America needs energy — a lot of it. And love it or loathe it, nuclear power will continue to be a preeminent source for meeting this demand.
During his visit Thursday, Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chair Dale Klein highlighted some of the key issues facing our future energy situation. Namely, one of the issues he noted is how very few options we actually have for generating the massive capacity to meet base-load demand — one’s choices are, in effect, coal and nuclear power. While alternative sources such as wind and solar energy can certainly aid in providing peak power, their inconsistent availability makes them unsuitable for replacing base-load power capacity on the electrical grid.
Yet if America wishes to significantly reduce its carbon emissions, coal-fired power plants will become increasingly difficult to justify — particularly if any form of emissions caps are ever signed into law.
No wonder, then, that the nuclear power industry in America is facing a renaissance. While demand for new nuclear plants collapsed in the wake of the Three-Mile Island incident, recent concerns over meeting electricity demand in the face of rising restrictions on carbon output have been a boon for the nuclear industry. Klein notes that 32 formal expressions of interest for new plant construction were filed with the NRC just last year.
Yet one largely unresolved issue of this is how to deal with the long-term consequence of nuclear power: spent nuclear fuel. In their condition coming immediately out of the reactor, the radioactivity from spent nuclear fuel rods can take thousands of years to fully decay.
The plans to handle spent fuel involve the highly contentious Yucca Mountain Storage Facility in Nevada, where waste will be safely isolated for several hundred thousand years. Yet even if Yucca Mountain is allowed to open — a politically dubious proposition — Klein admits that by current estimates, it would manage to be filled up by existing waste waiting to be stored within a mere few decades. This would necessitate a long and difficult search for a new site.
But alternatives to geologic storage exist — for example, spent nuclear fuel can be chemically reprocessed, separating out uranium, plutonium and other fissionable materials, where they can be redeployed into special reactors capable of burning up the longest-lived elements and dramatically shortening the decay time of the remaining waste — not to mention significantly reducing the volume of waste to be stored.
While this process has been well known for decades, in April of 1977, President Jimmy Carter stopped all commercial reprocessing activity in the United States for fear of encouraging further nuclear proliferation. Klein said this policy proved to be a spectacular failure. Rather than discouraging other nations from continuing to reprocess spent fuel, it ramped up demand by nations pursuing the technology, giving the perception of the U.S. as an unreliable partner in the process.
Carter’s concerns over proliferation were valid — in the wrong hands, reprocessing technology can be used to separate out components for nuclear weapons, much in the same way Iran used enrichment technology in its attempted nuclear weapons program.
Yet as Klein stressed, halting reprocessing isn’t the way to stop this. Rather, by hosting the capacity to enrich and reprocess fuel here and in other stable nuclear powers, while encouraging initiatives like the proposed IAEA fuel bank, we can “crowd out” demand for the spread of potentially dangerous dual-use technologies.
In this fashion, we can help close the door on potential proliferation pathways countries like Iran have chosen to explore, while assuring a continued safe and stable supply of nuclear fuel for everyone — and responsibly dealing with the long-term problem of nuclear waste.
Steve is a doctoral student in nuclear engineering. E-mail him at [email protected]
