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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 31 2014, @03:43AM
This is why I do not trust nuclear energy. (Or a lot of other forms of energy for that matter.) Yes, we need nuke energy (at least in the short term), but politics are way too involved. How long has Yucca Mountain been going on? Decades? How can we have safe nuclear energy production if we don't know how we're going to safely dispose of this waste that has the potential to affect at least several generations?
I'd like to engage in a good debate with knowledgeable people, but I don't even feel comfortable logging in and doing that on here. It's one of the few times I'm going the A. Coward route. I do not understand how anyone can feel comfortable going ahead with any kind of nuclear project without knowing what the end game is going to look like.
I'm also always surprised by how much hostility there is anytime ideas like this are brought up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 31 2014, @06:42AM
tl;dr too big to fail
Nuclear is ridiculously expensive. There wouldn't be a single production reactor going if it wasn't for massive subsidies. And the big boys want to keep milking their investment forever. For many people the invention of clean abundant energy would be a horrible setback. Nevermind the radioactive waste, it's simply not interesting to these sociopaths. And unless we do something to it, it will be there forever. And forever is a long time.
Nuclear is a holy cow, it's too legit to quit. Disagree and you'll find yourself picking up your teeth...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mtrycz on Sunday August 31 2014, @09:41AM
I remember having seen the documentary about this new type of nuclear by this guy who's supporting it, lemme see if I can find it.
Yeah, I got it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4 [youtube.com], it's an interesting video, and while I'm too ignorant on the matter to either endorse or dismiss the type of nuclear he's advocating, the video explains the details of why traditional nuclear is so bad.
The pieces I liked the most is where:
1. nuclear fuel rod are used up in about 1% of their fuel content, and the remaining 99% of it remains inside, unusable
2. uranium and plutonium were researched and built *because* of their weapon applicability, while thorium was dismissed for not having this applicability
Now I'm not saying that the claims are right or wrong, as I don't have the knowledge necessary, but I'm sure other folks here can.
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(Score: 2) by subs on Sunday August 31 2014, @11:24AM
Full agree that the politics is meddling a lot in nuclear energy, but then politics intervenes a lot in all matters that are strategic to the nation. Politics also intervenes in a lot of other countries that have significant nuclear projects (France, China and Russia to name a few), but in those countries the political leadership recognizes the importance of nuclear power and makes conscious decisions to support it. America is special in that its government is populated primarily career politicians backed by various business interests, most of which are largely opposed to nuclear power for their own reasons.
As for the outlook on the end game, it was always pretty clear to the original nuclear pioneers: light-water as an intermediate step to the "true" nuclear power, which is a closed-loop cycle based on breeders or actinide burners. Those people weren't dumb and that's why Yucca Mountain was conceived as a repository rather than a pit - so we could go in and pull the stuff back out and burn it in newer reactor designs. One fast reactor design [wikipedia.org] came tantalizingly close to being completed before being killed by political action in 1994 (the scientists on the project estimated they were 2-3 years from commercialization). GE is currently offering the completed plant design as the S-PRISM, however the current regulatory and policy environment in the US is such that its licensing would take huge amounts of effort and money and is uncertain at best - every new nuclear startup is trying to avoid going through the NRC as much as possible (Terrapower are openly saying they'll probably build outside the US, Flibe energy is pitching to the military to avoid the NRC, Terrestrial is Canadian and so don't have to deal with the NRC at all, etc.). Terrestrial's David LeBlanc nicely summarized it when he said that the NRC is based entirely on rules around light-water reactors, so anything that wants to get approved either has to find a way to fit into those rules, or wait for the NRC to change its rules (which takes *a long* time).
So the problem is pretty much of our own making. We have the technology and it's continuously being improved with better physics modeling, enhanced safety and proliferation resistance and lots of new ideas on improving and lowering its cost. What is lacking is decisive political action that will make nuclear part of a national strategy to wean ourselves off fossil fuels and clean the policy roadblocks for the technology to finally start getting deployed.