Nuclear Regulatory Commission decision is seen as a “game-changer”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8068
At the business-news website Forbes.com, contributor James Conca identifies himself as “a scientist in the field of the earth and environmental sciences for 33 years, specializing in geologic disposal of nuclear waste.” He praises the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for what he calls a recent “small but incredibly important decision about nuclear waste that could finally get nuclear energy moving forward again.” If that assessment is even partly valid, it’s surprising that very little media coverage has ensued.
Bloomberg.com covered the news, however, and so did Matthew Wald at the New York Times. Wald’s opening paragraphs summarize:
As the country struggles to find a place to bury spent nuclear fuel, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has decided that nuclear waste from power plants can be stored above ground in containers that can be maintained and guarded indefinitely.
The decision, in a unanimous vote of the commission on [26 August], means that new nuclear plants can be built and old ones can expand their operations despite the lack of a long-term plan for disposing of the waste.
Wald mentions a few immediately affected nuclear plants. He also notes that in a statement, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Geoffrey H. Fettus charged that the NRC “failed to analyze the long-term environmental consequences of indefinite storage of highly toxic and radioactive nuclear waste, the risks of which are apparent to any observer of history over the past 50 years.”
Conca sees it quite differently. The “game-changer of this ruling is it recognizes storing spent fuel for long periods in dry casks is incredibly safe and cheap.” He adds:
[O]ne of the best things you can do with spent nuclear fuel is let it sit for a hundred years. A hundred years is a few half-lives of the two bad players—the uranium fission products cesium-137 and strontium-90. Each of these nuclides has a 30-year half-life, so after 100 years, 90% of each will have decayed away, and the waste will be much, much cooler and easier to handle, no matter what you end up doing with it.
He cites a Nuclear Regulatory Commission fact sheet that says:
Dry cask storage is safe and environmentally sound. Cask systems are designed to contain radiation, manage heat and prevent nuclear fission. They must resist earthquakes, projectiles, tornadoes, floods, temperature extremes and other scenarios. The heat generated by a loaded spent fuel cask is typically less than is given off by a home-heating system. The heat and radioactivity decrease over time without the need for fans or pumps. The casks are under constant monitoring and surveillance.
In the days leading up to the decision, the Sierra Club and others expressed worries, as reported in a Washington Post blog (“Groups try to block nuclear regulator’s vote, citing conflict of interest”) and in an article at a magazine well known for taking pride in being named for a “radical reformer,” Mother Jones (“Ruling on nuclear waste storage could create a ‘catastrophic risk’”).
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.