To reprocess or dispose? A look at fuel cycle triage

A recent study by former colleagues of mine from Oak Ridge National Laboratory raises some interesting questions about the future direction of U.S. nuclear fuel cycle. My colleagues have been presently engaged in a scientific triage study for used nuclear fuel disposition options. One of the largest parts of their work has simply been in collecting the massive amount of data on the 67,600 metric tons (1 MT = 1000 kg) of commercial used nuclear fuel in the U.S., including issues such as how long it was burned in the reactor, the fuel type, and the initial enrichment, with an objective of being able to accurately characterize the composition and location of every used nuclear fuel assembly presently in the U.S. (I also am tangentially involved in this work, funding an undergraduate for data collection and am hoping to expand my role into doing modeling work in support of this effort).

The overall goal of this work is to support a more informed decision framework to specifically look at how we deal with spent fuel inventories in the U.S. - in other words, performing a triage analysis on what fuel would be the best candidates for various fuel cycle options (including direct disposal versus recycling). Given that some fuel is inherently going to be less suitable (read: more expensive) for recovering actinides as future fuel material, the goal is to sort out what can be disposed of immediately and what might be preserved for future fuel cycles.

Their (surprising) finding was that of the present inventory, 98% of the current used fuel inventory (by mass) could be disposed of without leaving open the option of future retrieval while still allowing for the ability to facilitate a future closed fuel cycle in the U.S. This conclusion was based upon the assumption that the U.S. would eventually open a fuel reprocessing facility; even under this assumption most of the present inventory of used nuclear fuel is not needed to support such a cycle. Some of this is simply due to the large inventory of used nuclear fuel in the U.S. - at nearly 68,000 metric tons of heavy metal with the largest fuel reprocessing centers having a throughput on the order of 1,000-1,500 MTHM per year, there is simply more "legacy" fuel out there than a typical facility would ever usefully process.

Their decision analysis was based on several factors, including the value of material which would be recovered (older fuel tends to have less plutonium available for recovery, and the plutonium is of lower quality); complexity (older fuel has other complicating factors such as different types of cladding material - like stainless steel - which can complicate potential recovery and thus make it less preferable to newer fuel), and simply the amount of material needed to sustain a closed fuel cycle (given the time before such a facility would come online, it is anticipated more than sufficient inventories would be present to sustain a closed fuel cycle without drawing into older fuel). Likewise, they considered what fuel assemblies might be useful to future reprocessing research efforts by DOE (such as used, highly-enriched fuel from naval and research programs).

To many who advocate exploiting the resource potential of used nuclear fuel (myself included), this is a jarring conclusion. There has always been a tacit assumption in mind that domestic reprocessing would not only include future inventories of used nuclear fuel, but help to alleviate the pressure on current demand for geologic repository space by making use of the readily available inventories out there. Yet beyond looking at what is economically practical (i.e., prioritizing the most valuable fuel for recovery), the report brings in an eye-opening reality - given the fact that the U.S. has spent the last thirty years committed to a once-through fuel cycle track, there is simply more used fuel than a single modern reprocessing facility would have capacity to handle, especially given the stable influx of fuel coming out of future reactors which would form the foundation for a future closed fuel cycle. As a result, much of this "legacy" fuel becomes unnecessary to support such future fuel cycles.

A more important implication relates to geologic disposal itself. The plans for the (now likely former) Yucca Mountain site called for a 50-75 year "retrievability" window; in other words, the repository was to be operated for an extended period which would allow for retrieval of used fuel out of the repository for other uses. (After the retrieval period, it was generally assumed if no use case had emerged by this point, permanently closing the repository was the most reasonable option).

Designing a repository with future retrievability in mind doesn't come for free; it essentially adds another engineering constraint (read: cost) to the problem and ultimately requires further analysis of how the repository will perform in containing waste in addition to the "post-closure" period. (It also tends to bias one's choice of geology - a feature of salt-based repositories like WIPP is that they are explicitly not designed to be retrievable - the heat from nuclear waste packages generally causes salt to plastically deform around waste packages, effectively "sealing them in.")

