Commentary on the commentary...

A little over a week ago I got a personal email from Bettina Fest at the Union of Concerned Scientists.  I joined UCS a few years ago, and have been following their reports on nuclear safety closely since the Fukushima disaster.  I am sure I checked a box on a web page somewhere to let them know that this was once of my concerns.  So they were contacting me to see if I would write a letter to the editor of the Star Tribune.  Sure, but how about an op-ed instead, I asked.

 Since Fukushima, I have been learning a lot about Minnesota's nuclear power plants, both of which are on the Mississippi River.  That we are stockpiling nuclear waste at these plants seems just crazy to me: in the post-Fukushima world, I would hope that the NRC would be looking hard at plants that are particularly disaster-prone.  And to me, the plant at Prairie Island (2 reactors there), which is essentially an island in the middle of the river, seems pretty disaster prone.  Rivers flood.  Levees break.  What else do we need to know?  Oh, that some 300 member of the Prairie Island Indian Community live within a few hundred meters of the plants and the storage casks.  And also this: that in the past 50 years, precipitation AND flooding events in the upper Mississippi watershed have become increasingly intense.  And the global climate models predict more of the same. 

So I had a bit to add to the UCS's main talking point, which was that, at the very least, we should be storing nuclear waste in dry storage casks rather than the spent fuel pools where it is initially stored.

The piece was published in the Star Tribune last Wednesday.  Since I signed an agreement that says the content is still my own, I can paste it here.
BTW, this isn't quite the version that made it into the Strib.  This version has some errors corrected that unfortunately made it into print.  The link to the print version is
http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentaries/169385856.html



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Minnesota has a nuclear waste storage problem. The problem is simply stated: we currently generate radioactive wastes at our nuclear power plants at Monticello and Prairie Island, but we have no viable plan for long-term storage of that waste.  In other words, every time Minnesotans flip on the light switch, more nuclear waste is produced.  And for the foreseeable future, there is nowhere for that nuclear waste to go.

From the 1980’s to 2008, the U.S. government had a working plan to move nuclear waste from the plants where it is generated to a permanent storage facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. But in 2008, the Yucca Mountain development ended.  One of the key factors in the closure of Yucca Mountain repository involved clear scientific evidence that underground storage location was not geologically isolated from the surface environment.  This flaw in the repository design is often overlooked in discussion of the political factors for its closure. Until another, more appropriate geological repository can be developed, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s plan is to continue to store spent nuclear fuel at the plants where it is generated.

A September 3 Star Tribune article about nuclear waste storage quotes Prairie Island Indian Community secretary Ron Johnson saying that spent fuel “was supposed to have been removed in the 1990s. We translate that to mean [the Prairie Island site] is probably more of a permanent storage facility."

The problem isn’t unique to Minnesota: nuclear power plants all over the US now store nuclear waste on site. But, and this is a big one, the majority of our power plants weren’t designed or located in places that make sense for long-term storage of nuclear waste.  Both of Minnesota’s nuclear facilities are on the Mississippi River.  Building the plants along the river made sense: the river water can be used for cooling the spent fuel and steam.  But by their very nature, the Mississippi River’s floodplains are hazard-prone: rivers do flood.  Particularly after the destruction of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant by major tsunami, we need to give careful thought to where and how we store nuclear waste.  In a post-Fukushima world, it is difficult to believe that Minnesota’s nuclear facilities are entirely disaster-proof.

Until a suitable permanent waste repository can be found and developed, we may be stuck with on-site storage, but we can take important steps to minimize the risks.  Currently, we manage nuclear wastes in two stages. Waste is initially cooled and stored in spent fuel pools.  This waste is eventually transferred to and sealed in steel and concrete containers called dry casks.  The Prairie Island and Monticello plants use both methods.

Each method has a key advantage: at operating power plants, storage in spent fuel pools is less expensive, while dry cask storage is far safer.  The casks are less vulnerable to hazards such as fire, flooding, or even earthquakes and tsunamis. At Fukushima, none of the released radiation came from wastes stored in dry casks.

According to the September 3 article, the Prairie Island Indian Community has concerns about the longevity of the dry casks.  But the casks represent a much better alternative than storage in pools, and moving waste to cask storage is a necessary step before the waste can be moved offsite.  The Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-partisan scientific organization, sees dry cask storage as one of the most obvious means of nuclear risk reduction.

This week, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing on a bill to implement recommendations of President Obama’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future.  Unfortunately, neither the Blue Ribbon Commission’s report nor the bill convey the importance of transferring spent fuel waste to dry cask storage. 

This is where Minnesota can make a difference.  Senator Al Franken sits on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and has the opportunity to make important policy recommendations that would accelerate the process of moving spent fuel to safer storage systems.  Ideally, Senator Franken can also urge the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to reduce the risks to the Prairie Island Indian Community by moving waste quickly from the Mississippi River floodplain.  Dry cask storage is the essential first step.

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