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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