Sorting Out Nuclear Waste

The United States retired its first commercial nuclear power plant, the Shippingport Atomic Power Station, in 1982. During its lifetime, the plant generated about 6.5 billion kilowatts of electricity; it also created tons of high-level nuclear waste, whose lifetime will far exceed that of the plant itself. The plant's shutdown and decommissioning were heralded as case studies for other reactors nearing the end of their life, yet the plant's largest legacy was left unresolved: what to do with the waste.

When President Dwight D. Eisenhower dedicated Shippingport in 1957, the United States had no definitive policy about what to do with the high-level waste generated by commercial nuclear power reactors. The 1954 Atomic Energy Act, which aimed to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy in a manner that was consistent with the safety and security of the country, simply stated that responsibility for the “by-product” of nuclear power production should be transferred to the federal government. So while the 1954 act and the subsequent 1957 Price-Anderson Act (which limited the liability of nuclear utilities) made way for the development of more than 100 nuclear power plants that contributed substantially to U.S. electric-generating capacity, the U.S. government failed to address the waste problem, one of the most fundamental issues raised by their operation.

Repeated attempts to resolve this problem have failed to substantively change the landscape. The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act tried to fix the initial 1954 legislation's shortcomings by tasking the federal government with building at least two geologic repositories where nuclear waste would be permanently stored, but a 1987 amendment to the act marred the repository selection process by reducing the number of sites to be studied to a single location: Yucca Mountain, Nevada. And it's far from certain that Yucca will ever open its doors to accept waste, despite it being the only option on the table for storing spent fuel for the long term.

The biggest change since the 1950s has been in the amount of material that needs to be disposed. More than 56,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel awaits permanent disposal, and this total increases by about 2,000 metric tons a year. Utility companies are temporarily storing the waste at reactor sites, in spent fuel pools or in dry cask storage, but they desire a long-term solution, as some are starting down the uncertain and costly road of building new nuclear reactors.

even if reprocessing plants and burner reactors were built, reprocessing and burning the fuel would create several streams of waste–rather than the single stream of spent fuel–merely delaying when the wastes would need to be permanently disposed.

In 2006, the United States launched the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) partially in response to concerns about its failure to implement a long-term nuclear waste policy. GNEP in part proposes to chemically reprocess spent fuel to isolate the transuranic elements (plutonium, americium, curium, etc.) and burn the resulting fuel in an advanced type of reactor that would reduce the amount of long-lived, high-level waste. Though it sounds like a tidy way to decrease the amount of waste in need of disposal, reprocessing spent fuel is not a viable solution to the waste problem.

To start with, a 1996 study by the National Academy of Sciences estimated that it would cost at least $50 billion and possibly more than $100 billion to reprocess the transuranic elements in the first 62,000 metric tons of spent fuel (the amount of waste that Yucca Mountain is capable of holding). The cost to build the sodium-cooled reactors that would burn the reprocessed fuel would run anywhere from $40 billion to $150 billion, according to an analysis by Frank von Hippel, a physicist with Princeton University's Program on Science and Global Security and a member of the Bulletin's Board of Sponsors. The combined cost of these two elements of GNEP would certainly prove cost prohibitive when compared to relatively affordable temporary dry cask storage.

Even if reprocessing plants and the burner reactors were built, reprocessing and burning the fuel would create several streams of waste–rather than the single stream of spent fuel–merely delaying when the wastes would need to be permanently disposed. Reprocessing spent fuel, even the advanced forms of reprocessing being developed today, also heightens the risk of plutonium or other transuranics being diverted to weapons programs or made vulnerable to theft. Proliferation concerns, as well as GNEP's failure to realistically impact the waste issue, led Congress to limit the amount of funding for new reprocessing and burner reactor technologies in the 2008 appropriations bill. Congress was right to limit this funding.

Despite utility companies' embrace of reprocessing as a way to reduce the volume of nuclear waste, the nuclear industry is also focused on developing a more comprehensive, near-term plan to deal with the waste that is piling up, which explains its emphasis on moving forward on the licensing of the Yucca Mountain repository (see “The Campaign to Sell Nuclear,” p. 38). This effort is well directed in one regard: The federal government should formulate a nuclear waste policy that will protect the public and ensure global security to the greatest degree possible. It should also adopt a process of carrying out that policy that is both transparent and engenders public confidence. If the public is convinced that industry will work openly and diligently to secure nuclear material, prevent accidents and leaks, and dispose of its waste in a responsible manner, then it might be willing to accept the risks inherent in nuclear power operations.

Scientists have raised enough serious questions about the long-term viability of the Yucca Mountain site–from its location near active earthquake faults to the faster than expected movement of water through the rock above the site–that Congress should consider reopening the siting process rather than moving relentlessly toward licensing Yucca. At the very least, Energy should initiate a process to compare Yucca Mountain to other possible sites in a manner similar to the steps outlined in the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, a process long-advocated by leading scientists. By comparing data on Yucca Mountain with other possible repository sites in the United States and around the world, and incorporating what is learned into its own repository planning, Energy may be able to build a wide enough base of public and political support to see through to its completion the licensing and operation of a repository, be it Yucca or somewhere else.

Now is the appropriate time for the federal government and nuclear utilities to begin taking into account the factors previous generations of officials neglected to address. If federal agencies had a workable plan for disposing of nuclear waste prior to the development of the first generation of nuclear power plants, the risks and costs incurred today due to the growing amounts of waste could have been avoided.

Although legislation going back to the 1954 act puts the onus of dealing with nuclear waste on the federal government, utility companies also have a responsibility to ensure a solution is in place. Just as utility companies are responsible for scrubbing emissions from fossil fuel-burning plants, and may ultimately be required to cap emissions or else pay a price, nuclear operators should be expected to share responsibility for developing a process to deal with the by-products of nuclear power. Delaying new nuclear reactors may ultimately affect the ability of the United States to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions, if only because some other type of power plants would have to be built to replace the nuclear plants scheduled to retire in the coming decades. But if the current climate crisis has taught us anything, it's that a global population, whose demand for energy is only increasing, needs to consider the full effects of its technological investments. It's no secret that nuclear power production creates high-level, long-lived wastes. It would be foolhardy not to prepare for this reality.

This issue of the Bulletin is devoted entirely to discussing nuclear energy. To better understand the motivations of countries considering building new nuclear plants, the Bulletin asked energy officials from around the world to explain their governments' turn toward nuclear (p. 14).

To penetrate the economics of building new plants, perhaps the greatest indicator of whether nuclear power will experience a true revival, we sat down with the chairman of the largest nuclear utility in the United States, Exelon Corporation's John Rowe (p. 9). As a warning, physicists Zia Mian and Alexander Glaser recount how past expansions of nuclear power led to nuclear proliferation (p. 42). We welcome your thoughts on this special issue. Please email [e-mail].