Thus, figuring out what spent fuel has little potential prospect for future recovery represents an technical triage which can help simplify a future repository design (as well as open up options for where such repositories might be located). In essence, separating out the "wheat" (fuel more useful for recovery) from the "chaff" (fuel which has limited potential for recovery) allows for a more intelligent approach to used fuel disposition which can ultimately make constructing a future permanent geologic repository cheaper and easier.

Of course, the standard caveat applies: the hardest part of opening any geologic repository has never been technical so much as it has political. Nonetheless, the ORNL report offers a rather bracing conclusion as to what a future U.S. fuel cycle may look like, even if the decision is made to restart reprocessing in the U.S. Ultimately, the vast majority of the current inventory of used nuclear fuel may yet still be destined for direct disposal, simply due to the realities of waiting over three decades before finally deciding to reconsider our rather ill-fated national decision to abandon a closed nuclear fuel cycle.

Yucca Mountain is dead. Long live Yucca Mountain!

Last October, during the Republican primaries, I made a prediction regarding the future of Yucca Mountain - namely, don't bet on it. Not, of course, because it's particularly deficient on a technical level (it's not perfect, but you can judge the science that went into it for yourself.) But rather, the battle for Yucca mountain left its opponents holding the political high ground - particularly when even none of the Republican hopefuls would defend the site at risk of angering Nevada voters.

Skip forward to today. Mitt Romney (last seen saying anything to the residents of Nevada that he think would lead to his election) has lost, meaning any possibility of a reversal of fortune for Yucca Mountain is pretty much dead in the water for the next four years (and likely now for all time).

Politically, not much has changed. Harry Reid still wields an inexplicable* position of influence over the Senate, and Obama still holds the presidency. Absent a surprise intervention by the Supreme Court on the Yucca licensing issue or a sudden change of heart by the residents of Nevada outside of Nye county (the potential host of Yucca Mountain, and generally more supportive overall of the project, namely because of the perceived benefits in terms of high-paying jobs and local investment which generally balance out perceived risks), it is unlikely anything much is going to happen.
 
(*One of my students in my Nuclear Waste Management class asked me how Harry Reid managed to ascend to such a position of influence from what is otherwise an inconsequential state - to which I had to answer, "I don't know, it is beyond the scope of this class." I really don't have a good answer for this one.)

As an aside, relevant to this discussion is an interview in this month's Nuclear News with Chairwoman Allison MacFarlane:

Q: Do you have technical concerns about a repository at Yucca Mountain, such as the rock form or the possibility of contact with an aquifer?

Let me explain. The technical analysis that I did on Yucca Mountain was in the pre-2002 time frame. Since then, in 2008, the Department of Energy submitted a license application. Then the NRC did some technical analysis. I haven’t looked at either of those. So I haven’t updated myself on the technical situation or on any new information that’s come in within the last 10 years. And so, as a careful scientist, I would hold off on making any judgment.

(Emphasis mine.)

On one hand, as a fellow scientist, I appreciate Dr. MacFarlane's reticence toward commenting on a technical issue which she herself recognizes that she is not current on. On the other hand, it is somewhat distressing that the chairwoman of the NRC would not deign to familiarize herself with those very same findings.  (I realize that Dr. MacFarlane obviously has a very full agenda, but nonetheless given that her specialty with geologic disposal of nuclear wastes was one of her core competencies given for her nomination to head the agency, the fact that she has been an extremely outspoken critic of Yucca Mountain, and the fact that this is a timely and controversial topic facing her agency, one would think that she might find the time for a bit of... "light weekend reading...")

