new storage proposal for U.S. nuclear waste

New storage  proposal for U.S. Nuclear source to be unpopular

No U.S. politician ever lost an election by opposing a nuclear waste dump. That’s  why the latest report on from U.S. department of energy commission will end up in the same garbage can as proposal to build a nuclear  waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

The latest idea is build one or more above ground storage facilities made of enough concrete and steel to resist a potential terrorist attack and to store the spent fuel supply for decades. Courts have ruled out the law establishing Yucca Mountain requires the DOE to show that spent fuel could be safely  stored there for a million years. The best the department could do was 10,000 years. A million years then 10,000 years  now about 120 years. What happens after that is anybody’s guess and somebody elses problem.

The political beauty of this solution is that it kicks the can down road a really long ways. It also prevents the DOE and congress from having to consider doing things differently.

In U.S. virtually all spent nuclear fuel is stored in casks above ground out or cooling ponds located at the reactor sites. There are 104 operating reactors in U.S. and more than 100 disposal sites. The cooling ponds are similar to the ponds that began leaking and then over heating at Fukushima Daiichi reactors.

France which generates about 80 % of its electricity from nuclear power, and the Japan and U.K. all recycle and reprocess most of their spent fuel. Reprocessing is not illegal in U.S.,but there is no nuclear  reprocessing plant in the U.S. but it was deemed and cleaner years ago to use only new fuel rods in the U.S.  reactors. It is probably still cheaper to use new uranium.

A nuclear reactor design could also make Terra Power LLC is working on traveling wave reactor that could use a small amount of low-enriched uranium to start up and then fuelled with depleted uranium, which is a by product of standard enrichment process. This company claims its reactors could run for decade on depleted  uranium, reducing dramatically the amount of nuclear waste.

There are about 700,000 metric tons of this low -level nuclear material lying around U.S. and Terra Power claims that mere 8 metric ton could generate 25 million megawatts annually. The company’s  original backers included Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold  of Micro Soft and now include venture capitalist Vinod  Khosla  a founder of Sun Micro Systems and driving force behind Kir Inc - bio fuel company that recently filed for an I.P.O.

Any of these solution, though will take time. Even if Yucca Mountain had been approved construction would have taken about 10 years. Building above ground storage as the DOE commission recommends, would take about long. So would designing and building Terra power reactor with commercial development 15 years off.

In wake of disaster in Japan, no plan to do any thing about nuclear power in the U.S. is likely find support. If any thing  most of support will be shutting the existing power plants down as their licenses expire. How U.S. will replace that approximately 20 per cent of total U.S. generation is an unanswered question. Solar or wind or geo thermal or something else or all combined not likely to meet  demand.

The answer is to develop latest nuclear reactors with  safety parameters and continue to educate operators and technicians on latest safety guide lines while operating nuclear reactors and  it is  advised to U.S. for investing heavily  on safe latest nuclear technology  instead of running away from global proved and reliable accepted  nuclear technology.