The media has taken notice of the problem of spent fuel being stored indefinitely at reactor sites, which, for now, will be there long after the plant has been taken offline…
The LA Times ran an article on the spent fuel being stored at San Onofre Nuclear Generation Station, which closed in 2013. It highlights the elephant in the nuclear power industry’s living room: Yucca Mountain. Or rather, the fact that no permanent spent fuel repository has been provided by the Department of Energy.
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The article highlights the desire of the Trump administration to move the waste to temporary storage facilities until a permanent storage location can be developed. Here’s what the article says:
The massive, 150-ton turbines have stopped spinning. The mile-long cooling pipes that extend into the Pacific will likely become undersea relics. High voltage that once energized the homes of more than a million Californians is down to zero.
But the San Onofre nuclear power plant will loom for a long time as a landmark, its 1,800 tons of lethal radioactive waste stored on the edge of the Pacific and within sight of the busy 5 Freeway.
Across the site, deep pools of water and massive concrete casks confine high-power gamma radiation and other forms of radioactivity emitted by 890,000 spent fuel rods that nobody wants there.
And like the other 79,000 tons of spent fuel spread across the nation, San Onofre’s nuclear waste has nowhere to go.
The nation’s inability to find a permanent home for the dangerous byproduct of its 50-year-adventure in nuclear energy represents one of the biggest and longest running policy failures in federal government history.
Now, the Trump administration and Congress are proposing a fast track fix. The new plan aims, after decades of delays, to move the waste to one or more temporary central storage sites that would hold it until a geologic repository can be built in Nevada or somewhere else.
But the new strategy faces many of the same challenges that have dogged past efforts, leaving some experts doubtful that it can succeed.
The article explains that two companies have begun the licensing process with the NRC to build two temporary storage facilities for spent fuel in Texas and New Mexico. Ideally, the nation’s spent fuel would be shipped to these facilities, and then later moved into Yucca Mountain for permanent storage.
Is reviving Yucca Mountain a long shot?