Nuclear waste disposal is often considered to be the Achilles’ heel of nuclear power. According to the anti-nuclear crowd, geological storage of nuclear waste is condemning future generations to high levels of radiation. In reality, there is no crisis for nuclear waste, but there is a need for action. The spent nuclear fuel (SNF) is currently being stored in cooling pools and in dry cask storage at existing reac­tors. Cooling pools were not really expected to contain the spent nuclear fuel for decades because the United States was supposed to develop a long-term storage facility at Yucca Mountain to open in 1998—which, of course, did not happen. There is one upside to keeping SNF in cooling pools for years, though; over time, heat and radioactivity greatly decrease, making it is easier and safer to handle. A very good intermediate solution is to move the SNF from cooling pools after several years and put it into dry cask storage, where it could remain for a century or so. There could be several consolidated dry cask storage facilities in the United States, or they could be maintained at each reactor. In fact, both are likely. The Blue Ribbon Commission appointed by President Obama to study nuclear waste disposal recommended that consolidated dry waste storage be implemented in the near future, especially for “stranded fuel” from closed nuclear power plants. There would still be a need to store SNF at the reactor sites for an interim period (20).

And yet a long-term nuclear disposal site is still necessary. Yucca Mountain was born out of political gun-slinging that doomed it for political reasons. But

that doesn’t mean that it would not be a perfectly satisfactory and safe disposal site. After a few hundred years, the fission products will have decayed to the radioactive equivalent of the uranium ore the nuclear fuel originally came from. The longer-term concern is from plutonium isotopes and other transuranics. Plutonium is not really that much of a concern because it is readily adsorbed by clay and is essentially insoluble in water. It can be easily contained for thousands of years. The main problem would potentially be neptunium (see Chapter 9 for details), but that can also be contained for tens of thousands of years, according to modeling studies done by scientists studying Yucca Mountain.

The allowable dose limit of0.15 mSv for the next 10,000 years and 1 mSv for the next million years is well below normal background levels of radiation. The radiation background in Amargosa Valley near Yucca Mountain is 1.3 mSv per year, about one-third of the average background in Colorado (4.5 mSv). So even if the radiation to the public tripled after 10,000 years to 3 mSv per year, it would still only be equal to the average dose in Colorado. And it is not as if the radiation would emanate from Yucca Mountain. There would only be exposure if people pumped water out of the ground that somehow became contaminated with radio­nuclides. In the end, the controversy about Yucca Mountain is really a tempest in a teapot, kept alive by political considerations.

There is another solution that minimizes the problems with long-term disposal of SNF and that is to reprocess it, as is done in France and other countries. By separating out the fission products—especially cesium and strontium—and vit­rifying them, their disposal becomes much simpler and the radioactivity decays to background levels after a few hundred years. The plutonium and uranium can then be used in mixed oxide fuel and burned in existing reactors. This has the advantage of minimizing the waste storage problem and also getting about 25% more fuel out of the SNF. The United States has been opposed to this approach since Presidents Ford and Carter shut down the planned reprocessing plant in South Carolina, but it has been done successfully for decades in France. This is certainly an option for the future. Ultimately, the plutonium isotopes that build up even in the MOX fuel could be burned up in a fast neutron breeder reactor.

So the truth is that there are solutions to spent nuclear fuel that are available and that do not pose a risk to humans. The Blue Ribbon Commission appointed by President Obama lays out the issue very clearly:

The problem of nuclear waste may be unique in the sense that there is wide agreement about the outlines of the solution. Simply put, we know what we have to do, we know we have to do it, and we even know how to do it. Experience in the United States and abroad has shown that suitable sites for deep geologic repositories for nuclear waste can be identified and developed. The knowledge and experience we need are in hand and the necessary funds have been and are being collected. Rather the core difficulty remains what it has always been: finding a way to site these inherently controversial facilities and to conduct the waste management program in a manner that allows all stakeholders, but most especially host states, tribes and communities, to con­clude that their interests have been adequately protected and their well-being enhanced—not merely sacrificed or overridden by the interests of the coun­try as a whole (20).