) the spent fuel pools are a gol darn mess, and they’ve been dumping uncontrolled amounts of water on them, the stuff has to go somewhere.
To those who believe the nuclear fuel is going to be a environmental disaster no matter what we do, you need to study further the idea of reprocessing before you "Chicken Little" your uninformed rants about the subject.
It amazes me how people remain uninformed about radiation. Most people seem to think it comes from X-ray machines and nuclear power plants. Other than that, you get nothing. This is far from the truth. The fact is, you swim in a sea of radiation every second of your life. Look into it. It is commonly known that you get 300-600mrem of dose every year from background sources of radiation. People working in nuclear power plants are limited to 2,000 mrem of occupation exposure. People living in certain places in the world get 5,000mrem just living where they do, and the rate of cancers & such is no different than anywhere else. When you break down what 450mrem is per year, it comes out to 15,000 individual counts of ionizing radiation ripping through your body every second. Every second of every day since the day you were conceived you have been getting hit by 15,000 bits of radiation. So minor amounts of exposure you get from these events would be like worrying about getting squirted with a squirt gun while standing in a rain storm.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo complain about small extra doses of radiation is as ridiculous as a fish complaining about being wet.
I agree that reprocessing is the only way to truly deal with nuclear waste. Every form of energy generation has its hazards and cost, economically, environmentally and socially, but on the industrial scale that we need abundant, cheap energy can only really be supplied by coal, hydro or nuclear. Solar is quaint, but is limited by available Sunlight and the inherent hazard, environmentally and financially, in producing and replacing solar panels.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOur scientist are either not being paid enough, or are not motivated enough to find long-term solutions to our societies energy requirements. And too many are sidetracked by politics and political correctness to offer comprehensive solutions. If we can process nuclear waste until it is harmless, why aren't we doing that. This is an obvious path that we must seriously explore.
The French have a reprocessing plant for nuclear fuel in La Hague. The MOX fuel rods in one of the reactors in Fukushima came from there.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe problem is, that the costs of reprocessing the fuel rods is more expensive than putting just new uranium fuel rods into the reactors.
Due to this, this plant in La Hague was supposed to be closed in 2010.
I don't know if this plant is still working to-day (may be the price of uranium to-day is significantly higher than it was 2 years ago, so reprocessing might be more competitive) .
Anyhow – today's nuclear waste is no waste at all – it will be a valuable fuel alternative for the new generation 4 reactor line currently under development.
Reprocessing, as it is done to-day, does not solve our current nuclear waste problem. What reprocessing does, it removes the Plutonium239 from the spent fuel rods and builds with this extracted PU239 these MOX fuel rods (one reactor in Fukushima was using them).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo – after going through this reprocessing cycle you have then still all this long living transuranic stuff in these spent old fuel rods.