How to dispose of nuclear waste?

As frequently stated in Washington, money talks, and it is now money that is at the heart of the problem surrounding the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository facility. After decades of planning, and more than $10 billion spent, the Obama administration recently announced that Yucca Mountain would no longer be a candidate for storing US nuclear waste (see also Overhauling US Nuclear Waste Policy ).

The repository will shortly be too small to deal with the current levels of nuclear waste produced, and concerns over the viability of the site have left a vexing problem for the US Department of Energy—which has been collecting nuclear waste disposal fees from US electric utilities since 1983—over what could replace it.

The issue came to the forefront this week when 16 electric utilities sued the US government to halt the collection of nuclear waste disposal fees, arguing that the country no longer had a disposal plan after ruling out Yucca Mountain.

New and old solutions

Among the solutions are to keep the waste in the current cooling ponds at nuclear reactors for another 10–20 years. Alternatively, the utilities could build air-cooled storage facilities (also on the site of existing reactors) without too much difficulty. However, the money collected for DOE to store nuclear waste would not pay for that type of facility because it is classified as a “short-term” interim option. The utilities are suing to try to persuade DOE to help build that type of facility, or to take the spent fuel waste off their hands.

At a 15 March meeting in Washington, DC , the world’s leading experts on deep borehole repositories suggested one solution—hundreds of boreholes that could be spread nationwide, where waste would be sealed several kilometers down in impermeable rock.

The meeting was organized by geochemist Patrick Brady of Sandia National Laboratories and was sponsored by Sandia and MIT to study the different technologies that could be used to store nuclear waste.

Also on the list is another Yucca Mountain—style storage facility, which this time would have a better geological location, and may be in a less politically sensitive state.

Finally, the most attractive option to some parts of the nuclear community is to burn or transmute the waste into less radioactive products using subcritical reactors . The building of such reactors has been discussed for some time, but no one has built one yet, partly because digging a $10–20 billion hole that remains radioactive for hundreds of years is still cheaper, and partly because of the technical difficulties in building such a machine.

Paul Guinnessy