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Now that the final report of the President’s Commission on the future of nuclear energy has been completed and published, the path is open to a reasonable solution on how to use and store spent fuel. We can safely assume now that the expensive Yucca Mountain boondoggle is truly dead. We now must concentrate on how to handle, store and ultimately make use of spent fuel.
The spent fuel we are discussing began as uranium ore mined somewhere in the world. This uranium ore was purified and sent to an enrichment plant, such as we have in Eunice, N.M.
In this plant, the uranium is enriched to 3-6 percent uranium 235. The enriched uranium is sold to a utility for a nuclear power reactor, where it will be used for 3-6 years until the U235 is depleted.
The spent fuel is then transferred to a water-cooling bath, where it remains for a few years. From this point, the spent fuel is transferred to air-cooling casks where it resides. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has found these methods to be safe.
The problem of what to do with spent fuel was created by President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, when he decreed that we will no longer consider the reprocessing of spent fuel to obtain valuable elements for future energy. His decision led to the concept of burying spent fuel in cavities created in Yucca Mountain – truly a waste of enormous amounts of inexpensive energy, because over 50 times more recoverable energy remains in the fuel than originally extracted.
This endeavor was expensive, costing tens of billions of dollars, and ended in failure because proof of absolute safety could never be established. No spent fuel was ever sent to Yucca Mountain. This, and other problems, led finally to the failure of the whole concept of underground storage.
Meanwhile, utilities had to address the problem of their accumulating spent fuel.
What they developed, as mentioned earlier, was the use of air cooling of spent fuel casks made with concrete and steel. These casks are stored by the utilities at the sites of nuclear reactors – completely safe. The casks are too heavy to move without special equipment, and the contents are too radioactive to handle without shielding.
No accident or incident has ever occurred in the utilities’ method of storing spent fuel. So, what is the problem? It is that all the spent fuel being stored by the utilities belongs to the federal government, which has totally failed to meet its obligations and has now placed on the utilities huge problems that must soon be solved.
Where now to create a national site to safely store and prepare spent fuel for further use? Just such a location exists in southeastern New Mexico, close to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
There, large land areas exist which are nearly ideal. The land, too salty and dry for agriculture, is currently not utilized and is essentially useless except for perhaps storage of spent fuel.
The physical requirements of such a site are simple and relatively inexpensive. The basic requirements are concrete pads on which to store the spent fuel casks, rail access and adequate lifting equipment and fencing – all inexpensive requirements indeed. This site could be used for not only safe storage, but also for reprocessing spent fuel for additional energy.
In our opinion, this is an ideal solution for New Mexico, the electric utilities, as well as for the federal government and the nation.
The federal government pays a penalty every month for not solving the problem. Underground storage is not necessary, nor even desirable. It is most undesirable because, once buried, it would be very difficult and expensive to retrieve for reprocessing.
We believe that planning for this site in New Mexico should commence as soon as possible.
Also signed by Donald Petersen, Glen Graves and Stephen Stoddard, members of Los Alamos Education Group.
