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The New York Times is reporting that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has decided that nuclear waste from power plants can be stored on site, above ground, in containers that can be maintained and guarded forever.
In her statement, the Chairwoman recognized that this unanimous decision makes it less likely that any permanent storage facility will ever be approved by Congress:
“If you make the assumption that there will be some kind of institution that will exist, like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, that will assure material stays safe for hundreds or thousands of years, there’s not much impetus for Congress to want to deal with this issue. Personally, I think that we can’t say with any certainty what the future will look like. We’re pretty damned poor at predicting the future.”
The decision allows the resumption of Nuclear Licensing for new reactors, and expansion of existing plants by allowing indefinite use of above ground storage that can be monitored repaired and maintained essentially forever.
In June 2012, a court ruled that the commission had not done its homework in studying whether the waste could be stored on an interim basis while awaiting the creation of underground storage facilities. As a result, the commission froze much of its licensing activity two years ago.
The new storage plan is exactly the same as the old storage plan, but drops any pretense of there being a central underground storage facility, while at the same time mumbling some vague plans for 2048.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by subs on Saturday August 30 2014, @11:16PM
I do not envy, but at the same time have no sympathy for the people in charge of this situation. It's of their own making. This situation is a direct result of the US shuttering its fast reactor research projects in the 90s and the NRC specifically gearing itself towards a purely light-water rule-based approach to licensing. They have limited interested in licensing anything that doesn't fit within the tight boundaries of a traditional LWR, which essentially eliminates all of their viable options on waste handling.
At the same time, both political parties are just all to happy about the status quo, the Democrats because they are heavily RE/gas-lobbied and passionately hate nuclear power, and the Republicans because they are wholly owned by the oil/coal industry. I think the Democratic hate for nuclear is completely unjustified, as it would in fact help the overall environmental agenda of reducing CO2 emissions (except for the gas guys - they'd lose in a nuclear-dominated world); the Republicans OTOH, are very rightfully afraid of it, since it's the only thing that has a significant potential of dethroning fossil energy sources (they've seen what happened in France in the 80s/90s and want no piece of that; France has within 20 years, starting in 1974, all but eliminated fossil fuels from electrical production, now they enjoy CO2 emissions from electrical production that are 10x lower per capita than that of their renewable powerhouse neighbor, Germany).
This situation is unsustainable. Modern nuclear technology is going to get developed. If not in the US, it's going to happen elsewhere and those places are going to capitalize on that development big time. Russia has just fired up [rt.com] their pilot second generation commercial fast reactor [wikipedia.org] power plant and a much more economical mass production unit is ready for construction start [wikipedia.org]. Bill Gates' Terrapower hopes to get to a super-modern fast reactor demo plant in 2022 [terrapower.com], which eliminates the need for periodic fuel reprocessing entirely and only requires a relatively simple off-site recasting of the spent fuel without chemical separation of the plutonium after 30 years of operation (while in operation, the reactor is completely sealed). Another Canadian group is gearing to beating them to the market by 2021 with a essentially denatured molten-salt reactor [nextbigfuture.com] design, which can run on a partial Thorium mix, doesn't require U233 separation and doesn't breed, so it's a much lower proliferation risk than even LWRs are now. They are aiming for a small modular design initially for supporting oil sands production (which will finance their R&D).
As is the norm nowadays, America has accepted a following role in many key modern industries and that's going to have severe national and global repercussions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 31 2014, @08:44AM
I think you are correct and other countries will forge ahead with reprocessing tech. Hopefully we can send them our waste someday, and they will do something useful with it. It's not unthinkable, since the reprocessing cost could well be below the storage cost, especially if that's "forever". But shipping storage casks across the ocean will have its own risks and regulatory problems. Maybe Canada can help.