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Blogs by Leland Waldrip
A Mountain of Nuclear Waste 9/25/2007 7:34:24 AM
The first thing to do, when you find you're too deep in a hole, is stop digging. I've recently posted an article, Mobile Chernobyl, and a poem, Yucca Mountain Blues, that both explore problems with nuclear waste that proponents of nuclear power seem to want to divorce from the benefits of "clean, safe nuclear power." MSNBC is today announcing the first application to build a nuclear reactor (in Texas) in thirty years. I doubt that in their application they account for the full costs of handling the radioactive byproducts and decommissioning the plant on its demise.
Unfortunately, nuclear proponents have adopted accounting methods akin to those of Enron Corporation. Or maybe it was Enron doing the adopting from the nuclear people. In any case, the cost of dealing with nuclear waste must be added to the costs of building reactors and processing uranium to produce nuclear fuel.
We know there is a huge cost associated with nuclear waste. But we also know that, even after more than half a century of using nuclear power, we don't know the real cost of dealing with the waste by-products of it. No country has found a safe way to deal with it. In fact, we can only guess at the enormity of the problem.
The poster-child of nuclear energy these days seems to be France. It's pointed out, factually, that 76% of their electric energy comes from nuclear power. They adopted the Westinghouse reactor design and under centralized control they have avoided some of the production problems encountered in countries like the U.S. where diversity of competition makes for non-uniform efforts. I think the number of reactors France operates is now 58. The French people are, from many reports, happy with nuclear energy. They have, as they say, "no oil, no coal, and no choice." Their happiness may be due to the fact that they haven't looked behind that poster where their radioactive waste products are stored.
France is facing a crisis in their nuclear energy program. They ship some of their radioactive waste across Europe into Russia, where it is processed and stored in horribly contaminated sites in Siberia. Most of France's radioactive waste, however, is stored at about a thousand sites around the country, with a couple of large sites designated as "stocking repositories." This term is apparently a euphemism to avoid scaring the bejeebers out of the people in whose back yards these collection points have been sited. Ostensibly, this material is being "stocked" for research into ways to make it useful and/or less dangerous.
Whatever ideas they come up with, certainly will have to be better than the solutions adopted so far to deal with the problem. As of this writing the repository at La Hague is leaking into the groundwater and the huge repository in the Champaigne region is leaking Tritium into the groundwater that feeds vinyards in that region. Perhaps future wine tasters will be looking for body, boquet and glowing aura or tingling lips.
France produces about 12,000 tons of radioactive waste each year. That's a lot of samples coming in the door of the lab, not to mention fifty years worth already sitting there. This logic, it seems to me is like, say, Holland opening a twenty-foot hole in their dikes so they can study seawater. France, like many other countries, including the U.S., should stop digging ever deeper if they ever want to get out of the radioactive hole we all find ourselves in.
