Part 2 of 3 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
     Jeri Fry isn’t a trained nuclear scientist. However, she does want communities to know about the history and risks of the nuclear industry. This includes the uranium that was mined and processed to feed those reactors.
     Fry said, “These things have half-lives that are centuries, millennia long. And so a community that is not given full disclosure and full information about what they’re signing on to, could just get a horrible commitment.”
     Historical nuclear waste with no permanent storage and large-scale nuclear disasters have caused many Americans to be distrustful of nuclear power.
      Anna Erickson is a professor of nuclear and radiological engineering in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. She also leads a research consortium sponsored by the DoE’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Major accidents at nuclear reactors like Chernobyl sparked Erickson’s interest in the subject of dealing with spent nuclear fuel. Erickson said, “It was done very carelessly in the past. It is not how we do things today. We have a lot better understanding of material associated with the uranium fuel cycle, and we do not think that depleted uranium is harmless anymore.”
     Erickson added that the scale of today’s waste from power plants is smaller and more manageable than the waste from nuclear weapons and fuel production left in places like Cañon City.
     Twenty years’ worth of spent nuclear fuel is stored at the former Maine Yankee nuclear plant. Nuclear experts say that the nation’s inventory of spent nuclear fuel would fit inside a football field and be about thirty feet deep. This kind of highly radioactive waste, primarily spent nuclear fuel, is stored in large cylinders made of concrete and steel.
     Erickson said, “If you take all of the spent fuel that’s been stored on site of nuclear reactors, and you consolidate it all, it’s (the) size of about a football field, right, about 10 yards deep. “Once the fuel is stored in those casks, the radiation around those casks is actually not that high. Those casks are regularly inspected today by humans with those Geiger counters that you’ve seen or other instruments. But in the future, we’re looking to move to robotics inspection.”
     Erickson continued that the U.S. has a good safety record while storing spent nuclear fuel on a temporary basis. “We have not had major accidents, or pretty much any accidents related to release of the material from those spent fuel casks.”
     According to a federal study from 2016, more than thirteen hundred spent fuel nuclear shipments have been completed safely in the United States over a thirty-five-year period. The report said that four shipments were involved in accidents, but “none resulted in a release of radioactive material or a fatality due to radiation exposure.”
     The Government Accountability Office calls the spent nuclear fuel that was shipped “one of the most hazardous substances ever created by humans.” Federal documents acknowledge that while many safety precautions are in place to prevent leakage of radioactive materials, there are risks to moving the fuel into the storage casks and transporting it. Citing several studies, the government says, “The key risk posed by spent nuclear fuel involves a release of radiation that could harm human health or the environment.”
Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering
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Part 1 of 3 Parts
     For over a decade, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has been working to develop one central location to temporarily store spent nuclear fuel. Meanwhile, this nuclear waste has been piling up on-site, at nuclear power plants across the country. Three years ago, the DoE began asking for public feedback on the issue of spent nuclear fuel storage. The agency received hundreds of responses from concerned citizens.
     A group called Colorado Citizens Against Toxic Waste (CCAT) was one of the organizations that entered their concerns into the federal record. CCAT and other activist groups wrote a joint letter that said, “A major reason for the public’s irreparable loss of trust in (the U.S. Department of Energy) is its incompetence, or worse, at managing irradiated nuclear fuel and highly radioactive waste over decades past.”
     Jeri Fry is a co-founder of CCAT who lives in Cañon City, Colorado. This community is still dealing with the fallout of uranium processing from decades ago, which resulted in the release of radioactive material into soil and groundwater. Her father, who worked at the Cotter uranium mill, died of cancer after winning a lawsuit that alleged his lymphoma was linked to radiation exposure.

     Fry currently runs one of the most unusual and somber tours in Colorado. The tour begins with her loading a Geiger counter into her car to check for radiation at her destination which is down a quiet gravel road on the outskirts of Cañon City.
     The lonely road is being reclaimed by weeds and sagebrush. It ends at a gate with an old guard shack. Signs warn of radiation danger in a restricted area. Beyond the gate are the remains of the uranium processing mill, where an estimated five million eight hundred thousand tons of radioactive waste is buried behind a berm. A big industrial building stands in front of a large retaining pond with mountains in the background.
     The Cotter uranium mill dominated the outskirts of Cañon City in 2007. The area is now a superfund site where millions of tons of radioactive waste are buried. The mill supported efforts to create nuclear fuel.
     In November, Fry said, “We’re living with an active Superfund site that hasn’t been cleaned up since it was declared. And so it’s more than 40 years now.” She works to increase awareness of and pressure the government to clean up past contamination. She regularly comments on federal nuclear energy proposals. Last year, she introduced herself in a letter as a “second-generation neighbor of a 40-year-old Superfund site in southeastern Colorado.”
    Fry added, “My radioactive neighbor is a daily residual reminder and threat to my community, that is not cleaned up. I bear witness to the desperate need for sincere investment in policy and technology at the filthy nuclear front end.”
     As the government seeks a place to store spent nuclear fuel from the back end of the nuclear cycle, some communities in northwest Colorado have expressed an interest in learning more. An economic development group is promoting the idea of a temporary storage facility as a way to boost the economy in the region.
Colorado Citizens Against Toxic Waste