Decommissioning

James Conca, Senior Scientist for the Institute for Energy and the Environment at New Mexico State University and Director of the NMSU Carlsbad Environmental Monitoring and Research Center, blows the lid off some preconceived ideas over nuclear energy waste disposal in the US, highlighting that many people are unaware that the US has been safely disposing nuclear waste for years. According to Conca, disposal in the right geology is safe, and wouldn't cost the taxpayer a dime.

Commentary by James Conca, Director of NMSU CEMRC

Solution sitting on the sidelines

Bound up in the discussion of nuclear energy, environmental concerns with our growing fossil fuel addiction, and achieving a sustainable global energy mix by mid-century, is the issue of nuclear waste disposal. 

Let me state unconditionally that nuclear waste disposal is safe, easy and reasonably low cost.  

Of course, listening to the public discourse over the last 40 years would have one believe the complete opposite.

Fortunately, we have experience in deep geologic disposal of nuclear waste and that experience, plus 60 years of history with nuclear, demonstrates that handling and disposing of nuclear waste is one of the safest and easiest endeavors in which we have ever engaged.

Safety record unmatched

No has ever been killed in the U.S. handling or disposing of nuclear waste, or working in any nuclear power plant or related facility of any kind. Ever.

There is no other energy source or industry that can make that claim. Not natural gas, not wind, not the fast food industry.

Also not nuclear weapons. Most people cannot distinguish between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons and that is the root of the misconceptions of nuclear energy and nuclear waste. 

Nuclear Weapons Bad.  Nuclear Energy Good. They have almost nothing to do with each other.

All of the deaths, environmental contamination and fears come from weapons and weapons production.

Chernobyl was a weapons reactor. No one in the world has ever made a weapon from used commercial spent nuclear fuel.

A weapons reactor is a weapons reactor, and a power reactor is a power reactor.

The few people who have died in America from nuclear have been at weapons facilities and weapons reactors.

No one has ever died in the U.S. at a nuclear power facility or while handling nuclear waste. 

Fewer people get hurt at reactors than sitting at desks trading stocks.

According to OSHA, the nuclear industry is the safest job in America.  It can’t be more safe.

Next, the volume of nuclear waste is so small that, unless you’ve seen it with your own eyes, it is unimaginable.

Housing waste

Twenty percent of the electricity consumed in America comes from nuclear power, and it produces only 2,000 tons of waste a year, which would fit into a large garage. 

Compare this to coal, which produces 400,000,000 tons of waste per year, not including the 2,000,000,000 tons of CO₂ emitted into the atmosphere.

All of the nuclear waste we have ever produced, in history, would fit in any high school football stadium.

France, responding to the 1973 oil embargo, went 80% nuclear and all of its waste is sitting in one building waiting to be recycled. 

The small amount of waste is obvious when one considers that burning one ounce of uranium is the same as 75 tons of coal.  Yes, a big volume difference. 

You don’t need much uranium and you don’t produce much waste. And we know exactly how to dispose of it safely and cheaply.

US has been handling geological repository for years

Unknown to most people, the U.S. already has an operating permanent, deep geologic repository for nuclear waste. 

It is in the Permian salt beds that underlie 10,000 square miles of New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.

Massive salt was chosen by the National Academy of Sciences way back in 1957 as the best rock type for all nuclear waste, and a small sixteen-square-mile portion of this salt in southeastern New Mexico was set aside in 1992 for permanent nuclear waste disposal. 

The repository is located one-half mile below the surface of the earth in the Salado Formation, a particularly massive and optimal member of these salt beds that has never been deformed, folded, faulted or otherwise had any disruptive geologic activity in this area in 225 million years.

The Salado only has 1% water, and that water is not mobile, but is trapped as small fluid inclusions of 225-million-old seawater that have not moved a millimeter in 225 million years. 

The present nuclear repository is known as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) and is licensed for defense-generated transuranic waste, basically bomb waste, that includes everything from low-activity to high-activity waste like recycled spent fuel waste from old weapons reactors (see www.wipp.energy.gov and www.cemrc.org).

WIPP has been operating safely and efficiently for eleven years and has not had any problems at all; no releases, no deaths, only a few industrial accidents like falling off a ladder, and has a better safety and environmental record than any other industry in America, including wind and solar.

When WIPP is complete, it will have used up only one-half of a square mile of the original sixteen of the total ten thousand.

WIPP is on schedule and under budget. There is no other project as successful or safe.  The same can be done for commercial nuclear waste. 

Paid in advance

Nuclear waste is not much of a problem, less than all other energy-related problems, and disposal of it in the right geology is not expensive, able to be covered completely by the existing nuclear waste tax that all nuclear utilities presently must pay.

No tax-payer dollars needed.

Dr. JAMES L. CONCA, Senior Scientist for the Institute for Energy and the Environment at New Mexico State University, has been Director of the NMSU Carlsbad Environmental Monitoring and Research Center, the independent monitoring facility for the DOE WIPP nuclear repository. CEMRC is a radiochemistry facility dedicated to environmental monitoring and mitigation of radioactive materials, and the development of sustainable energy distributions.