Process matters

By this point, your response is probably something along the lines of, "Thanks for the update on News of the Obvious." But to be honest, it seems like a great many people haven't seemed to get the memo yet. Following a discussion on Jim Conca's recent Forbes piece featuring WIPP (the Waste Isolation Pilot Project in Carlsbad, NM, which is responsible for handling military-origin transuranic wastes to be buried deep in salt bed caverns), the question was inevitably asked - "If WIPP is working, why can't Yucca Mountain?"

Herein lies the problem. Debates over the technical details of Yucca aside (details which have been exhaustively studied for nearly two decades), it was never about technical feasibility. One of the most salient arguments I have tried to convey upon my students (and anyone else unfortunate enough to be caught within earshot) is that process matters. Again and again this has been emphasized - by myself and by the findings of the Blue Ribbon Commission themselves. (As well as by social science experts - see for example, this decent op-ed by Chris Mooney on science communication right around the time Yucca faced the axe.)

WIPP worked namely because WIPP made sure to do the process right. From the start, WIPP focused on public engagement and local consent - trying to build understanding and consensus before they broke ground. And to that end, they've been remarkably successful. WIPP enjoys extremely high levels of support from the local Carlsbad community, largely in part due to the influx of high-paying jobs it has brought an otherwise very rural economy. And by committing to transparency and public oversight from the start, the WIPP project managed to soften much of the opposition which may have otherwise doomed such a project - namely because the public felt like both they had a say and that the process was fair and trustworthy. (Mind you, it is unlikely one will ever gain complete consensus - namely because there are some who persist in asserting that nuclear waste is an "unsolvable" problem and frankly have no interest in solving it...)

But far too often in the technical community, there is an attitude that this process can be circumvented. "Who cares what the unwashed masses think? We're right and they're not" - a fine ethos for a dictatorship run by scientists and engineers, a recipe for repeated and painful failure in a democracy. This is the attitude that I see prevailing each and every time I hear someone hammer on why we need to keep pushing on Yucca Mountain - either by forcing a showdown on the licensing process or some other means. And let me reiterate - on a technical basis, I think Yucca Mountain is a sufficient (not ideal, namely because it consigns otherwise recoverable resources to waste, but sufficient) solution.


Here's the problem - it's off the table. There is about a snowball's chance in hell of any of the following factors aligning to rescue Yucca Mountain right now: Chairwoman MacFarlane rescuing the Yucca Mountain license (previously withdrawn with prejudice by Secretary Chu), a sudden reversal in position by President Obama, an intervention by the Supreme Court to finish the Yucca Mountain licensing evaluation, a marked shift of opinion in the state of Nevada, or the sudden departure of Sen. Harry Reid.

Like it or not, the political deck has been stacked against Yucca. Perhaps why it's so hard for technical folks to accept is because of this - it's a victory of politics over science - and unabashedly so. But even assuming Yucca were never to have been derailed by an opportunistic president looking to make a deal with an influential senator, the problems at the core still remain - a process built on a foundation of rolling over state-level consent. It is hardly believable that the opposition which has escalated through the courts up until the 2010 would suddenly evaporate upon Yucca's grand opening. Instead, it is far more likely that another decade of contentious (and expensive) lawsuits would have followed, bankrolled (in somewhat ironic fashion) by the same funds legally obligated to the state of Nevada for hosting the repository by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act.

$8 billion and all I got was this lousy blog post

Hence my point of emphasis to folks still pushing Yucca Mountain: he's dead, Jim. Let this one go and start thinking about what to do right now while we begin the process again, this time hopefully learning something from our $8 billion lesson.

The sunk cost is perhaps what is hard for most to accept, particularly in the nuclear community. $8 billion is a high price to pay for learning to respect the process of siting a repository in equal measure to the level of technical effort that went into it. But again, this is where the hard-nosed realism of technical folks must prevail - what do you hope to do now? Wishing for a more favorable political situation won't bring back your $8 billion or put a single fuel assembly into the ground. Instead, it's going to require a hard gut check and some long thinking about where we go from here.

So what now?

