This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 29, 2011 - WASHINGTON - About 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, the federal government has gambled nearly $10 billion on an arid tract of real estate that hasn't paid off. That project -- to convert Nevada's Yucca Mountain into the nation's long-term repository for nuclear waste -- may not yet be dead, but it is on life support.
In the wake of this month's nuclear crisis in Japan, however, some in Congress now want to revive the Yucca project. That's partly because the problems at the Fukushima Daiichi plant has refueled the debate over the safety of nuclear waste stored in spent-fuel pools at power plants scattered around this country, including Missouri's Callaway plant and seven storage sites in Illinois.
Others are backing a range of other options -- including a controversial about-face to allow "reprocessing" of spent fuel or burying waste in heavily fortified casks -- to move the still-radioactive nuclear fuel out of crowded spent-fuel pools at the nation's 104 active nuclear power plants and several closed plants.
At this point, reviving Yucca may be the longest shot, even though the government already has spent nearly $10 billion on the project -- a tenth of its total estimated cost.
As late as 2006, the Energy Department wanted to open Yucca by 2017. But when Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, a Democrat, became the Senate majority leader the following year, he vowed that Yucca -- first proposed a quarter century earlier -- "will never happen." Backed by environmental groups and Las Vegas tourism leaders, Reid found enough allies to block most funding for the project.
Despite the massive cut in Yucca's 2008 budget, the Energy Department applied for a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to prepare Yucca. But President Barack Obama, who had opposed Yucca during his 2008 campaign, moved to make good on that promise after he became president the following January.
In March 2009, Energy Secretary Steven Chu told a Senate panel that his department no longer considered the Yucca site an option for storing reactor waste. At Obama's request, the department named a blue-ribbon commission to examine other options, and the DOE filed a motion with the NRC last year to withdraw the Yucca license application. Even so, several states, including Washington and South Carolina, sued the administration over waste storage, contending that the Energy Department could not by itself derail the Yucca plan.
And a growing number of House Republicans, joined by some Democrats, is trying to find a way to keep the Yucca option alive. Among those die-hards is U.S. Rep. John Shimkus, R-Collinsville, who told the Beacon that the DOE lacks the legal authority to block Yucca. He vowed that reviving the project was one of his priorities as the new chairman of the House Energy and Commerce panel's Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy.
While most Senate Democrats are reluctant to fight Reid on the issue, and the budget debate is allowing little room for expensive projects, some Senate Republicans plan to push for Yucca. On Friday, Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., said this country "has spent more than 25 years and approximately $10 billion developing Yucca Mountain to avoid costly and potentially dangerous short-term fuel storage options. We should end the political stalemate and store our fuel at Yucca."
If a permit is granted and Congress forces his hand, Chu has said the DOE could in theory restart the Yucca project, but insists that the administration prefers to move to other solutions. And even if Congress approved and fully funded the Yucca project this year, experts say it would take between seven and 10 years to prepare the storage facility to receive nuclear waste -- not to mention another three or four decades to move all that radioactive material to Nevada.
"Transporting nuclear waste would be very risky," asserts Kevin Kamps, a radioactive waste expert with the Maryland-based Beyond Nuclear group. He said the Energy Department's 2002 environmental impact statement on Yucca estimated that "it would take 24 to 38 years to move the nuclear waste" from commercial nuclear plants to the Nevada site.
There is so much waste, and the shipment casks are so heavy, that the Energy Department could only do about 2,000 shipments a year. Kamps and other environmentalists predict that each shipment would face protests and delays as it moved by rail or truck across the country toward Nevada. In Germany, such protests have plagued nuclear waste shipments to a salt-mine storage facility in Gorleben.
Kamps told the Beacon that Illinois and Missouri would likely be central to some nuclear transport plans, including routes that would pass through Chicago, St. Louis and Kansas City. The Yucca environmental impact statement proposed rail and road routes that would criss-cross Illinois and Missouri.
"There would be thousands of shipments through Chicago" under the 2002 plan, said Kamp. "They also wanted to barge high-level radioactive waste on Lake Michigan" to move it from plants in Wisconsin and Michigan not readily accessible to rail lines.
Such controversies over radioactive transport, the timetable and the colossal price tag appear likely to keep the Yucca project bogged down in the U.S. Senate, even though the Republican-controlled House might possibly approve it.
While he voted for the Yucca plan years ago, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the Senate's second-raking Democrat, said Friday at a Chicago forum that Yucca is now in a "stalemate" in Congress. Instead, Durbin said other options should be considered as well, including reprocessing spent fuel.
Reprocessing Raises Proliferation, Environmental Fears
In the early days of nuclear energy, the ideal solution to reducing the tonnage of nuclear waste appeared to be reprocessing -- that is, using chemical procedures to separate uranium, plutonium and other useful components from spent nuclear fuel.
But the production of plutonium -- a major component of nuclear weapons -- meant that reprocessing might hurt the effort to stop the proliferation of such weapons. President Gerald Ford first suspended the commercial reprocessing of plutonium in 1976; Jimmy Carter made the ban permanent the following year. (Countries such as France and the United Kingdom continued to reprocess spent nuclear fuel.) President Ronald Reagan lifted the U.S. ban in 1981, but Congress never came up with the billions of dollars needed to re-establish commercial reprocessing.
In recent years, the DOE has authorized some reprocessing to create so-called MOX nuclear fuel for certain thermal nuclear reactors, but the reprocessed uranium is so costly that it is not attractive as commercial fuel. Even so, supporters of reprocessing point out that France and some other countries have been doing it for decades.
