Current U.S. nuclear waste storage strategy

Speaking of strategies to store nuclear waste, here's an article on the current de facto U.S. government strategy: compensate nuclear operators for storing onsite, and double the expense by continually pursuing doomed litigation to avoid these payments. I think in a perfect world we could probably figure out something better.

Larry Summers, prophet of toxic waste

Two decades after the infamous Summers memo,

The U.S. is reportedly in talks with Mongolia about the country setting up an international repository for nuclear waste.

Via FP Passport, details (fairly speculative) here.

Like a few other Summers statements, the one on toxic waste (which he later asserted was sarcastic) is easily demonized, but upon further examination shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.

I find the nuclear waste storage debate in the U.S. intensely frustrating - it is on par with entitlement spending in the political challenges of doing the right thing in the face of short-term incentives that are much stronger and more visible than the long-term ones.

I also liked an idea from Stuart Brand's Whole Earth Discipline: rather than try to prove a storage site will be safe for 10,000 years, use the Iroquois seven generations rule, find somewhere it will be safe for 200 years, and see how far re-processing technology has evolved by then.

Explore all the nuclear fuel alternatives

Environmental Capital on the statement emerging from Obama's recent visit to Japan:

But one bit in particular seems interesting: “Strengthened partnership on nuclear energy including on advanced fuel cycle technologies…”

That pretty much boils down to figuring out the best—and most affordable way—to reprocess spent nuclear fuel. That’s something Japan and some European countries do; the U.S. nixed such plans during the Carter administration, though it’s perennially on the Energy Department’s back burner.

Given the many challenges posed by reprocessing nuclear fuel, one would hope that "advanced fuel cycle technologies" has a more broad and far-sighted connotation, including alternative reactor designs (e.g. here, here) and perhaps a more substantive R&D effort around the promising but under-developed thorium fuel cycle.

The case against reprocessing

Frank von Hippel, a physicist and professor of public and international affairs at Princeton, has an op ed in the LA Times arguing against reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. The simple case for reprocessing is that it reuses much of the spent nuclear fuel that we in the U.S. consider waste (and were, until recently, planning to store at Yucca Mountain). There is a catchy sound byte I can't find that says something like all of France's nuclear waste is stored in a warehouse the size of X (not very big).

Unfortunately, it is not so simple. (To be fair, the media has pointed this out before, e.g. in this NYT piece on reprocessing from May). But von Hippel brings true expertise to the table, so his articulation of the objections is worth citing (subtitles are mine).

Cost: "Based on French and Japanese experience, the cost of producing this recycled fuel is several times that of producing fresh uranium reactor fuel."

Waste volume (not actually reduced): "The French reprocessing company AREVA claims that its method reduces the volume and longevity of the radioactive waste produced by nuclear power reactors. But when you take into account the additional radioactive waste streams created by reprocessing and plutonium recycling, the volume of the long-lived radioactive waste is not reduced."

Radioactivity: "Reprocessing is enormously dangerous. The amount of radioactivity in the liquid waste stored at France's plant is more than 100 times that released by the Chernobyl accident. That is why France's government set up antiaircraft missile batteries around its reprocessing plant after the 9/11 attacks."

Plutonium: "Even more dangerous, however, is the fact that reprocessing provides access to plutonium, a nuclear weapon material. That is why the U.S. turned against it after 1974, the year India used the first plutonium separated with U.S.-provided reprocessing for a nuclear explosion."

von Hippel favors eventually storing waste in a long-term storage like Yucca Mountain (except perhaps one in a community which already has a nuclear plant, for easier acceptance, as successfully done in Finland and Sweden). In the meantime, he thinks we should sit on the current dry cask storage, rather than "panic" and take the "very expensive and dangerous detour" of reprocessing.

His arguments have something for everyone - cost for businessmen and economists, waste volume for the environment, radioactivity for human health and plutonium for security hawks. In particular I think the high cost of reprocessing is not well-known and deserves to be mentioned more prominently in a balanced debate.