Shed No Tears for Yucca Mountain

Instead, Chu said, the Obama Administration will cut all but the most rudimentary funding and be content to allow spent fuel rods to sit in storage pools and dry casks while the administration “devises a new strategy toward nuclear waste disposal.”

Harry Reid was dancing a jig, bragging on his website, “It was very easy working with the Obama Administration to bring about these cuts. The project is dead. This announcement is another indicator that our efforts are paying off.” Anti-nuclear groups were even more gratified, since they have long seen Yucca Mountain as a choke point at which a nuclear renaissance can be strangled in its cradle. Greenpeace immediately called for an end to new construction and for all existing reactors to be closed down. 

Meanwhile, supporters of nuclear seemed flummoxed. Even as Chu testified before Congress, The Weekly Standard was assuring its conservative readership that the Obama Administration would never dare abandon Yucca because it would have to refund $30 billion to the utilities. (The project has been entirely paid for by the industry.)  Senator John McCain, who ran on a pro-platform last November, criticized Chu for prematurely abandoning the nation’s nuclear revival, but to no seeming avail.

So does defunding Yucca mean an end of budding nuclear renaissance that has gained so much momentum and will soon be featured in a special supplement in Business Week? It’s not likely. Rather, the demise of Yucca Mountain may offer an opportunity to correct a tragic historical mistake that led to a demonizing of nuclear power in the first place – the Ford and Carter Administration’s 1970s decision to end the reprocessing of nuclear fuel. 

Consider this: In twenty years of effort, the Department of Energy had succeeded in carving a $10 billion, five-mile long railroad tunnel into Yucca that would serve as the main artery for carrying the vitrified remains of spent fuel rods to their geological tomb. That might seem like a lot of work, but plans for Yucca called for yet another sixty miles of smaller tunnels and bore holes into which the material would ultimately be reposited. That was scheduled to take another ten years.

Now consider this: France stores all its high-level wastes from thirty years of generating 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear power beneath the floor of one room at its national reprocessing center in Le Hague. 

Does that make it seem as it Yucca Mountain was on the wrong track?

The long bitter struggle over Yucca Mountain has obscured what is perhaps the most important thing to recognize about nuclear energy – there is no such thing as nuclear waste.

The concept of “waste” is basically a holdover from the fossil fuel era. Fossil fuels derive their energy from chemical reactions, which reduce the carbon compounds from a high to low energy state. The fuel material doesn’t disappear, it only changes form.  Thus, the millions of tons of relatively high-energy coal are transformed into even more millions of tons of carbon dioxide that is exhausted of its fuel potential. That’s why we call it “exhaust.” Because it has no use, it is dumped into the atmosphere, where it may be causing meteorological changes.  Then there is the sludge and other impurities, which – if captured – must be trucked off to landfills where they sit eternally. 

Nuclear fuel rods, on the other hand, do not interact with the environment. There are no chemicals changes and no exhaust.  The process of nuclear transformation actually withdraws only a very small portion of the fuel’s energy potential – about 1 percent. There are no low-energy products that have to be disposed.   

The second important factor in dealing with spent fuel rods is the incredible density of nuclear fuels. Here’s a way of making comparison. A 1000-megawatt coal station must be fed by a 110-car freight train filled with coal arriving at the plant every 30 hours. Each car contains about twenty minutes of electricity. Railroads around the country are now straining under the weight of delivering this coal – most of it from the Powder River Valley in Wyoming – to coal plants from Idaho to Arkansas.

A nuclear reactor, on the other hand, is fed by a single tractor-trailer filled with a load of fuel rods arriving at the plant once every 18 months. The fuel rods are only mildly radioactive and can be handled with gloves. Those rods, representing one-third of the core, will sit in the reactor for five years. At the end, they will be taken out looking exactly as they did when they went in – except that they will be about six ounces lighter. That is because six ounces have been completely transformed into energy. That may not seem like much, but when plugged into Einstein’s formula, E = mc2, those six ounces are enough to power the entire city of San Francisco for five years.

