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Nuclear Regulatory Commission Shows Dry Cask Storage Is Safe – Yet Again

This article is more than 4 years old.

America and the world are grappling with the effects of two pandemics. The recent one is the Coronavirus sweeping across the world. The other is a wave of anti-science attitudes that started some years ago. The latter has made the former worse.

Whether it was China gagging doctors who tried to raise the alarm on COVID-19, budget cuts to our medical and basic sciences over the last few years, anti-vaxxers or denying climate change, ignoring reality has consequences.

Those consequences can be deaths, as in the case of pandemics. Or just lots of money. The best example of wasting money is our anti-science attitudes towards nuclear energy. They have cost us a lot of money, money that could have been better spent elsewhere. And they have prevented us from bringing up the cleanest and safest form of energy that we so desperately need.

So it’s good to see science trumping fear on one issue that we scientists all thought would be easy – storing commercial nuclear waste.

The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued a draft environmental impact statement (EIS) for Holtec International's proposed consolidated HI-STORE spent nuclear fuel interim storage facility near Carlsbad, New Mexico.

The NRC found no environmental impacts that would stop it from issuing a license for environmental reasons. The EIS assesses the environmental impacts of the entire project, from construction to decommissioning. Impacts that are considered include land use, transportation, geology and soils, surface waters and wetlands, groundwater, ecological resources, historic and cultural resources, environmental justice and a few others.

Holtec would begin storing about 500 canisters holding over 9,500 tons of spent nuclear fuel at the proposed site.

Of course it’s safe! Dry Cask storage is probably the safest activity one can do in America. The risks are too small to be measured, although we try to assign numbers. But the risks are below any other activity humans engage in, making the relative risks not statistically different from zero.

As Holtec President and CEO Kris Singh said, "Our stakeholders should know that our HI-STORE underground storage system in New Mexico has the three coveted characteristics, namely readily retrievable canisters to enable at-will relocation, extreme resistance to terror and hurricanes, and a geologically stable terrain that precludes the incidence of earthquakes."

Holtec also plans to use waste heat from the stored canisters to purify waste water from fracking, a significant economic benefit to a desert community that has huge subsurface natural gas deposits being extracted by fracking.

Holtec launched the storage initiative together with the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance. Used fuel, which is currently stored at commercial reactor sites in over thirty states, would be transported by rail to the storage facility. NRC noted that interim storage allows spent fuel, now stored at decommissioned reactor sites, to be removed, completing the decommissioning process and returning land at those sites to other uses.

The facility would store spent nuclear fuel, which is better referred to as slightly used nuclear fuel, until a final disposal facility is built or until we build our new fast reactors that will burn it, or until we recycle it into new fuel.

Reactor fuel usually spends five years in the reactor, after which only 5% of the energy in the fuel is used, but fission products from the nuclear fission have built-up to the point where the fuel must be replaced. After leaving the reactor, the spent fuel usually spends about 5 years in spent fuel pools of water, until heat and radiation have decreased sufficiently to allow the fuel to be passively cooled in a dry cask (see 1,2,3).

At this point the dry casks can stay where they are for over a century, or be moved to a centralized storage facility like Holtec is proposing. A centralized facility would make the logistics and costs of storage easier and lower than having dozens of sites around the country, especially at those sites where the reactors themselves are not operating anymore, like at San Onofre in California.

A study by Oak Ridge National Laboratory showed an interim storage site would save the U.S. Treasury $15 billion by 2040, $30 billion by 2050, and $54 billion by 2060.

The NRC has concluded that spent fuel storage in pools and casks is safe and secure.

Interim storage of spent nuclear fuel is nothing new. It’s been going on in the United States for decades at existing nuclear plant sites. Much of our used fuel, over 70,000 tons, is in interim storage in pools and casks at operating nuclear power plants throughout the country, several of which have been shut down and decommissioned.

Dry casks are typically constructed of one or more shells of steel, cast iron, and reinforced concrete to provide leak containment and radiation shielding. Casks typically hold 10 tons of spent fuel. At present, dry cask storage is licensed at 35 nuclear plant sites in 24 states. There are 65 sites with operating reactors in the United States.

Critics of the project cite the danger of transporting what could be volatile nuclear waste, and are worried about the environmental impact of burying spent nuclear fuel in New Mexico. Both are not serious risks since this waste is not very volatile, the canisters are welded shut, and there are no free liquids to leak.

Besides, we’ve been disposing of nuclear waste in New Mexico since 1999 - some of it very high activity - and we have transported almost a million tons of nuclear waste, nuclear weapons and spent nuclear fuel over millions of miles of roadways – all with no problems.

No deaths. No cancers. A few ordinary industrial accidents like falling off scaffolding, or running into someone with a forklift. Nothing from radiation or from the waste itself.

Critics believe that any ideas about handling nuclear waste are bad but that leaving it where it is not acceptable. Unfortunately, they never suggest any scientifically-credible solutions and just poo-poo the real science. Of course, their goal is usually to shut down nuclear, not solving problems.

Our nuclear waste containers have been tested over the last 40 years by running them into concrete bunkers at 80 mph, being dropped onto huge steel spikes, burned in jet fuel fires at thousands of degrees, and sunk deep in water for weeks. These things are as strong as humans can make them.

Holtec has already done this kind of thing before, very successfully. Holtec’s HI-STORM UMAX was certified and licensed by the NRC in 2015 and is already deployed at nuclear power plants around the United States, including Callaway Nuclear Generating Station and SONGS. It was engineered to store all of our used nuclear fuel that has been produced.

John Heaton, Chair of the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance, estimates that the entire proposed facility in New Mexico would take ten years to construct, and employ about 300 local workers.

The public can comment on the draft EIS before NRC prepares the final EIS, scheduled for March 2021. The separate technical safety review of this system is scheduled to be completed at the same time. A decision on whether to grant the license would follow.

Dealing with our nuclear waste is really the last hurdle in a bright and clean energy future that includes all non-fossil sources. So we need to get this going.

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