I often blog about nuclear waste. It is one of the major problems with the use of nuclear power to generate electricity and heat. Recently Greenpeace published a report on nuclear waste storage facility in seven countries including Belgium, Britain, Finland, France, Japan, Sweden, and the United States. Several of these countries have so much spent nuclear fuel that they are nearing the point of saturation for storage options. In addition to running out of room to store spent nuclear fuel, these countries are also confronting other problems including the risk of fire at storage facilities, the venting of radioactive gases from storage facilities, contamination of the environment, the failure of storage containers to safely store spent fuel, possible terrorist attacks on storage facilities and the increasing cost of storage.
Shaun Burnie is a nuclear expert at Greenpeace Germany and a coordinator of the team that put out the report. He said, “More than 65 years after the start of the civil use of nuclear power, not a single country can claim that it has the solution to manage the most dangerous radioactive wastes.” He also said that although storing nuclear waste deep underground is the most researched long-term storage option, it “has shown major flaws which exclude it for now as a credible option.”
At present, there are around two hundred and fifty thousand tons of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel in fourteen countries around the globe. Most of this spent fuel remains in the cooling pools at reactor sites which lack secondary containment storage in dry casks and is susceptible to loss of cooling. In some cases, the nuclear power plants do not even have an alternative source of electricity to run the cooling system if the reactors go offline.
The Greenpeace 100-page report was compiled by a panel of experts. It details problems with the management of a huge amount of spent nuclear fuel in France which gets seventy five percent of its electricity from its fleet of fifty-eight nuclear power plants. The report states that “There is no credible solution for long-term safe disposal of nuclear waste in France.” Nuclear regulatory agencies in France have expressed concerns with respect to huge cooling pools at the La Hague nuclear power plant in Normandy. The French company, Orana, manages the Normandy plant. They say that the cooling pools will not be full until 2030 at the current rate.
There are about seventy thousand tons of spent nuclear fuel in the U.S. alone. The U.S. has spent billions of dollars over decades trying to site and construct a permanent geological repository under Yucca Mountain in Nevada that was supposed to be operational in 1999. The project was cancelled in 2010 by the Obama administration.
Currently, about seventy percent of the spent nuclear fuel in the U.S. sits in cooling pools. Often there are more than three times as many fuel assemblies in the pools beyond the designed capacities. When the pools can no longer accept any more fuel assemblies, the reactors may have to be shut down.
Millions of dollars are spent annually by proponents of nuclear power to promote its adoption and expansion. Unless the problem of spent nuclear fuel can be solved in the near future, it would be unwise to expand the use of nuclear power.