In the West, a new urgency in storage of nuclear waste

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 Oko-Institut in Berlin, a research and consulting group focused on sustainability.

Anti-nuclear politicians, he said, felt that if they came out in favour 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 Sailer, and eventually to make a scientifically based decision about which sites to proceed with.

This development, 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 centralised 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.

Upside down

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,” 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 US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The US 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.

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.

Jennex said that in the US, and to some extent around the world, “our reactors are getting pretty full, in terms of what they can store on site.”