Nuclear waste: No solution yet, but expansion continues

As Georgia Power and other utilities race to build a new generation of nuclear reactors, one of the industry’s steepest challenges has been absent from the official debate.

That challenge just got worse.

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Georgia Power

Georgia Power plans two more reactors at Plant Vogtle, where quantities of sealed nuclear waste are mounting. There are similar situations around the nation.

THE STORY SO FAR

• Previously: Georgia Power plans to build two new reactors at its Vogtle nuclear plant in Waynesboro.
• The latest: The Obama administration cut funding for a federal nuclear-waste repository.
• What's next: A federal task force will reconsider what to do about nuclear waste.

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Thousands of tons of highly radioactive waste are sitting in enclosed pools and concrete casks in Georgia, waiting for a final resting place.

The nuclear industry still has no place to dispose of its most toxic and long-lived byproduct, the radioactive spent fuel rods nuclear power production leaves behind.

And two weeks ago, the Obama administration all but killed the industry’s sole hope for changing that, cutting funding for a long-delayed federal waste depository under Nevada’s remote Yucca Mountain.

The industry, including Georgia Power’s nuclear affiliate, Southern Nuclear, says Yucca’s demise shouldn’t affect plans to build new reactors.

For now, the waste can stay safely stored at the plants that create it, spokeswoman Amoi Geter said: “Southern Nuclear has safe, reliable on-site options to store the used fuel at all of our nuclear plants.”

The industry’s trade group, the Nuclear Energy Institute, said that can continue for decades: “We can safely store it for a century plus more,” NEI spokesman Mitchell Singer said.

Singer said the demise of Yucca might steer the country toward other alternatives, and applauded the Obama administration’s Wednesday announcement of a blue-ribbon task force to study the waste issue.

Nuclear energy’s foes, meanwhile, say the waste issue is the undiscussed elephant in the room as utilities such as Georgia Power pursue dozens of new U.S. reactors for the first time in decades.

“We shouldn’t start producing more waste when we can’t deal with the waste we have,” said Sara Barczak of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

Nuclear waste remains dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years, she said: “There’s supposed to be a permanent solution.”

Yucca was to be solution

Until recently, even some of the nuclear industry’s biggest players held that a waste solution should precede new reactors.

“We have to be able to look the public in the eye and say, ‘If we build a plant, here’s where the waste will go,’ ” said John Rowe, CEO of the nation’s biggest nuclear operator, Exelon Corp., in an interview with Fortune magazine in 2006.

At the time, the Yucca repository appeared feasible, even if badly delayed.

Congress made the federal government responsible for nuclear waste disposal in 1982 and designated Yucca Mountain as the repository site in 1987.

The waste would go into tunnels drilled deep under the mountain and stay there for thousands of years. The federal government was to take the waste off the utilities’ hands by 1998. But litigation, environmental concerns and politics intervened.

To date, according to the National Association of Utility Regulators, the federal government has collected $16.5 billion from the nuclear utility industry and its customers to pay for Yucca. Georgia Power customers have paid $678.9 million of that, the company said.

Meanwhile, utilities stored their waste on-site, at 72 locations nationally.

The fuel can be stored safely in deep pools of water and boron, as long as it’s not packed too densely.

As those pools filled up, utilities bought huge concrete casks capable of storing older, cooler nuclear waste on land outside their reactors.

Georgia Power has two nuclear power plants. Plant Vogtle in Waynesboro uses only pools for its waste, while Plant Hatch, near Baxley, uses both pools and casks.

Georgia Power parent Southern Co. was also among eight nuclear utilities that contracted with a Utah Indian tribe for private interim storage of spent fuel. But Southern withdrew from the group in 2005, and the project fell through.

Issue not on the table

What happens next is an open question.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced his blue-ribbon task force Wednesday.

Meanwhile, dozens of new reactors are moving forward, none faster than Georgia Power’s.

A new round of Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing hearings on its reactor plans begins this week in Augusta and Waynesboro, but the spent-fuel disposal issue will not come up.

Opponents can’t raise it, because of a rule the NRC first made in 1984. Called the waste confidence rule, it says the NRC has confidence that a permanent nuclear disposal site would exist by 2025 and that on-site storage will be sufficient in the interim.

But the NRC is considering removing the 2025 date, although it is still expressing confidence a permanent solution will emerge.

But environmentalists remain concerned.

“If anything, there’s less assurance now than a couple of weeks ago,” said Barczak, of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. “It sounds like a punt to me.”