What’s the Plan for Nuclear Waste?
Zachary Rosario
Professor John Horgan
Seminar in Science Writing
28 January 2025
What’s the Plan for Nuclear Waste?
Since 1970, the United States has been trying to find a suitable location for a national nuclear waste repository. Lack of public support has spoiled every attempt so far, however, so have technical difficulties1. Naysayers to nuclear waste storage often get labelled as neo-luddites, but their worries are founded given the NRC’s record.
The first selected location was in Lyons, Kansas, deep in the tunnels of an abandoned salt mine2. Salt deposits have been proposed since the 1950’s as a practical place to store nuclear waste. This is because they are often found in areas with low earth-quake activity; their presence shows the absence of water and that they heal on their own3. However, after a 2-year study, the NRC discovered potential leakage and water entry into the site from old blast-holes. Public and political outrage ensued, cancelling the project.
With no alternative solution, the nuclear power plants and cold war nuclear stockpiles waste were stored in above ground tanks and warehouses. Some waste was just sitting in the fields of rural America uncontained.
The loosely regulated storage of nuclear waste resulted in plenty of accidents in the United States between the 40’s and 80’s. For example, children who grew up next to the Mallinckrodt plant in St. Louis, during in the 40’s-50’s became eligible last year for compensation due to elevated risk of cancer and disease they face, for many it is too late4.
This nightmare of a mess culminated in Congress passing the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1982, starting the DOE’s second search for a national repository. Three sites were chosen in the beginning, but Yucca Mountain came out on top. Located in Nye County next to the historic nuclear testing field, its geology was supposed to provide an ideal location for long-term waste storage5.
The site had many entries for water, as did the salt mine. Created from volcanic eruptions, Yucca Mountain is not only seismically active and on land where many Native American actively live, but full of possible entries for water6. If groundwater were to be contaminated with radiation, it would be passed from the irrigation systems to cattle and crops, waiting to be consumed in grocery stores around the country, but those who live in the closest would be affected the most.
The repository at Yucca Mountain was finally cancelled in 2008, twenty-six years later. Still to this day, the U.S does not have a single national repository for nuclear waste. While recently, the Supreme Court approved the construction of an interim facility in Texas, the solution does not address the need for nuclear waste to be stored for hundreds of thousands of years but rather a mere 40 years. Nor does it even come close to supporting just how much waste we need to store7.
In the meantime, nuclear waste is mainly stored on site at nuclear power plants inside of dry casks made of steel and concrete.
So far, dry casks have had a clean leakage record since their adoption in 19868. However, in terms of half-life this isn’t very long. Aging casks present a risk and must be actively managed due to their inferior materials and design.
While the current interim storage solutions are much safer than those of the past, they are still only temporary. They do not solve the issue that at some point we will run out of short-term storage space and will have to begin shipping nuclear waste at scale across our interstates once again.
With AI data centers driving our economy and now eyeing nuclear power for their operation, the risk is even greater. One day, this mess will have to be handled. Let us hope the reason we get to it is not some disaster, but innovation in science.
1 https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2016/04/f30/History%20of%20Waste%20Managem ent_1.pdf
2 https://www.congress.gov/116/meeting/house/109598/witnesses/HHRG-116-GO28-Wstate-HancockD20190607.pdf
3 https://www.wipp.energy.gov/fctshts/salt.pdf
4 https://missouriindependent.com/2024/03/07/u-s-senate-approves-compensation-for-st-louis-nuclearwaste-exposures/
5 https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2016/04/f30/History%20of%20Waste%20Management_1.pdf
6 https://ag.nv.gov/Hot_Topics/Issue/Yucca/
7 https://www.sciencenews.org/article/supreme-court-nuclear-waste-storage
8 https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/dry-cask-storage
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