Between the output of existing commercial nuclear reactors and 21 proposed reactors covered by agreements quietly signed by the outgoing Bush Administration, the United States already has agreed to store enough spent reactor fuel to fill the equivalent of not one, but two, Yucca Mountain high-level radioactive waste repositories, according to documents acquired under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER).
The Obama Administration recently cut all funding for the long-delayed and controversial Yucca Mountain facility. However the administration is funding efforts to renew nuclear power development in the US.
The IEER notes that U.S. taxpayers would be on the hook for potentially tens of billions of dollars in penalties that would have to be paid to utilities if the 21 proposed reactor projects proceed.
In a period of less than three months, the Bush Administration signed
contracts to accept irradiated nuclear fuel from 21 new commercial
atomic reactors even though at that time, no repository for new sources
of irradiated fuel existed or was planned. It also did so even though
the U.S. government had already paid out $565 million in contract
damages–and faced an additional $790 million of contract damages at
that very same time–for its failure to dispose of the existing
inventory of irradiated fuel in the US. And it did so even though it
already expected to face around an additional billion dollars of damage
payments to nuclear power utilities each and every year for the next
decade.
On Thursday, the Obama Administration’s "Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future." met for the first time to discuss the issue of nuclear waste.
Even if the Yucca Mountain repository were open today–35 years after the process to create it started–it would already be filled to its legal limit of 63,000 metric tons of commercial waste by this spring, the new report states.
A second repository the same size would be filled with the 42,000 additional metric tons of spent fuel yet to be produced by existing nuclear reactors and the 21,000 metric tons that would be produced by the 21 proposed reactors covered under the Bush-industry agreements.
Beyond Nuclear Radioactive Waste Specialist Kevin Kamps: "The bottom
line here is that we have an industry and a White House proposing to
race ahead with new reactors when we haven’t figured out how to clean up
the mess created by the first wave of reactors. Instead, 28 years after
passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, 35 years after the repository
search began, 53 years into commercial nuclear power, and 68 years after
Fermi first split the atom during the Manhattan Project, the U.S. still
has no safe, sound, permanent storage plan for high-level radioactive
waste."
Separately, over 170 groups in all 50 states this week released the "Principles for Safeguarding Nuclear Waste at Reactors" calling for specific steps to protect the public from the immediate threats posed by the currently vulnerable storage of commercial spent fuel at nuclear reactor facilities. The principles call for safer on-site storage of spent nuclear fuel through the use of less densely packed reactor pools and "hardened on-site storage" (HOSS) designed to "withstand an attack by air, land, or water from a force at least equal in size and coordination to the 9/11 attacks."
Dr. Arjun Makhijani, president, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) said: "Yucca Mountain was known to be a poor repository site when it was chosen. Now, after 10 billion dollars of ratepayer money has been wasted and Yucca has rightly been abandoned, even the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not expressed confidence that a repository will open within ten years of the expiration of the first new reactor. In fact the NRC has not committed to any specific date for a repository; it has no logical or factual basis to come up with one."
The principles and a backgrounder outlining the "below the radar" Bush Administration deals with the nuclear industry are available at the link below.
Loading...