Scuttlebutt: Storing Nuclear Waste
I subscribe to the U.S. Energy Department Office of Environmental Management's newsletter. They are the folks who handle the federal efforts at nuclear clean-up. Each week I get a report on a new list of projects that they fund and supervise. It is a dizzying list of highly complicated, dangerous, and super expensive work they are doing to clean up from our nuclear weapons programs as well as dealing with issues of waste storage and nuclear “incidents”.
I also subscribe to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Nuclear Information and Resource Service and other organizations focusing on nuclear energy issues, but I have never seen in any national media a discussion of any one of the dozens of projects that are on-going and will continue for decades.
All of this work is certainly essential and I am not qualified to critique their efforts. Questions do arise for me as to how effective they can actually be to keep us safe from what they freely admit is highly hazardous. That is why you are paying hundreds of billions of dollars to handle these issues with the greatest of care.
They have nearly an impossible job. First there is the monumental task of figuring out how to perform this remedial work, which requires a myriad of new and unique engineering challenges. Then there is the political effort to get the public to finance their plans.
After 70 years of using nuclear energy and creating vast amounts of waste, we still do not have a waste storage location to “permanently” store high level nuclear waste. Deep salt mines in Michigan are deemed to be the most geologically stable location in America, but that location was quickly shot down some decades ago due to public resistance. The spot that has been the focus of most efforts is the Yucca Flats area of Nevada. I haven't seen the evidence as to why this is a good location, but I have seen the evidence as to why it is not. To no one's surprise, the people of Nevada don't like that idea and planning for that was halted during the Obama years. This fight has been going on since 1987 and over $20 billion has been spent so far to initiate the development. The Trump administration has been making weak, but, reportedly, intentionally ineffective efforts to revive the project. An election year is no time to piss off swing state voters.
This situation reminds me of the phrase “all dressed up and nowhere to go”. There are enormous quantities of nuclear material in over 100 sites all over the country that needs some way to keep it safe from the rest of life on earth, yet while we still don't know what to do with the stuff, we keep making more and more of it.
Meanwhile nuclear plant operators are sucking up billions in bailout funds from the public trough. Ohio granted a $1.1 billion bailout in 2019. ComEd got $2.4 billion from the state of Illinois. Exelon got $7.6 billion from New York and $3 billion from New Jersey. They, and FirstEnergy are angling for $500 million from Pennsylvania.
I have written in the past about the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico. It was designed to store transuranic waste, which is a kind of mid-level waste that is not the super hot stuff, but is not low level waste either. but still needs to be stored for 12,000 years. In 1979 Congress authorized construction of the facility that now consists of 56 rooms, 300 ft. long, buried a half mile deep in salt formations where salt tectonics have been stable for more than 250 million years. After 20 years of work and $1.9 billion of today's dollars, the first nuclear waste arrived at the plant in 1999, but in 2014 there was an accident which caused to site to close during a three-year, $2 billion remediation effort. The plant is estimated to continue accepting waste for 25 to 35 years and to cost a grand total of 19 billion dollars (don't hold your breath on that one).
I mention the WIPP and the enormous costs associated with this project not because of its huge costs, but to point out that it is only one of many such projects being undertaken to support our use of nuclear weapons—the too-cheap-to-meter nuclear power. These multi-billion dollar projects are happening all over the place. These incredible engineering feats and massive construction projects are being accomplished to accommodate nuclear energy use.
But if you want to talk about costs (and few ever do) look no further than the Hanford nuclear facility. This 580-square-mile site is, by far, the most complicated and expensive clean-up project the Energy Dept has. Though various clean-up projects have been undergoing for decades, Hanford is currently dealing with 56 million gallons of highly contaminated liquid that is stored in 177 aging underground tanks. Of these, more than one-third have already leaked. To deal with this toxic brew they will build something called the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP). The WTP Project is equivalent to building two nuclear power plants and will span 65 acres and include four major nuclear facilities that will use vitrification to encase the material in glass. The largest of these structures has a footprint equivalent to four football fields and will be 12 stories tall when complete. The overall complex requires more than 260,000 cubic yards of concrete, 40,000 tons of structural steel, and more than one million feet of piping.
This project will only suck $2.5 billion from the federal treasury this year, but the total cost of just the vitrification plant is $17 billion; however, according to an audit report, the estimate for the waste treatment project costs are expected to continue to change (in other words, increase). A new DOE estimate increases the cost of remaining environmental cleanup at Hanford by $82 billion, bringing it to $242 billion. The Department of Energy audited financial report for the fiscal year 2018 says DOE’s remaining costs for cleanup around the nation have increased from $384 billion estimated in fiscal 2017 to $494 billion in fiscal 2018.
And counting....
Barrel Image by Mostafa Elturkey from Pixabay
