Social sustainability and environmental sustainability are both tested to the limit with nuclear power, not only because of the risks but because of the long term problem of waste storage. The below NYT article is a good summary of how the world is – or is not – managing the problem.
Nuclear waste would seem to be one of the global sustainability PR as well as energy security nightmares.
A New Urgency to the Problem of Storing Nuclear Waste
By KATE GALBRAITH: Published: November 27, 2011
AUSTIN, TEXAS — The nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan, earlier this year caused many countries to rethink their appetite for nuclear power. It is also, in subtler ways, altering the fraught discussion of what to do with nuclear plants’ wastes.
A prime example is Germany, which decided to shut down all its nuclear power plants by 2022 after the partial reactor meltdowns at Fukushima. That decision is making it easier for Germans to have a calm and focused discussion about a permanent disposal site for the plants’ wastes, analysts say.
Previously, opponents of nuclear power worried that backing a permanent solution for the wastes would make it easier for nuclear power plants to continue to exist, according to Michael Sailer, the chief executive at the Öko-Institut in Berlin, a research and consulting group focused on sustainability.
Anti-nuclear politicians, he said, felt that if they came out in favor of a permanent disposal site, “they support pro-nuclear people because they solve the waste problem.”.
Protests over waste storage are a long tradition for Germany, and they continue. In recent days, anti-nuclear activists in both France and Germany clashed with the police as a train carrying waste made its way toward a facility in Germany. The waste had originated in Germany and been reprocessed in France and was returning to Germany for storage.
Even so, Germany is now moving forward on the waste issue. Earlier this month, leaders from around Germany met to discuss a permanent disposal solution. They agreed to study a number of potential sites around the country, according to Mr. Sailer, and eventually to make a scientifically based decision about which sites to proceed with.
This development, Mr. Sailer said, represents a “huge” advance over earlier efforts.
Other countries are also looking at waste in new ways in the post-Fukushima world. Right now, worldwide, most spent fuel waste is stored on the site of the facility that produced it, in spent-fuel pools and, after it eventually cools, dry casks. Experts say dispersed storage is expensive and that central storage would be more secure.
Few countries , apart from Sweden and Finland, have moved forward on centralized disposal sites, deep in the earth, designed to hold the waste permanently.
France is evaluating a permanent disposal site for spent fuel , near the remote northeastern village of Bure. The country gets roughly three-quarters of its power from nuclear plants and reprocesses its fuel, a technique that reduces the quantity of waste but is expensive and also creates plutonium, which can be used in nuclear weapons.
Japan also hopes to choose a site and build a geological disposal facility in the coming decades.
Meanwhile, every aspect of nuclear power in Japan — including waste storage — has been turned upside down by the Fukushima disaster in March, which followed a giant earthquake and tsunami. As a result of the accident, Japan has “doubled or tripled” the amount of non-spent fuel and high-level waste, according to Murray Jennex, a nuclear expert at San Diego State University. Even things like the building that houses the turbine are contaminated, he noted.
“So that’s really increased their demand for storage, and I’m not sure what they’re going to do with it,” Dr. Jennex said.
Japan is also considering what to do with the contaminated soil in the area affected by the plant.
Experts say the post-Fukushima spotlight on all aspects of nuclear safety will affect discussions of how, as well as where, to store waste.
“I think people will re-examine whether or not there’s a better way to safely store the spent fuel,” said Dale Klein, an associate director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas who is a former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The United States has long contemplated a permanent disposal site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but that plan has been stymied, perhaps permanently, by the politics of local opposition. Nevada has an early presidential primary, and this autumn several Republican presidential candidates, appearing at a debate in Las Vegas, denounced proposals to use the site. The Senate majority leader, Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, also opposes using Yucca Mountain.
Mr. Klein, who expressed disappointment that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission “did not have an opportunity” to assess whether Yucca Mountain was safe, also said that Fukushima was causing “a lot of utilities and their regulators” to weigh the pros and cons of moving sooner to dry-cask storage, because of the perception that an emergency could cause spent-fuel pools to leak.
Some countries are starting to address the waste disposal issue simply because they cannot put it off much longer. This is true of Britain, where “it’s just gone on for so long, and there’s so much of it,” said Ian Hore-Lacy, the head of communications for the World Nuclear Association, which is based in London.
Dr. Jennex of San Diego State said that in the United States, and to some extent around the world, “our reactors are getting pretty full, in terms of what they can store on site.”
In Germany, the new dialogue could ease pressures on the village of Gorleben, beside the Elbe River in northern Germany. Some waste has been stored there on an interim basis for years, leading to protests. (The train that nuclear opponents tried to block last week was headed to Gorleben.)
The area around Gorleben contains a salt dome formation that Germany has long eyed as a potential permanent waste repository. Now, however, German officials will consider more sites.
The planned closing of all German nuclear plants has opened up some “political space” needed to consider a waste-disposal solution, said R. Andreas Kraemer, the director of the nonprofit Ecologic Institute in Berlin.
“For the time being, however, much radioactive waste remains on the sites of nuclear power plants, which have not been designed for the purpose,” Mr. Kraemer said in an e-mail.
“The risks of storing nuclear waste on power plant sites have become clearer from the sequence of events in Fukushima, and the safety and security concerns associated with current storage are adding pressure to find a permanent solution in the form of a national nuclear waste depository.”
