The nuclear industry is always telling us how economical, low-carbon, efficient and safe nuclear power is. Nuclear waste is sort of like the unwanted child who is banished to the cellar. The spent nuclear fuel keeps piling up at each nuclear power reactor in the U.S. and there is no permanent storage available. It is difficult to factor in the cost of eventual waste disposal because these costs lie in the uncertain future. It is my feeling that, in retrospect, nuclear power will be seen to have cost far more than the nuclear industry claims.
The U.S. intended to have a permanent geological repository for spent nuclear fuel from all the nation's power reactors by 1999. The site that was chosen at Yucca Mountain was abandoned by the federal government in 2009. It is now estimated that there will be no permanent repository for spent nuclear fuel before 2050 at the soonest. There is a county in Texas and another in New Mexico which have offered to create "centralized interim storage sites", but neither of these would be ready to accept spent nuclear fuel for decades.
Illinois gets about half of its electricity from nuclear power. There are eleven operating nuclear power reactors in six power plants. The nuclear fuel rods used in the reactor are placed in cooling ponds after removal from the reactors. In a few years, the worse of the radiation dissipates and the rods are ready to move to storage but the spent fuel rods will remain deadly for more than ten thousand years.
Illinois currently possesses more spent nuclear fuel than any other state in the country. There are nine thousand tons of spent nuclear fuel temporarily stored at the reactors in Illinois. Eighty percent is stored in deep cooling pools at forty five locations. The other twenty percent is stored in air-cooled concrete and steel dry casks at nuclear power plants.
If one of the cooling pools is drained, the fuel rods would spontaneously heat up, catch fire and spread radiation and radioactive particles around the landscape. An estimate from the U.S. Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1997 suggested that there could be up to seventy immediate deaths and thirty thousand delayed deaths within a fifty mile radius of such an accident. Operators of power reactors claim that the spent fuel pools are well-protected and safe. Engineers claim that dry cast storage is sufficient to protect spent fuel rods from any anticipated threat such as earthquakes, terrorism, extreme weather, etc. Critics of nuclear power beg to differ on the ultimate safety of both pools and casks.
There are calls for reinstating a moratorium on licensing new nuclear power reactors in Illinois until a solution can be found for the permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel. In the meantime, centralized interim storage sites should be created. Considering that it will be decades before either of these goals can be reached, critics of nuclear power in Illinois are effectively calling for an end to the expansion of nuclear power in Illinois for the foreseeable future. In any case, it may be a moot point because operators of nuclear power reactors in Illinois are losing the competition for power generation in the open market and have recently threatened to shut down existing power reactors unless the state government makes special arrangements to help the nuclear industry. Illinois may be a model of what will happen to the nuclear industry across the country in the coming years. We can only hope.
