Senator Tom Carper (D-Del) convened a hearing on nuclear waste issues at MIT on Monday, May 18. The Senator is the Chairman of the Clean Air and Nuclear Safety Subcommittee of the Committee on Environment and Public Works.
The panel consisted of
Dr. Charles Forsberg, Executive Director of the Fuel Cycle Study, Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, MIT
Dr. Matthew Bunn, Associate Professor of Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Dr. Ernest Moniz, Director, MIT Energy Initiative and Laboratory for Energy and the Environment, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics, MIT
Dr. Andrew Kadak, Professor of the Practice of Nuclear Engineering, Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, MIT
Video link to the full two hours.
Carper introduced the program by saying we have 104 operating nuclear power plants in the USA with 26 new plants proposed with loan guarantees for three of them already approved. "We have to have in this country what is called a nuclear renaissance." The stimulus money under the ARRA also includes loan guarantees for manufacturing nuclear components for power plants. Dry cask storage should be secure for up to a century and buys us time to figure out what we want to do with the waste ultimately.
Charles Forsberg: 2000 tons of nuclear spent fuel is produced every year. That is about five acres or one city block. Only around 1% of the energy in the fuel is used before it is spent and the fuel can be re-used in breeder reactors.
Matthew Bunn: Anything we do will require a repository and there's no rush. We should not recycle plutonium as they do in France and Japan. Nuclear reprocessing is a dying industry today and it would be a mistake to go ahead with the current technology.
Ernest Moniz: There is an update on MIT's 2003 report on the future of nuclear power at http://web.mit.edu/... with a 1 TeraWatt from nuclear plan by mid-century. We have time and "optionality" in what to do. We have 100,000 tons of old fuel now. We need to plan for a storage solution Consolidated storage with co-location of research and demonstration facilities may be a good way to go. No Purex or MOX. There are 270 tons of separated plutonium around the world today, reclaimed from spent fuel.
Andrew Kadak: Should we pursue any of these strategies if they're not economic? He showed a timeline based upon the projected price of uranium: central storage from 2010 on, regional storage by 2020, MOX by 2025, transmutation by 2035, new central repository by 2040, and breeder reactors by 2085. Longterm political stability is necessary to solve this problem.
Forsberg: Yucca Mountain safety requirements were decided only last December, years after the plant was sited.
Bunn: Obama's retreat from Yucca Mountain was a mistake. The Swedish and Finnish experience is different because the communities involved already had nuclear power and had received benefits from the technology.
Moniz: Storage should be part of our plan from the beginning and should be called not interim storage but managed storage.
Bunn: Locals don't want permanent waste sites.
Forsberg: France's decision to be energy independent came out of their reaction against the Algerian War as they were in Algeria for the oil. They decided in 1975 to go nuclear because they wanted no more oil.
Moniz: We need a robust new research program on alternative fuel cycles, on the order of at least $500 million.
Kadak: We need demonstration projects as well.
Bunn: If nuclear is to be part of the greenhouse gas solution, we need sealed, smaller factory-built reactors with product takeback for those areas of the world which are not secure enough or ready for large-scale nuclear power. We also have to think of nuclear as a process heat source for refineries and factories as well as electricity.
Forsberg: Uranium resources much larger than previously thought.
Kadak: Yucca Mountain not designed to be retrievable. MIT study on fast breeder reactors to be finished next year.
Areas of Agreement
Moniz: There's time; getting to first mover nuclear power plants soon is imperative; and reprocessing now is counter-productive.
Bunn: More research on nuclear fuel cycle and alternative fuel cycles; no rushing.
Forsberg: You can replace coal with nuclear in 25 years as France has demonstrated but it requires a real commitment.
Carper: No crisis, no momentum
To Do
Kadak: Allow Yucca Mountain to proceed at least through the licensing process; get waste fund off budget, interim storage with co-location; transportation, not discussed at all, will be a nightmare.
Moniz: First movers need to start moving; framework for managed storage; off budget R and D and D(emo) for low carbon electricity.
Bunn: Expanded interim storage to take decommissioned nukes' fuel; Feds to "own" spent fuel; world safety and security for nuke fuel with stronger global institutions and standards.
Forsberg: Waste needs to be outside the usual Federal and corporate business processes in order to work; Is nuclear power the enabling energy for liquid fuels after petroleum?
It was interesting to me that the transportation issue came up only at the very end and was not addressed at all. Within the last 24 hours, I heard one commentator compare the "no terrorists on our shores" kerfuffle to the way Yucca Mountain was delayed and stopped. According to him, when the opposition distributed maps showing the rail and road routes over which high-level rad wastes would have to move, people turned against the waste repository.
It was also interesting to me that nuclear power was being advocated as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but the timeframe for development was decades away when James Hansen and others are saying that we have to make radical changes to reduce those emissions in less than one decade.