Let me quote now from wisdom of the Bard Jagger:

You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, you just might find
You get what you need

In the short term, what is needed is some means of storing spent fuel, particularly from already-decommissioned sites (i.e., "orphaned fuel") in a consolidated interim storage facility. Such a facility would be inherently temporary by nature, something which can be enforced by contractual penalties as a means of making such a site more attractive to the host community. Fuel would be kept in concrete storage casks, where it is currently safely licensed to be kept for periods of up to 60 years, and may potentially be safely stored for up to 100-200 years, following further study.

Meanwhile, the main upshot of such a move to interim storage is that it provides a workable solution for the time being until the process of siting a repository can be restarted (which it inevitably must be). This something both recommended by the BRC and is now being proposed by outgoing Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM). Whether it or not it goes anywhere in Congress is anyone's guess (although it will likely and unfortunately be eclipsed by much of the talk of the coming "fiscal cliff.")

My own feelings on interim storage have evolved somewhat over the years; it was not long ago that I was critical of such a strategy, namely because it felt like "kicking the can down the road" to future generations. But here's the rub - as much as I generally favor strategies like reprocessing on the grounds of energy recovery, as far as economics go, it simply can't compete with the cost of mining new uranium, even with the repository cost tacked on - and the requisite technologies like fast-spectrum reactors which can effectively transmute and fission long-lived actinides (thermal spectrum, "light water" reactors like those we run now aren't particularly efficient at this) - simply aren't here yet. In that sense, absent the infrastructure to reprocess and effectively burn all of the long-lived constituents of used fuel (not just plutonium), it may just make sense to let it sit around for awhile under well-monitored conditions. Even assuming technology never progresses forward, the end result is a cooler, less radioactive fuel that is less expensive to dispose of. (It is one of the few problems in life that manages to get cheaper the longer you wait.)

Such a position doesn't necessarily sit perfectly with me - as a technical person, I have a bias toward action. (Which of course would be why my research focuses on advanced waste management and recovery strategies). But such a solution is certainly better than a complete failure of the federal government to meet its obligations to ratepayers (i.e., consumers of nuclear electricity) who have paid $30 billion over the last two decades to handle this problem, only to be met with nothing to show for it.

Siting even an interim storage for used fuel won't be trivial - it will likely run into some of the same political challenges Yucca Mountain has faced, if the fate of the proposed Private Fuel Storage facility in Utah is any indication. (PFS has negotiated with a Native American tribe - the Skull Valley Band of the Goshute Tribe - to host such a facility. Despite the fact that the facility is on tribal lands, the state of Utah has attempted to do everything in its power to block the proposed facility - namely by denying rail and road access.) But it may serve as a useful trial run for getting the process right when it comes to the "real thing," i.e., siting a permanent geologic repository.

On a final note, I will be supervising my students' end of semester projects this evening. The task I assigned them was to propose an amendment to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, taking into account the failures of U.S. high-level waste management policy (including a technical analysis of their proposed alternatives compared to the "baseline" scenario). It should be interesting to see what they come up with.

Follow-up: Is spent fuel repository space truly "scarce?"

An anonymous commenter* left a response this evening to my most recent post criticizing the BRC's chief reliance on interim storage as a waste management solution. [*While it is generally my policy to be quite liberal with anonymous commenting (and I would never demand anyone disclose their real identity without so choosing), it is perhaps helpful for responding to anonymous comments to provide some kind of pseudonym or handle. As it is, this is simply a personal preference, no more.]

Ordinarily, I would simply respond in the thread, however the commenter raised several intelligent and interesting points which are worth responding to more broadly.

Taking it piece-by-piece:

The BRC report actually does recommend a decision framework for adopting advanced future fuel cycle technologies (including reprocessing). The report says that the federal government should sponsor RD&D to develop and demonstrate these technologies, but that the federal government (and the federal corporation recommended by the BRC) should not build or operate such infrastructure. So any future closing of the fuel cycle would involve decisions made by the private sector, based upon economics of direct disposal versus recycle. There it is.

