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Everybody wants to do something about nuclear waste. Nuclear plant operators and most House members want to bury it in Nevada. A bipartisan group of senators wants states to compete for it. And Bill Gates and other entrepreneurs want to reuse it as fuel in next generation reactors.
Almost everybody is wrong to do so. Nuclear waste has never been a real problem. In fact, it’s the best solution to the environmental impacts from energy production.
Consider:
- Every year, the lives of seven million people are cut short by waste products in the form of air pollution from burning biomass and fossil fuels;
- No nation in the world has a serious plan to prevent toxic solar panel and wind turbine waste from entering the global electronic waste stream;
- No way of making electricity other than nuclear power safely manages and pays for any its waste.
In other words, nuclear power’s waste by-products aren‘t a mark against the technology, they are its key selling point.
By contrast, it is precisely those efforts to “solve” the nuclear waste non-problem that are creating real world problems. Such efforts are expensive, unnecessary, and — because they fuel support for non-nuclear energies that produce huge quantities of uncontained waste — dangerous.
Your Concerns About Nuclear Waste Are Ridiculous
What is usually referred to as nuclear waste is used nuclear fuel in the shape of rods about 12 feet long. For four and a half years, the uranium atoms that comprise the fuel rods are split apart to give off the heat that turns water into steam to spin turbines to make electricity. After that, nuclear plant workers move the used fuel rods into pools of water to cool.
Four to six years later, nuclear plant workers move the used fuel rods into 15-foot tall canisters known as “dry casks” that weigh 100 tons or more. These cans of used fuel sit undramatically on an area about the size of a basketball court. Thanks to “The Simpsons,” people tend to think nuclear waste is fluorescent green or even liquid. It’s not. It is boring gray metal.
How much is there? If all the nuclear waste from U.S. power plants were put on a football field, it would stack up just 50 feet high. In comparison to the waste produced by every other kind of electricity production, that quantity is close to zero.
Our paranoia about nuclear waste isn’t natural. There’s nothing in our evolutionary past that would lead us to fear drab cans of metal. Rather, for 50 years there has been a well-financed, psychologically sophisticated, and coordinated effort to frighten the public:
- Starting in the early 1960s, anti-nuclear leaders including Ralph Nader and Jane Fonda targeted women and mothers with pseudoscientific claims about the supposedly harmful impact of nuclear plants and their waste;
- Today, anti-nuclear journalists like Fred Pearce mislead the public into believing that the dangerous waste from atomic weapons production at places like the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in the state of Washington is the same as the old fuel rods from power plants;
- Anti-nuclear groups like Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists claim that nuclear waste could somehow be stolen or used by terrorists and turned into bombs.
To appreciate just how ridiculous the latter idea is, imagine, for a moment, that you are an elite terrorist commando like the kind depicted in “Mission Impossible” or a James Bond flick.
First, you must break into a nuclear plant, which is guarded by heavily armed security guards who are often — at least in the U.S. — former special forces officers. Next, you must kill, incarcerate, or otherwise incapacitate the 700 to 1,000 people who work at the plant.
After that you’re going to need to quickly hoist a can of old nuclear fuel onto the back of a truck. It can’t be a pick-up truck, which would be crushed under its weight. It will have to be an industrial-sized truck capable of hauling over 100 tons.
Next, you have to escape. This will require driving for hours on freeways while escaping law enforcement officers who will inevitably be scrambled in response to your plant invasion.
But all of that’s just the beginning. In order to turn the nuclear waste into a nuclear bomb, you’ll need to reprocess it in a highly specialized facility, preferably underground, so as to not be detected. Inside your mountain lair, which you spent months constructing without anyone noticing, you'll use a crane to pull the heavy metal rods out of the cans and reprocess them for so long that…
Well, at this point, even Michael Bay would say the scenario was too unrealistic.
What about a “dirty bomb”? Couldn’t a terrorist break into the plant and pull some nuclear waste out of a can and attach it to a homemade explosive?
But why would any terrorist do this? Any terrorist who wants to make a dirty bomb could just just break into the local hospital where radioactive waste (from x-rays and other medical devices) is available at far lower levels of security.
Save The Nukes, Don’t Move The Waste
After 60 years of civilian nuclear power we can finally declare that the top prize in the contest to safely and cheaply contain used nuclear fuel rods goes to... the cans the rods are currently stored in!
How do we know the cans are the best solution? Because they have proven 100 percent effective. The used nuclear fuel rods stored in cans have never hurt a fly much less killed a person.
By contrast, transporting cans of used nuclear waste would increase the threat to the continued operation of our life-saving nuclear plants. Anti-nuclear groups like Greenpeace and their PR agents have long planned a campaign of harassment and fear-mongering which would result in more unnecessary and expensive security guards.
Congress has repeatedly tried and failed to move the nuclear waste. Why, after $15 billion and 35 years of effort, are the cans still on-site? Because of fears that the cans would... leak, or “spill,” or be stolen by ISIS. Or something. Nobody’s quite sure.
Trying to solve this non-problem would cost an astonishing $65 billion, according to the NRC — an amount that doesn’t include the additional half billion more to operate the facility annually, or the quarter-billion more for monitoring after filling it up with spent fuel. By contrast, each canister costs just $500,000 to $1 million — a pittance for a plant that needs a few dozen maximum.
But how long will the canisters last? ”I have a difficult time imagining any reason why the [current waste can storage] system cannot work for decades to centuries,” wrote the dean of nuclear energy bloggers, Rod Adams, in 2005.
[T]he space taken up by [waste cans from] even a 60 year plant life is less than is needed for a Wal-Mart — even without any efforts to efficiently stack the containers. All of the plants in the US have dozens to hundreds of acres of available free space. The size of the work force needed to monitor this storage area is rather small; they provide security and occasional inspections of the containers but have few additional duties.
The real threat to public safety comes from the risk that America’s nuclear plants will be replaced by fossil fuels. Whenever that happens, air pollution and carbon emissions rise and people die.
By letting go of our nutty fears of nuclear waste we can save nuclear power. America’s nuclear waste fund — which is comprised of money paid into it by the operators of nuclear plants — still has $46 billion in it. It should be used to subsidize the continued operation of economically distressed nuclear plants, and subsidize the building of new ones.
If such a fund paid out five percent interest per year — an amount the IRS requires philanthropic foundations to give away annually — then $2.3 billion could flow to the distressed or new nuclear plants. That amount would be enough to keep uneconomical nuclear plants operating while creating an incentive to build new reactors.
(When spread across the 200 terawatt-hours of energy produced by the quarter of U.S. nuclear plants in the U.S. fleet Bloomberg says are in danger of closure, $2.3 billion would provide a stipend of $11.50/MWh, enough to keep the plants alive.)
A change in our view of nuclear waste must come alongside a changed view of nuclear plants generally. We need to stop seeing nuclear plants as temporary fixtures and start seeing them as the permanent backbone to our future clean energy system
Nuclear plants are functionally immortal. Existing plants can operate for 60, 80, 100 years or longer because everything inside the plant from the control panels to the steam generators and even the reactor vessel itself can be replaced, if needed.
Will the cans of old nuclear fuel stick around forever? Probably not. Sometime between 2050 and 2100, new nuclear plants — like the kind being developed by Bill Gates — will likely be able to use the so-called “waste” as fuel.
But achieving that future will first require that we abandon our ridiculous fears and start seeing nuclear waste as the environmental blessing that it is.
