Dr. Conca certainly thinks so. At the end of February, the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission accepted Holtec International’s license application for its proposed consolidated interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel, called HI-STORE CIS. To be located in southeastern New Mexico near Carlsbad, the facility would store spent nuclear fuel, which is better referred to as slightly used nuclear fuel, until a final disposal facility is built or until we build our new fast reactors that will burn it, or we recycle it into new fuel.
Reactor fuel usually spends five years in the reactor, after which about 5% of the energy in the fuel is used, but fission products of the reactions have built-up to the point where the fuel must be replaced. After leaving the reactor, the spent fuel usually spends about 5 years in spent fuel pools of water, until heat and radiation have decreased sufficiently to allow the fuel to be passively cooled in a dry cask (see 1,2,3). At this point the dry casks can stay where they are for over a century, or be moved to a centralized storage facility like Holtec is proposing. This would make the logistics and costs of storage easier and lower than having dozens of sites around the country, especially at those sites where the reactors themselves are gone.
A study by Oak Ridge National Laboratory showed an interim storage site would save the U.S. Treasury $15 billion by 2040, $30 billion by 2050, and $54 billion by 2060. The NRC has concluded that spent fuel storage in pools and casks is safe and secure. This and other nuclear developments follow directly from the recommendations of President Obama’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, and were followed up in the President's Memorandum on disposal of Defense High-Level Waste and the 2013 Administration's Strategy for the Management and Disposal of Used Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Radioactive Waste.
Conca and Wright (2012) provide background on nuclear waste and interpretation of the three BRC recommendations pertaining to nuclear waste disposal that has led to some of these changes. Interim storage of spent nuclear fuel is nothing new. It’s been going on in the United States for decades at existing nuclear plant sites. Much of our used fuel, over 70,000 tons, is in interim storage in pools and casks at operating nuclear power plants, and several that have been shut down and decommissioned, throughout the country.
Dry casks are typically constructed of one or more shells of steel, cast iron, and reinforced concrete to provide leak containment and radiation shielding. Casts typically hold 10 tons of spent fuel. At present, dry cask storage is licensed at 35 nuclear plant sites in 24 states. There are 65 sites with operating reactors in the United States. Now that Holtec’s application has been accepted for review, it will take several years to license and construct such a consolidated interim storage facility (more). HI-STORE CIS is a subterranean used nuclear fuel storage system (see figure) with a maximum storage capacity of 10,000 canisters that can each hold about 12 tons of spent fuel. The first phase of the project is an initial 40-year license application for 500 storage cavities which can hold over 8,500 metric tons of uranium. Uranium makes up over 95% of the fuel.
HI-STORE CIS is being funded by Holtec with the enthusiastic support of local communities in southeastern New Mexico, including the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance and the state’s Governor Susana Martinez. John Heaton, Chair of the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance, estimates that the entire facility would take ten years to construct, and employ about 300 local workers.
The NRC has projected the cost of the regulatory review of Holtec’s application at approximately $7.5 million. At this writing, HI-STORE CIS is the only ongoing licensing effort in the country that seeks to fulfill DOE’s desire for a consolidated interim storage facility. Critics of the project cite the danger of transporting what could be volatile nuclear waste, and are worried about the environmental impact of burying spent nuclear fuel in New Mexico. Both are not serious risks since none of the waste is volatile, there are no free liquids to leak, we’ve been disposing of nuclear waste in New Mexico since 1999 (some of it very high activity) and we have transported many thousands of tons of nuclear waste, nuclear weapons and spent nuclear fuel over millions of miles of roadways - with no problems.
Critics always say any ideas about handling nuclear waste are bad but leaving them where they are is not acceptable, then never suggest any scientifically-credible solutions. Our nuclear waste containers have been tested over the last 30 years by running into concrete bunkers at 80 mph, being dropped onto huge steel spikes, burned in jet fuel fires at thousands of degrees, and sunk deep in water for weeks. These things are as strong as humans can make them.
And Holtec has already done this kind of thing before very successfully. Holtec’s HI-STORM UMAX was certified and licensed by the NRC in 2015 and is already deployed at many nuclear power plants around the United States (see figure). It was engineered to store all of our used nuclear fuel that has been produced. The HI-STORM UMAX stores the canister entirely below-ground allowing unobstructed views of the entire facility from any direction. HI-STORE CIS is designed to unify the storage of all different storage canisters (both vertically and horizontally stored) in one standardized HI-STORM UMAX system simplifying operations and moving beyond our older management activities.
These systems are indeed a temporary interim measure. The stainless-steel canisters are easily retrievable and ready for transport to whatever permanent solution is chosen, such as deep geologic disposal or burning in fast reactors. The canisters are designed, qualified, and tested to survive for centuries and prevent the release of radioactive material under the most adverse accident scenarios postulated by NRC regulations for both storage and transportation. As an add-on, Holtec is also seeking approval from NRC to use the heat generated by the waste, from just sitting on the pad, to make clean drinking water from dirty water from industrial processes like drilling. New Mexico generates a lot of water contaminated with organics and salts, especially in the region where the interim storage facility will be located, and using their patented process-heat design would be quite a boon to this arid region.
Using waste heat for industrial processes, even just heating homes and buildings, is just what Sweden and other Scandinavian countries do with much of their waste heat, from all generation sources, not just nuclear. It’s about time we employed this type of energy efficiency. Venting so much heat to the atmosphere is wasteful and counter-productive if one cares about global warming (more). Holtec International is a diverse energy company headquartered in Jupiter, Florida that hopes to use this system for its own future nuclear waste. Holtec is developing and testing a small modular reactor, the SMR-160 in its new Singh Technology Campus on the Delaware River in Camden, New Jersey. Like almost all SMRs, it will be walk-away safe, unable to melt-down.
Dealing with the waste is really the last hurdle in a bright and clean nuclear future.
Original URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2018/03/06/will-we-actually-get-a-place-to-store-our-nuclear-waste/#589cb7f323a0
Managed by I2M Consulting, LLC