The United States is on the verge of a nuclear renaissance. One problem: Americans fear waste

BUCHANAN, New York
CNN
—

The Indian Point nuclear power plant has been an energy behemoth for 50 years, producing a quarter of the electricity that powers New York City’s iconic, sparkling skyline.

After its closure in 2021, the decommissioning process is well underway: The remaining waste of the radioactive fuel that once produced all that power has been sealed inside more than 120 large metal and concrete canisters.

huge containers They are welded shut and stand in rows behind barbed wire fences, watched 24/7 by security guards carrying long guns.

This is one of many misconceptions about nuclear energy: America’s nuclear waste is not buried in a mountain or hidden at the bottom of a deep, rocky cave. It is sealed in coffin-like barrels and distributed to more than 50 locations across the country.

Many other countries with long-running nuclear energy programs have plans to create a permanent home for these spent fuel canisters. The USA does not do this. Congress’s decades-old idea to bury them deep inside Yucca Mountain in Nevada is long dead, and no alternative has been identified.

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This is almost entirely because Americans are opposed to living near nuclear waste and are suspicious of attempts by governments or utilities to allay nuclear fears. The byproduct of nuclear energy is still associated with atomic bombs or nuclear meltdowns. In reality, what comes out of reactors is far from the dangerous, radioactive sludge seen in movies or imagined.

“People imagine it looks like the barrels of green goo that Homer Simpson had,” said Paul Murray, the U.S. Department of Energy’s assistant secretary for nuclear waste. Murray said spent fuel (metal rods containing uranium pellets) is “boringly safe” when sealed properly.

Waste from nuclear energy poses so little danger that a person would have to stand near it for an entire year to be exposed to “about one or two roentgens” of radiation, said Brian Vangor, landfill manager in Indiana. Point.

But the perception of danger is quickly becoming one of the biggest obstacles to the country loading abundant climate-friendly energy onto the grid.

The new wave, including nuclear ventures led by Bill Gates, is pouring billions of dollars into reactor technology. Two major reactors came online in Georgia recently, and a burst of activity in AI has tech giants scrambling to bring back to life facilities like Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the site of America’s infamous nuclear meltdown.

On the cusp of America’s nuclear energy renaissance, federal officials are imploring communities to say yes to storing spent fuel. Despite the lucrative deals it could create, no state has yet raised its hand to store the country’s nuclear energy waste. Not even temporarily.

For example, Holtec, which owns the now-decommissioned Indian Point, is looking for a facility in New Mexico to store its spent fuel.

Officials in New Mexico, where the Manhattan Project tested the first nuclear bombs without telling surrounding communities what was happening, flatly reject the idea.

“Just because we have the right geology, low population and large landmass doesn’t mean we’re willing to be more of a sacrifice zone for the nation’s defense industry or even the energy industry,” said New Mexico Environment Secretary James Kenney. Department.

Other Western countries going all-in on nuclear energy, including Finland, Sweden, and Canada, have spent years offering communities sweet deals in the form of either money to host permanent repositories or investments in new medical facilities, libraries, community centers, or new medical facilities. other public buildings.

The United States took a more clumsy approach. Congress’s decision in the late 1980s to bury the nation’s nuclear waste deep within Nevada’s Yucca Mountain was made largely without consulting Nevada state officials, let alone its residents.

“The United States followed the decide-announce-defend model, which has clearly been a failure,” said Allison McFarlane, a former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission who wrote a book about the Yucca Mountain saga.

The decision caused great reaction. State leaders called it the “Damn Nevada bill” and fought it tooth and nail. Some scientists and government officials were concerned about Yucca’s history of seismic activity and feared that the repository might be more exposed to free oxygen, increasing the likelihood of radiation leaks.

In a state that has no nuclear power plants and whose desert has hosted more than 900 atomic bomb tests dating back to the Cold War, Congress’s failure to ask has calcified the opposition.

This, combined with fears that nuclear waste would be transported through Las Vegas, the state’s economic engine and the nation’s party capital, sealed Yucca’s fate. It was Harry Reid of Nevada who put the final nail in Yucca’s coffin when he became Senate majority leader.

Murray, a soft-spoken English native who has studied nuclear energy for decades, is on a mission to make waste less scary.

Its first mission is to spread public concern about the eventual transfer of nuclear waste to a temporary storage site (location yet to be determined). Murray’s office will begin a mission next year to subject fuel storage containers to a very creative and very public stress test, using the scenario people fear most.

“We want to take a package, we want to hit it on a train, drop it on a hard surface, drive it against a prop, set it on fire, drop it in a lake, go fishing,” Murray said. “They want to see if we throw a turkey or a chicken?” They will do this.

This series of successes has one purpose: to show, not to say, that spent nuclear fuel is safe. Many other countries (France, UK, Japan) regularly transport spent fuel barrels by train, boat and even trucks.

The other big item on Murray’s list is waiting for states to raise their hands to temporarily house the nation’s spent fuel.

“We can basically make it work for any state that comes forward,” Murray said.

States have so far been firmly opposed to the operation of this system.

Leaders in Texas oppose their state’s temporary solution, and a case over the future of nuclear waste storage in both Texas and neighboring New Mexico is heading to the Supreme Court.

New Mexico recently passed a nuclear waste storage ban to prevent Holtec, which owns Indian Point as well as several other nuclear plants, from completing a landfill there.

Kenney, the province’s environment minister, said his opposition was in defense of people who experience health problems while working in the province’s uranium mines or living near waste produced by those mines.

Even attempts to clean up old uranium mine tailings in New Mexico have been controversial. High school students in Thoreau, New Mexico, protested the EPA’s plan to do so because the agency proposed storing the waste in their town.

“Historically, the government has not treated the Navajos and Native Americans right,” Thoreau high school student Ezekiel Gonzales told CNN. “We can’t trust our government because of what they did to us. “This makes me angry, and I’m sure it makes everyone in my town angry too.”

Taxpayers have already paid $47 billion in landfill fees for all of the homeless’ nuclear waste, and that price tag will continue to rise until the feds find a permanent solution.

“The longer we wait to move, the more they’re going to have to pay,” said Frank Rusco, a director at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which focuses on energy.

That’s why some experts encourage another solution, though more politically challenging: recycling. France has been doing this for years, turning spent plutonium into a product that can go back into reactors and produce more energy.

Some experts argue that America’s massive 94,000-ton stockpile of spent fuel is a waste of money.

“This doesn’t have to be just a one-time process,” said Greg Piefer, founder and CEO of Shine Technologies, a nuclear fusion company exploring reprocessing. “Every time you burn it, you can produce more plutonium, and then you burn that plutonium again.”

But first the country would need to build a facility that would actually recycle and reuse waste, and building that would be costly.

As with Yucca Mountain, Congress would need to amend an existing law aimed at curbing gun proliferation.

As taxpayer costs and energy demands soar, this is a nuclear option worth examining. Some MPs also agree on this issue.

“Reprocessing should be part of the discussion and debate in terms of understanding how expensive it is,” Democratic Sen. Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico told CNN. “If anything goes into the soil, it should be in the smallest amount.”