Part 3 of 3 Parts (Please read Parts 1 and 2 first)
Isaac Jones is the power supervisor for Enterprise and a member of the UAMPS board of directors. He told an interviewer that when he spoke to representatives of cities which had withdrawn from the Carbon Free Power Project, he got the impression that people were nervous when they heard the word “nuclear.” He also mentioned that there are now solar farms on the south side of his city. He said, “There’s going to come a day when it has to be cleaned up and recycled somehow, and that really hasn’t been thought of yet. As much as we appreciate the fact that it’s green energy, it has its issues, too.”
When it comes to potential environmental impacts of the project, Williams said that the number one issue is highly radioactive nuclear waste. “We’ve been building nuclear reactors around the country since the 60s, and all of that highly radioactive fuel is just sitting at those power plants with nowhere to go.”
In order to dispose of spent nuclear fuel from U.S. nuclear reactors, the Department of Energy began the construction of a geological repository under Yucca Mountain in Nevada but that project was cancelled in 2009. He said that “it’s very controversial scientifically whether that was the right place to put it.” It is also politically controversial, he added because, Nevada doesn’t want the entire nation’s nuclear waste coming to their state. While the debate still rages, the spent nuclear fuel continues to fill up in the cooling pools at U.S. nuclear reactor.
Williams says, “We just think we shouldn’t generate anymore high-level nuclear waste until we have a safe, environmentally responsible way to deal with it.” In addition to this problem, he said that another concern is the process of creating nuclear fuel. Every stage of the process from mining to milling to enrichment presents health and environmental hazards. He said that “Southeastern Utah is full of abandoned uranium mines that create radioactive exposure to the populations down there, and they’re not being cleaned up. Most of these mines are in San Juan County. The entire Navajo Nation is full of them. In fact, we’re just putting a map together; There’s hundreds of them on the Navajo Reservation.”
Much of the mine tailings were dumped near Moab. For forty years they have been moving these tailings away from the Colorado Rivers to a place near Interstate 70. This process has cost taxpayers billions of dollars. This project is called the Moab Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action Project. It is being administered by the U.S. Department of Energy. About seventy percent of the sixteen million tons of uranium tailings have been moved from the banks of the Colorado River to a permanent disposal site thirty-two miles north, near Crescent Junction.
A third problem for the project is the possibility of a nuclear accident at the Idaho power plant which would be devastating to the environment. Williams said that “UAMPS and NuScale say this plant is meltdown-proof, but they’ve never actually built one of these modules before, so it’s all theoretical at this point.”
So, if there are such major concerns with the Carbon Free Power Project, what is the alternative for the cities in the region? In addition to wind, solar and existing hydro power, there is a new technology that will be available before the Idaho power plant is completed. This new technology includes utility-scale or home-based battery storage for intermittent renewable energy. An investment in energy efficiency is also important as is making use of wasted power through grid integration.
What is really important is a shift in public perception according to Williams. “A lot of the people who are proponents of this nuclear plant are still thinking about energy the way we’ve been producing it in the past, and they say, ‘Battery storage will never be economically competitive.’ But they said that about solar 10 years ago, and it’s become cheaper faster than any of them could have predicted.”