Yes, it is true the report states just that. However, as I pointed out previously, the BRC report does not address any of the incentive structure built into the current waste fee, which charges based upon electricity demand rather than final impact upon the repository. By the current policy, private operators have no incentive to reprocess until the value of spent fuel exceeds the direct cost of reprocessing in addition to fees already paid for disposal. (There is likewise the issue that the fuel is held in title by the federal government).

In this sense then, it is not per current law the province of the private market to solve. This is at the root of the reason that I point out the flawed incentive structure, however - right now, the current policy of pay-as-you-produce, per unit electricity fundamentally short-circuits decisions by the private market by forcing them to pay a fixed cost for disposal no matter what. A revised policy which rested on A) Payment at time of disposal, and B) Fees adjusted to repository-impacting factors such as volume and heat would allow for this kind of private decision-making process to take place.

In other words, right now any market for private action on spent fuel is essentially a stacked deck, which the BRC recommendations do little to address.

Further, because without further changes to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, spent fuel is the legal responsibility of the federal government, disclaiming technological alternatives to direct disposal without modifying the legal or fee-structure process is itself a commitment to direct disposal, absent events which entail spent fuel having a commercial value above and beyond that which has already been paid over to the federal government. Again, even a policy which delays these payments until spent fuel is handed over for final disposal would help to correct this issue.

As of now, given the fact that the federal government assumes a monopoly over spent fuel, it's a bit of a mulligan to argue that the private market serves as the decision framework for spent fuel treatment alternatives.

This post states that "The overall capacity of a geologic repository is controlled chiefly by temperature" which is not really correct; the overall capacity of a repository is determined primarily by the repository's area. The post presumes that repository area will remain a scarce resource, making closing the fuel cycle necessary to use limited repository area efficiently. This is a potentially completely incorrect assumption. What is the area of bedded salt in the Permean basin that stretches from Texas to Louisiana to Kansas? What is the area of the 70% of the continental U.S. which has crystalline basement rock within 2 kilometers of the surface suitable for deep boreholes? How many ridges of volcanic tuff are there at the Nevada Test Site that have ground water over 1000 feet below the surface? How much granite, how much clay does the U.S. have?

Let's break this into two issues. Assuming fixed physical design (i.e., footprint), temperature is a limiting factor. This is not really a matter of dispute. The temperature of the drift wall and the rock between drifts is what controls the physical emplacement of waste.

Yes, one can always dig a bigger hole - or for that matter, look into alternatives such as vertical emplacement rather than the current model for horizontal emplacement. And indeed, by this logic, we conceivably aren't restricted in terms of available repository space - which is why I took care to point out that this is a regulatory limit in the context of Yucca Mountain (based upon the design itself) rather than a strictly technical one. However, the political feasibility of this approach of indefinite expansion has always been in doubt (difficulties in opening one limited-scale geologic repository notwithstanding). I am extremely pessimistic that one can simply get away with indefinite expansion of capacity at a single site, despite what is easily sufficient physical capacity to do so.

Moving on to the broader point regarding available alternative disposal sites, this is actually a point I've been wanting to address in a future follow-up about geologic disposal alternatives (i.e., alternatives to the Yucca Mountain geology). Indeed, the Permian basin salt dome formation is quite large, and was the subject of the aforementioned "Project Salt Vault," which originally tested the feasibility of salt-dome formations. (Likewise, WIPP is also on the border of this same formation).

Deaf Smith county, Texas, one of the five original sites nominated for a permanent geologic repository, was also located in the Permian basin geology, which indeed is quite expansive, with many locations isolated from population centers. Other locations considered, such as Hanford feature granite in the saturated zone. The list goes on.

