Nuclear mattersU.S. searching for a nuclear waste graveyard

At the Diablo Canyon power plant in San Luis Obispo County, California, they bury nuclear waste in storage casks, each weighing about 180 tons and costing more than $1 million each. These casks were authorized by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in its ongoing struggle to deal with the 50,000 metric tons of toxic nuclear waste that has already been produced by the U.S. nuclear plants. Structures like these, measuring about 18 feet high, will soon dot the landscape at almost all the U.S. more than 104 active and shuttered nuclear reactors — near neighborhoods, streams, and oceans in thirty-eight states.

David Kravets writes that, according to the Department of Energy, there is enough spent nuclear waste in the United States to fill a football-field-sized hole fifteen feet deep. From many different proposals, scientists and politicians have selected on-site storage as the safest solution for the buildup. It is only a temporary solution. The waste will be fatal to humans and other animals for tens of thousands of years — yet the storage tombs are expected to last only a hundred years.

Kravets writes that these scattered nuclear graveyards are emblematic of a failed U.S. nuclear energy policy — a policy that is rarely discussed even as regulators entertain proposals to build roughly thirty new nuclear power plants. This month, Congress killed killed a controversial plan to house nuclear waste in a $100 billion facility in Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The move thrilled critics of the 30-year-old plan, but left the United States no closer to a practical, long-term solution, even as an additional 30,000 metric tons (.pdf) more of nuclear waste is expected to be generated in the coming decades.

“The reality is we created waste that we don’t know what to do with,” says Don Hancock, director of the Southwest Research and Information Center, an Albuquerque, New Mexico nuclear think tank. “People are capable of creating problems we don’t know how to solve.”

In the United States, where 20 percent of electricity comes from nuclear power, the official solution to the waste crisis has long been a permanent underground storage facility in the Yucca Mountain desert straddling California and Nevada. After years of scientific discord over the soundness of burying highly radioactive waste hundreds of yards deep into the earth, and concerns about transporting the waste by rail, the Yucca Mountain plan was officially scrapped this month in Obama’s proposed 2010 budget. “The Yucca Mountain program will be scaled back to those costs necessary to answer inquiries from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, while the Administration devises a new strategy toward nuclear waste disposal,” reads Obama’s budget document. (.pdf).

That leaves the United States with another central nuclear graveyard: the Waste Pilot Isolation Plant in the New Mexico desert near Carlsbad. After confronting issues similar to Yucca Mountain, the underground facility finally won an operating permit a decade ago. Carved out of salt beds, it is permitted to receive tons of radioactive waste stored in 1,000-pound drums from 23 Defense Department sites across the country. But it doesn’t have anywhere near the capacity to handle the droppings of America’s nuclear plants. “We’re talking about stuff that ought to be isolated for thousands of years,” says Jay Silberg, a Washington, D.C., attorney and expert on nuclear power law. “But it will always be the next presidential administration to come up with a plan, and then they’ll say: ‘We need to study this more.’”