Calling greater federal support for reprocessing research "long overdue," Durbin said Friday at the nuclear safety forum that "we need to reopen the conversation about research involving spent nuclear fuel" -- especially if ways could be found to reprocess the radioactive waste into substances less dangerous than plutonium.
"It's important for us to develop our own research -- maybe in concert with some of [the countries that now do reprocessing] -- keeping in mind the concern expressed by President Carter" about nuclear proliferation, Durbin said. "There has to be a way for us to pursue this in an environmentally responsible way and in a responsible way when it comes to national security."
Kirk also backed the concept of a greater focus on reprocessing Friday, but he and Mark T. Peters, a nuclear fuel-cycle expert at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, both supported the proposed Yucca Mountain repository as the best long-term solution to the challenge of safely storing nuclear waste.
Peters said, "We've started to grow back our research infrastructure" to investigate reprocessing options, "but the investments are quite modest in the United States."
If more nuclear plants are to be built in this county, Peters said, "It makes sense to recycle because you can make optimal use of repository space" -- given that recycling reduces the tonnage of nuclear waste.
But the expense of reprocessed fuel does not make it attractive to the nuclear industry. "Unless we start this as a matter of national policy, we won't pursue it for quite some time, because the economics are not there to support the initial investment" in reprocessing, said Exelon Generation's CEO, Charles Pardee. "The countries that have done this have done it with federal funds, as a matter of federal policy."
Beyond Nuclear's Kamps agrees that reprocessing is extremely expensive, necessitating government subsidies in every country that uses it. He also says the process is "very destructive of the environment" and "poses huge nuclear-weapons proliferation risks."
France is often cited at the country where reprocessing has been effective in reducing the nation's nuclear waste. But Greenpeace and other anti-nuclear groups have called for closing the French reprocessing plant in La Hague because it discharges liquid radioactive waste into the English Channel.
Officials at the La Hague reprocessing plant have said it occasionally releases small amounts of radioactive material, but add that the annual radiation dose in the area around the plant is no more than the solar radiation level that a passenger would be exposed to during a transatlantic flight.
The United Kingdom also has a controversial reprocessing plant, in Sellafield, that is in the process of being decommissioned. British environmental groups complain that the Sellafield complex, which also includes a nuclear waste storage area, has discharged radioactive materials into the Irish Sea.
In Japan, nuclear officials have spent a reported $20 billion to build a major reprocessing plant at Rokkasho, which has sparked controversy among Japanese environmental and commercial groups because it is located near a seismic fault line at the northeast tip of Honshu.
After this month's severe earthquake, the Rokkasho plant -- where about 3,000 tons of used nuclear fuel is reportedly being stored -- lost primary power. However, diesel generators provided backup power at Rokkasho until grid power was restored on March 14. The previous day, a Japanese radio station reported that 600 liters of water had leaked from the spent fuel.
Reflecting the views of many environmental activists, Missourians for Safe Energy chairman Mark Haim contends that "reprocessing has turned out to be a nightmare."
'Dry Cask' Safety Depends on Casks' Strength
Are fortified dry casks, stored at current nuclear power sites, the best medium-term solution to the nuclear waste dilemma?
Various types of casks have been used to store used nuclear fuel that has been cooled in spent-fuel pools. Typically, the casks are steel cylinders, either bolted or welded shut, surrounded by other layers of steel, concrete or another material that shields radiation.
According to Exelon, 5,156 of the 33,581 spent-fuel assemblies now being stored in Illinois are in dry casks. Of the seven sites in Illinois, four now have dry cask storage facilities with loaded casks (Byron, Dresden, LaSalle and Quad Cities); and an Exelon spokesman said the other three (Braidwood, Clinton and Zion) will have operating dry cask storage by 2014.
The current casks are safe, industry officials say, but some environmental groups aren't convinced. Dave Kraft of the Chicago-based Nuclear Energy Information Service told the Beacon that "a lot of utilities are now taking the fuel out of the spent-fuel pool and putting them in these outdoor canisters called dry casks. ... We don't know what the integrity of these canisters would be under extraordinary earthquake conditions, even though they claim they've done all sorts of computer simulations and tests on them. But we don't want to find out the hard way."
Nearly 200 environmental and anti-nuclear groups -- including Missourians for Safe Energy and the Missouri Coalition on the Environment and the Nuclear Energy Information Service in Illinois -- have signed onto a document outlining their support for "hardened on-site storage" (called HOSS) of nuclear waste in fortified casks.
"It's a strong consensus" among environmental and anti-nuclear groups, Kamps said. "It reflects recognition that the waste that's already been generated is not going anywhere soon."
The HOSS solution involves emptying the pools of cooled fuel rods and placing the used fuel into fortified dry-cask storage that Kamps said would be "much better built." While nuclear energy groups contend that the current dry casks are tough and safe, he argues that the current casks are "questionable in terms of their design. They are not designed to withstand certain terrorist attacks," such as metal-penetrating missiles.
Kamps believes that such storage at existing sites is a good medium-term solution because it would avoid what he called the "major problems" of transporting radioactive waste to a central storage site. "Even if Yucca had opened in 2010, it would take another quarter century to move the existing waste there -- a quarter century of storage risks," he said.
While he wants to investigate reprocessing, Durbin also said Friday that another option is packaging some of the spent fuel rods from their pools and encasing them in dry casks that are stored "in a safe place so that they can be held until we decide what to do with them next."
Haim also supports fortified casks, but adds that, as far as he is concerned, "the best solution to the nuclear waste problem is to stop making it."