So, are we limited in terms of available site selection for geologic repositories? Physically, no - nor was this the problem to begin with. However, I would argue on the basis of history that we are greatly constrained politically in opening such a repository. While I welcome the BRC report's emphasis upon a consent-based process for repository siting, I am pessimistic that the NIMBY politics which mired down a site selection process originally would not make opening or expanding future sites another difficult and time-consuming process. I would thus argue that repository space thus is at a premium, not for want of accommodating geology but for lack of political will, something which appears to evolve only on the same timescales as geology itself. (Again, somewhere I'd be happy to be proven wrong.)

On the topic of boreholes - this is one area where the BRC report appeared to favor further investigation - however the one remark I can provide here is that deep borehole disposal is relatively expensive - then again, so are geologic repositories. Cost estimates seem to vary wildly based upon the assessment, with some studies indicating an array of 700 boreholes to dispose of 70,000 MTHM of waste would cost about $14 billion. Looking back to a study performed by a former colleague, it would appear that their estimate for 95 boreholes (for 10,000 cubic meters of storage, or about the equivalent of 36,000 MT of SNF) would be about $3.26 billion - still less than a tenth of the estimated cost of Yucca Mountain and about a quarter of the estimated cost of a similar geologic repository in Sweden. (Note that this study is for intermediate-depth boreholes for greater-than-class-C waste; actual requirements for intact spent fuel may vary.)
In this sense then, issues of future retrievability and ultimate technical feasibility aside, deep borehole disposal may indeed be the way to go. This begs the question (to which I have no immediate answer) why the original Nuclear Waste Policy Act and subsequent amendments were thus so committed to the strategy of centralized geologic repositories, as opposed to decentralized disposal in deep boreholes.

Will the private sector ever want to invest in building reprocessing infrastructure that could become uneconomic overnight as soon as a few square miles of new repository space are opened up?

Historically, this factor didn't seem to stop investments at West Valley and Barnwell. While West Valley was ultimately ill-fated due to initial design issues and later rendered retroactively uneconomical by changing regulations, Barnwell was clearly an attempt by the private sector to directly address spent fuel reprocessing. One can dispute whether the economics ever favored the viability of Barnwell, however clearly the private sector has been willing in the past to take on some of this infrastructure.
Further, this assumes a relative ease in developing repository capacity which again, may not be technically constrained, but certainly has yet to be demonstrated in terms of political feasibility.

If the decision to recycle spent fuel is left to the private sector, as the BRC recommends, probably the only reason any significant amount of spent fuel will get recycled in the future is because new reactor technologies will be commercialized where fissile recovered from old spent fuel will be less expensive than fissile from natural uranium. Google "denatured molten salt reactor" for a plausible example.

If the BRC recommendations are followed with no further amendment to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (specifically with regard to the fee structure), this is likely true. And certainly, there are plenty of examples of reactor concepts which make use of recovered fissile materials, ranging from the integral fast reactor (a perennial favorite of Barry Brook over at Brave New Climate) to the EM2 small modular reactor design being proposed by General Atomics.

However, once again I believe my criticism here is still salient - how will the chain of custody of spent fuel adapt to allow for private alternatives to direct disposal? Will the federal government rebate funds for fuel diverted for recovery? Will an alternative fee be assessed for waste forms which are either more compact or cooler (thus having a lower marginal impact on the repository capacity?) These are questions which are left unanswered, ones which I believe would have significant consequences for private incentives for nuclear waste management (including recovery for reactors).

Given my own personal political preferences, I would prefer to see a system in which the private market handled spent fuel and the federal government only served in the role of steward of geologic disposal sites. However, in my opinion this requires a more fundamental re-working of the incentives built in to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which has yet to be proposed by the BRC.

Overall, several good and provocative points raised by the commenter - I appreciate their taking the time to present such a thought-out response, and hope this post serves to further the discussion.

Dissecting the BRC report, Part I: Where they got it right

Earlier this week, I gave a summary of the findings of the draft report of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Energy Future. Several experts have already made their responses to the BRC's recommendations known - both at Brave New Climate and Atomic Insights. While as a relatively new nuclear professional, I lack some of the gravitas of much more established folks, the issue of nuclear waste management and associated policy is of primary interest to me, and thus I wanted to add my thoughts. 