The spent fuel rods are extremely radioactive, there is no doubt of that. The radiation they are emitting is double what you would get standing at ground zero in Hiroshima. But they can be handled through industrial processes. Although open exposure to this radiation is obviously lethal, gamma radiation, the strongest kind, can be blocked by a few inches of lead, 40 inches of concrete or 40 feet of water. After the rods have cooled down for about two years, losing nearly half their radio activity, they can be stored in lead-lined “dry cask” containers above ground. These are good for at least 75 to 100 years.

So, where is the “nuclear waste?” There is none. Ninety-five percent is plain old uranium-238, the non-fissionable isotope of uranium that serves no purpose in the reactor except as packing material. It has a half-life of 4.5 billion years and is only mildly radioactive. U-238 is everywhere – in granite kitchen counters, in buildings, in the exhaust of coal plants. (Coal actually emits 100 times the radioactivity of nuclear reactors but is not regulated.) We could put U-238 right back into the ground, except we have elected to label it “low-level waste.” That means it has to be stored in landfills.

That’s 95 percent of the problem right there. What is the other 5 percent? One percent is U-235, the fissionable variety that runs the reactor. It makes up only 0.7 percent of the natural ore but is “enriched” up to 3 percent to reach “reactor grade.” (To become bomb material it must be enriched to 90 percent and then fired together at the speed of a cannon to achieve a critical mass. A nuclear reactor, let it be said once again, is not an atomic bomb.)

Another 1 percent is plutonium. This is also fissionable and can be used as bomb material, although it is very difficult to separate and even more difficult to explode. Plutonium can also serve as reactor fuel, another great advantage of reprocessing. Both the French and Japanese are blending plutonium and uranium-235 to make a “mixed oxide fuel” (MOX) that can be burned in specially designed reactors. Recycling plutonium will extend our uranium supplies for thousands of years.

The remaining 3 percent are divided between “fission products,” much lower on the periodic table, and the “actinides,” man-made elements above uranium that once existed on earth but have long succumbed to radioactive decay. Many of these are used as industrial or medical products. Forty percent of all medical procedures in the United States now involve a radioactive isotope. They are used either to treat cancer and other diseases or as tracers in all manner of diagnosis. Radioactive medicine is a $4 billion industry yet unfortunately we must import 100 percent of our isotopes from Canada. All our material has been headed for Yucca Mountain. 

What remains when all the harmless or valuable material has been removed is a residue of isotopes that have no immediate value but may one day find useful employment. This is what France is storing beneath the floor of its one room. This material gives off a lot of heat from radioactive decay – but heat is energy! James Lovelock, the venerated British environmentalist and originator of the “Gaia Hypothesis,” says he is willing to take his share in his back yard. “I’d use it to heat my home,” he says.

The notion that there is some intractable problem of “nuclear waste” has dogged the nuclear industry ever since President Ford temporarily banned reprocessing in 1976 and President Carter made the decision permanent a year later. (President Reagan lifted the ban in 1982 but by that time private companies had abandoned the industry.) The rationale, widespread at the time, was that terrorists or foreign agents would sneak into our reprocessing plants and steal the plutonium. It is now obvious that, if foreign countries want plutonium, they are far more likely to build their own reactors – as North Korea has done.  

Abandoning reprocessing has done nothing to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and in fact has probably made things worse.  By sacrificing our lead in nuclear technology we have left the field open to others. Russia is now building a reactor for Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Will the Russians look the other way if Chavez decides to purloin some plutonium to defend himself from the Great Gringo of the North? Your guess is as good as mine, but it certainly has the makings of another Cuban Missile Crisis.

So shed no tears for the demise of Yucca Mountain. The French – who are already a decade ahead of us – are planning to revive the original plutonium reprocessing plant in Barnwell, South Carolina. Without Yucca Mountain on the table, we may finally be able to leave behind the false dilemma of “nuclear waste” and move on with what will undoubtedly be the 21st Century’s principle source of electricity.

 

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