How to deal with used nuclear fuel from reactors continues to confound the U.S. (and other nuclear power countries), a puzzle that has paralyzed policy makers and politicians for more than 70 years.
Since the Trump administration pulled the financial plug on the over-40-year old, stalemated Yucca Mountain project in Nevada on political grounds, while pledging (emptily) to find a solution to what to do with spent nuclear fuel from civilian power plants, little has happened to suggest progress.
There has been much hand-waving and boosterism from the administration and the industry, but little that suggests progress. In early June, the industry and the Electric Power Research Institute hyped a contract with a small firm, “Deep Isolation,” to explore horizontal drilling beneath the “next generation” of nuclear plants. This is a decentralized approach, in contrast to many of the previous approaches to nuclear waste that were centralized, including the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which, through an essentially corrupt process, ended up targeting the Nevada Yucca Mountain site.
While Deep Isolation has some credible advisors, including former Obama administration Energy Secretary Stephen Chu, it appears to be lightly capitalized, with $14 million in startup funds from investors including Bechtel, NAC International, and Slumberger. The company’s concept is to use horizontal drilling technology, developed by the oil and gas industry for fracking for fossil fuels, as a method for sequestering spent fuel under a reactor site.
But there is a major, non-technical roadblock (not dealing with major technical roadblocks). The 1982 waste act, significantly amended in 1987, specifies Yucca Mountain as the U.S. sole option for storing spent nuclear fuel. Getting around that could spark severe political fights, as states that would see the spent fuel permanently located in the current locations might push back against a distributed approach.
In the meantime, dealing with the spent fuel from the shuttered San Onofre two-unit nuclear plant in Southern California is facing controversy. A recent report from a task force convened by Democratic Rep. Mike Levin of San Juan Capistrano, calls for a broad range of federal government actions to deal with the on-site spent fuel at the plant. The first recommendation is that “Congress should consider federal legislation requiring a plan for removal of [spent nuclear fuel] from the … site on San Onofre State Beach.” The chance that Congress would consider that is close to zero.
In another, related story, Canada’s provincial utility monopoly, Ontario Power Generation, has scrapped long-standing but long stalled plans to develop a multi-billion dollar plan for a deep spent nuclear fuel repository on a site near Lake Huron. OPG, owned by the province, said in a letter to the Canadian federal government, “We do not intend to carry out the project and have asked that the application for a site preparation and construction license be withdrawn.”
The most developed nuclear waste project in the U.S., the New Mexico Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), designed to store low-level military and transuranic wastes in salt beds, has seen multiple problems, which have shut the facility down for years at a time. New Jersey’s Holtec International has been working on a plan for a high-level spent fuel waste site near the WIPP site, but has so far been stymied from getting a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license by the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. New Mexico’s Democratic congressional delegation has been skeptical of the project.
— Kennedy Maize