To start things on a positive note, there were many helpful observations made in the report about the over geologic repository siting process (as well as the overall process of waste management policy) which should be highlighted. (To emphasize: even under advanced recycle scenarios, where long-lived actinides are recycled as fuel, some geologic repository will be necessary to handle fission product wastes; however, the engineering requirements would be substantially relaxed, given the shorter time periods for decay.) Thus, this post will focus on some of the highlights where the commission hit upon important, constructive ideas for waste management policy. Future posts in this series will look at where the report fell short.

As an additional aside: ANS is actively soliciting public comments on the entire BRC report for compilation.

A consent-based process 

One place where I am happy to eat (some of) my prior criticisms is in the report's overall emphasis upon a consent-based process for locating a permanent repository site. In fact, much of the analysis in revising the repository siting process focused on a means of engineering a consent-based process, similar to that achieved in Sweeden with the SKB repository; the report also repeatedly emphasized the success of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP, a salt-dome repository for defense waste in southern New Mexico). In particular, the BRC report identifies the importance of state-level cooperation in the waste management process.

The peculiar case of "Salt Vault"

An instructive historical example mentioned in the report is the case of "Project Salt Vault" in Lyons, Kansas in the 1960's. Much of the report's analysis points to the ultimate failure of Salt Vault, due to broad state opposition. However, focusing merely upon the terminal failure misses the greater part of the lesson, namely that community consent is not simply a random force of nature to be contended with, but rather something which can be cultivated with careful work and planning - and very quickly destroyed.

Initially, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was tasked to investigate disposal options for used nuclear fuel. Salt domes offer an attractive geologic disposal option because the existence of salt domes typically belies an area which has been relatively impermeable to water for long periods of time on a geologic scale (e.g., otherwise the salt would simply dissolve into brine). In addition, the heat of spent fuel causes salt to "plastically deform" around the spent fuel casks - in other words, the caverns "heal" around the shape of the container, thus sealing the chamber naturally. Ergo, burying fuel in salt dome formations offers a promising pathway for permanent disposal of intact fuel and long-lived nuclear wastes, as there is reasonable evidence that the formation will be isolated from groundwater, thus securely immobilizing and isolating nuclear waste from the environment.

The story of Salt Vault can be roughly be summed up in two stages. In the initial test phases, the AEC placed great emphasis upon public engagement and consent, contacting local leaders and emphasizing transparency and openness in its operations. During the spent fuel storage test, local citizens were invited to inspect the process and ask questions. Further, and perhaps most importantly, the nature of the test was inherently time-limited. When the experiment was concluded, the AEC removed all nuclear materials from the site, as promised.

The second part of the story picks up in 1970, after fire at the Rocky Flats plutonium facility in Colorado, which set about a chain of events which required the rapid development of a permanent repository for defense waste materials from the nuclear weapons complex. In 1970, the AEC announced - much to the surprise of local leaders - that pending further geological surveys, the Lyons site would be selected as a permanent repository. Unlike the earlier process, local residents and political leaders dug in their heels, and eventually the site was declared to be unfeasible on technical grounds.

What is unmistakable in this example is the impact an open, consent-based process can make. Projects such as SKB and WIPP have been successful precisely because they occurred in a manner which is predicated upon the consent of the local population. In this sense, the BRC report offers helpful analysis for a matter which unfortunately should have been obvious long before now.

