Do not send 50 years of spent nuclear fuel to New Mexico
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is considering a proposal by Holtec International to build a large nuclear waste storage site in New Mexico, between Carlsbad and Hobbs. Holtec specializes in equipment to monitor and store spent nuclear fuel.
The proposed Holtec site would initially contain 10,000 partially buried concrete and steel storage canisters, resulting in a spent nuclear fuel storage capacity of 120,000 tons. Currently in the U.S., there is some 76,000 tons of spent fuel stored at about 80 sites across 37 states (mainly at nuclear power plants). About 70 percent of the spent fuel is in cooling ponds, where it can stay for five to 10 years or more. After sufficient cooling, it is typically moved to dry cask storage, similar in concept to the air-cooled concrete and steel canisters envisioned in the Holtec project.
The Holtec plan is to take all the spent fuel being stored in dry casks and transport it by rail or road to New Mexico for interim storage. “Interim” here means “until a deep, geologic repository is found,” which could be quite a long time. The proposed Holtec site is large enough to hold all existing spent nuclear fuel in the U.S., plus all future spent nuclear fuel generated by today’s operating nuclear reactors.
After extensive U.S. experience with commercial nuclear power, one would hope we had a well-developed scientific consensus on how to deal with the back end of the nuclear power fuel cycle; that is, how to safely and economically render spent nuclear fuel harmless. But such a consensus has not emerged. Until recently, the best U.S. plan was deep, geologic storage at Yucca Mountain, Nev. But that plan stalled in 2011 after strong opposition from Nevada residents and their political representatives. Now a Plan B has surfaced, which is to ship it all to New Mexico for shallow, interim burial.
This plan should be opposed. The costs and risks of the Holtec
plan include those associated with transporting spent nuclear fuel from some 80 sites across the U.S. to one site in southeastern New Mexico. Even though the rail and road transportation risks are small, they are not zero. And that’s the rub when proposing a plan of this large scale. The Sierra Club estimates that 10,000 shipments over 20 years will be required. If a single shipment has an accident risk of 1 in 1,000, then the expected number of accidents in 10,000 shipments is 10. And any accident involving high-level nuclear waste could be very serious.
The main advantage to New Mexico of the Holtec plan is additional economic development in southeastern New Mexico. But this benefit is overshadowed by the risks and costs associated with transporting, storing and monitoring up to 120,000 tons of nuclear waste for an indefinite future.
So, is there an alternative to Plan B? Yes, there is. Until a deep, geologic storage site becomes available, we should continue to store spent nuclear fuel in dry casks near the nuclear power plants that created it. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has certified dry cask storage as safe. There is no good reason to transport all the high-level U.S. nuclear waste to New Mexico just to store it in more dry casks. Keeping spent nuclear fuel at the nuclear power plant is a fair way to allocate the regulatory burdens, costs and accident risks associated with this material. This solution appears to be considerably less expensive and also much safer than the proposed Holtec plan. And looking across the states which created the waste, it’s far more equitable.
James Eagle, Ph.D., is a retired chairman of the Department of Operations Research, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, Calif. In his U.S. Navy career, he served on three nuclear submarines, retiring as a captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve. He and his wife, Maj-Britt, live in Santa Fe.