by CKR
An article in today's WaPo discusses the risks of storing spent nuclear fuel in cooling pools at the reactors.
The National Academy of Sciences has done a study that concludes that this fuel is vulnerable to terrorist attack. The study is not available for classification reasons.
This should not be a surprise.
Spent fuel, nuclear fuel that is no longer usable for power generation, is extremely radioactive and thermally hot when it is removed from the reactor. It must be stored in water for cooling and radiation shielding for several months in order to let the fission products that cause most of the heat and radioactivity to disintegrate. This must be done in any case, so any power reactor will have some inventory of cooling fuel stored in its pool.
The problem that the NAS study addresses is that, because no long-term storage facility is available, all US spent fuel is currently being stored in pools at the reactors. While many of the hottest fission products have disappeared from the fuel, some biologically dangerous ones like cesium-137 and strontium-90, which the human body will build into bones, remain, along with uranium and plutonium. The pools may be located in parts of the reactor complex that are not as well protected from a crashing airplane as the reactor itself.
There are four options for the spent fuel: leave it where it is, build an interim (probably above-ground) central facility for storage, open the repository at Yucca Mountain, or reprocess it.
The last option was given up for the US by the Carter administration. The reasoning was that if the plutonium was never separated from the more radioactive fission products, anyone wanting to separate it to make a bomb would have a very difficult time. The United States would show the way for the rest of the world. The rest of the world, however, chose to continue reprocessing, and the result is that the US has given up its influence and technology development in this area.
The repository at Yucca Mountain has been developed with taxes on consumers of nuclear power. The state of Nevada no longer wants it. Requirements have now apparently grown to complete and utter safety for 200,000 years. We've been human for only a little longer than that.
An interim storage facility has been discussed and designed for many years. I would suspect that the latest designs would be a reinforced concrete structure, at least partly underground. This option would require irritating another NIMBY constituency outside Nevada, endless certification debates, and the concerns about transportation and handling multiplied by two (once from the reactor to interim storage and once from interim storage to permanent repository). Retrievable storage at Yucca Mountain has also been considered and would be a somewhat similar option, although it would remove some of the storage, transportation and vulnerability concerns.
Giving up nuclear power isn't an option. Even if the US were willing to do without something like 20% of its electricity, the existing fuel rods are still there.
So there you are. Open Yucca Mountain and take the fuel there, or stick with the currently vulnerable system.