Under new management

Likewise, the BRC's recommendations for a federally-chartered corporation (similar to the Tennessee Valley Authority) with dedicated access to the Nuclear Waste Fund also promises to solve other inherent problems which have stymied waste management policy in the U.S. Namely, as of now, waste management operations are a line item in the annual budget; in other words, despite the fact that nuclear operators (and thus ultimately you, the consumer) pay for the cost of disposal in the form of a $0.001/kWh tax on production, the DOE must specifically request funds to manage operations from Congress each year. Which of course means that waste management operations are subject to the whims of politicians, each and every year - including stunts like "defunding" projects mandated by law such as Yucca Mountain and attempting to hijack the repository licensing process through attrition. (Whether one approves of Yucca Mountain as a geologic repository or not - and I think there are better options available - it is still the existing law of the land, per the 1987 amendments to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, and thus what the administration has done is clearly illegal.) 

The net result has three decades wasted for a $13 billion hole in the ground, in addition to the approximately $20 billion (with interest) that has been collected by Congress but not allocated. Thus, a clear case can be made for a greater degree of overall independence in nuclear waste management operations.

Flexibility in the process

A particular point of emphasis throughout the BRC report is in maintaining a flexible, staged process which easily lends itself to adaptations due to unforeseen circumstances, in marked contrast to the current policy which committed to Yucca Mountain as the nation's sole geologic repository site early on (for reasons of perceived political expediency). A blistering criticism of the current Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) in the report is in the inflexibility and relative prescriptiveness of the current policy, "locking in" a single solution to nuclear waste management with little flexibility to adapt to new technologies and developments (including both political developments - such as widespread local opposition - and technical developments, such as unexpected revelations in site characteristics). Specifically, the report criticizes the 1987 amendments to the NWPA for failing to account for the contingency that Yucca Mountain should prove untenable.

By contrast, the report's conclusions emphasize the need for a process which avoids "lock-in" - both in terms of policy and technology. Rather, they highlight the need for a phased process which affords maximum flexibility. It should thus come as no surprise, given this perspective, that the report focuses chiefly upon centralized interim storage for fuel (i.e., storing spent fuel in concrete casks in a centralized location) as a medium-term solution for waste management, while options for a geologic repository or other alternatives (such as reprocessing) are evaluated.

Such a strategy bears remarkable similarity to the original NWPA framework (prior to the 1987 amendments), where a second site was to be designated for "monitored retrievable storage" (MRS). The goal of MRS was to provide a medium-term storage location for fuel where it could later be easily retrieved, either for purposes of recovery or for final treatment and disposal elsewhere. In the original framework, an MRS site was not scheduled to be opened until a permanent repository had been located, as to avoid the perception that an MRS site could become a "de facto" permanent repository.

Likewise, the original provisions for the geologic repository prescribed a fixed period of retrievability. However, these provisions were less for purposes of alternative strategies (e.g., reprocessing) as much as the ability to respond to unforeseen technical problems, i.e., should the repository not perform as expected.

Summing it up

Much of the BRC's focus on the process of waste management is important, echoing many of the criticisms waste management experts have made for some time. In particular, nuclear waste management has long been a political problem more than a technical one in the United States (which is not to understate the gravity of the technical challenge). In this sense, the BRC report offers a useful blueprint for the repository process for any future geologic repository process.

Unfortunately, as will be laid out in following posts, this provides little in the means of immediate solutions for nuclear waste management. In particular, the Commission was extremely reluctant to endorse any of the plethora of technical options available for waste management and disposal, instead preferring to outline a strategy for starting over while buying breathing room for the federal government. Most of the practical, immediate solutions for managing spent fuel in the U.S. rely on the concept of centralized interim storage - which while perhaps better than the status quo, is not without its own problems, as will be discussed in the following posts. 

Ultimately, a credible strategy for the entire fuel cycle is necessary for the continued overall acceptance of nuclear energy. While considerations such as economics and safety will always be at the forefront, it is my belief that a credible and technically sound solution for managing spent fuel remains as the last true barrier to widespread public acceptance of nuclear energy, namely because of its current perceive intractability (unlike safety and economics). 

Hence there is a need not only to establish a sound process (which the BRC does a reasonably good job with), but also to begin a process of laying out a commitment to credible solutions - something both the BRC and the federal government have been less forthcoming with.