Nuclear Renaissance Must Still Solve for Spent Fuel

The U.S. nuclear-power renaissance is plunging ahead without a long-term solution for some 92,500 metric tons of spent fuel piled up at power plant sites around the country. Another 2,000 metric tons is added every year, according to figures from industry trade group the Nuclear Energy Institute.

That’s even before the planned new nuclear capacity coming via deals like one between Microsoft and Constellation Energy and another between Alphabet’s Google and Kairos Power, both well-covered by my colleagues Timothy Gardner and Laila Kearney.

The waste was supposed to go to a permanent underground facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. But its development was halted by former President Barack Obama’s administration under political pressure.

Currently the U.S. Department of Energy is working on ‘consent-based’ siting, or sending the waste to places willing to take it, but that’s slow going. A planned storage facility is western Texas is tied up in court.

It would be good to hurry up. About 40,000 metric tons of the spent fuel in the U.S. is stored in pools requiring power. One worry when a tsunami knocked out power at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant in 2011 was that its storage pools would overheat, though later examination showed they did not, according to the U.S. Congressional Research Service.

The majority of the spent U.S. nuclear fuel has been moved into “dry cask” storage that does not need continuous power. Still Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety for the Union of Concerned Scientists said he worries that regulators and energy executives are plunging ahead while leaving spent fuel stored onsite indefinitely.

However safe things are currently, “it is absurd to believe that it will be true forever,” Lyman said.

Matthew Wald, an energy analyst at The Breakthrough Institute, a climate-focused think tank, said power companies have robust safety records managing spent fuel and that many of their costs are covered by federal payments they receive over the Energy Department’s failure to open a long-term storage site.

But public concerns about waste handling remain, he said. “From a technical standpoint, it’s not urgent, but solving the waste problem would help get new reactors built,” Wald said.

Other countries like France face similar challenges managing spent nuclear fuel. Constellation is the largest U.S. nuclear power operator with 12 nuclear plants in service.

As of Dec. 31 its facilities stored about a fifth of the total spent fuel in the U.S. based on the company’s most recent annual report.

The company has a nuclear oversight committee charged with overseeing safe and reliable facility operations, chaired by John Richardson, a retired U.S. Navy admiral. It has committed to declassify its staggered board, a structure unpopular with investors.

One of two reactors at the Three Mile Island nuclear power station suffered a partial meltdown in 1979 in the worst U.S. nuclear power accident. The other reactor continued to operate until 2019 and would be restarted under Constellation’s deal with Microsoft.

Safety is its number one priority, Constellation said in a statement sent by a representative. “We diligently contain, number, catalogue, track and isolate spent nuclear fuel used by our facilities, so we know where every ounce is located. As an industry, nuclear is the only large-scale energy source that takes full responsibility for all of its waste and plans for its eventual disposal,” Constellation said.

Rod McCullum, senior director for the NEI trade group, said all of the spent fuel at Three Mile Island, 743 metric tons, has been moved to dry casks in preparation for a decommissioning. Now with a restart planned, the facility’s cooling pool is empty. “That gives them a lot of operational flexibility,” McCullum said.

Ultimately the industry believes a long-term solution will have to be in a place willing to accept the spent fuel, McCullum said, a deal never quite sealed with leaders in Nevada where Yucca Mountain is located.

“We’re on board with consent-based siting, whether its Yucca or anywhere else,” he said.