August 15, 1997|By NEWSDAY
LIMERICK, Pa. -- Nestled in racks at the bottom of a 39-foot-deep pool of water, the used fuel from the Limerick nuclear reactor betrays only the slightest hint that it will remain deadly for 10,000 years or more.
The radioactive fuel gives off a faint blue glow as high-energy particles it emits speed through the water.
The effect is eerily alluring - amplified by water so clean that it tricks the eye. Although 22 feet below the surface, the cross-like tops of the fuel bundles seem within reach.
Such bundles - nasty leftovers of the nuclear era - have been accumulating in storage pools at 109 commercial power reactors across the United States and at 10 closed reactors. More than 34,000 tons await disposal, an amount that grows by about 2,000 tons a year.
The fuel is called "spent," but that is a misnomer. It will retain its ominous residual activity for millennia. The final disposal of spent reactor fuel - an afterthought during the "Atoms for Peace" optimism at the birth of nuclear power - has become one of the great technical and political challenges of the modern era. It is the ultimate not-in-my-back-yard dilemma.
The Environmental Protection Agency is charged with developing radiation protection standards for the ages - from identifying the population that might be at risk from any radiation leaking from a waste repository to setting dose limits. Planners also must consider what could happen if someone were to inadvertently intrude into the dump centuries from now.
It is as if the ancient Egyptians had to do a risk assessment before burying King Tut .
Disposal program problems
Such forecasting aside, the nation's spent-fuel disposal program has been stymied, critics say, by false starts, escalating costs, management ineptitude, missed deadlines and nagging doubts about how quickly to put the deadly waste out of sight and out of mind.
The effort has been complicated recently by an all-out industry campaign to persuade Congress to approve a temporary holding facility for the waste adjacent to Nevada's Yucca Mountain, a step critics say is ill-timed and could jeopardize the effort to determine whether that barren ridge 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas is suitable as a permanent burial site for the commercial spent fuel as well as some wastes from military nuclear programs.
The temporary storage site would compete with the Yucca Mountain project for tight funds, they say, and - if built - would ease the pressure to build the permanent repository, now projected to open in 2010 at the earliest and cost at least $33 billion (in 1994 dollars) through 2071. Under provisions of a House bill, the temporary storage facility would have an initial license period of 20 years, a second phase of up to 100 years - and renewable beyond that.
"I don't think they [industry officials] care about" a permanent repository, says Robert Loux of the state of Nevada's Nuclear Waste Projects Office. "They believe their only opportunity to get waste away from reactor sites is through interim storage."
Action in Congress
Loux questions whether the temporary facility - essentially a parking lot for huge casks filled with reactor fuel assemblies - could be built, licensed and operating as quickly as the %o congressional legislation envisions. By a 65-34 vote in April, the Senate approved a plan to open the temporary storage site by 2003. Last month, a House subcommittee passed a similar bill with a 2002 opening for the storage site. The full House is expected to follow suit. But the White House promises a veto. The Clinton administration opposes any attempt to establish an interim storage site in Nevada until the viability of Yucca Mountain as a permanent burial site is established.
Backers of the interim facility say it will provide a measure of relief for utilities that have started to build expensive on-site storage facilities at nuclear reactors because the government has been unable to deliver on its legal obligation - affirmed last year by a U.S. Appeals Court - to start taking the waste off their hands by next January.
Utilities, state regulators and federal officials are due in court next month to discuss compensation or other legal remedies for the Energy Department's inability to take the waste. The department already has broached the possibility of reimbursing utilities - at taxpayer expense - for some of the cost of building new on-site storage facilities for used reactor fuel.
The battle over an interim storage facility in Nevada is the latest chapter in the tangled history of nuclear waste policy in the United States.
Many experts remain confident that the nuclear waste dilemma - with its attendant questions about the safety of moving the spent fuel - can be solved. "Most people in the field don't see any problems," said Peter Soo, a nuclear engineer at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, N.Y. "The solutions are at hand. We know how to do it."
