RADIOACTIVE SHELL GAME
Quigg, Catherine
Radioactive shell game The industry has a plan for all that 'waste' Catherine Quigg Nuclear power may have its enthusiasts, but even the most enthusiastic want little to do with the nuclear...
...This might happen if a heavy cask fell from an overhead crane and crashed onto the fuel in the racks...
...Already it has approved twenty applications for the redesign of reactor swimming pools to permit storage of more fuel cores — and many more applications are pending...
...The persistence of the Federal Government's twenty-year search for suitable disposal sites is matched by the determination of a growing number of states to avoid being selected...
...If Sabotage could be a problem...
...Look," the Government and utilities would then say, "we have all this valuable fuel on hand...
...Increasing the amount of spent fuel on-site increases the potential seriousness of an accident...
...it will be safer and cheaper to reprocess it where it is than to package it and ship it to some far-off permanent repository that might not work anyway...
...Commissioner Victor Gilinsky of the NRC, testifying before the California Energy Resources Commission in January 1977, said, "A question that ought to be on everyone's mind by now is, what will happen if neither reprocessing nor a [permanent] repository materializes by 1985...
...It wants six of these off-site plants...
...So, with no place else for it to go, the spent fuel has just continued to accumulate...
...Radioactive shell game The industry has a plan for all that 'waste' Catherine Quigg Nuclear power may have its enthusiasts, but even the most enthusiastic want little to do with the nuclear garbage it creates...
...He argued, as have many others, that a plutonium economy could bring unparalleled hazards, such as the proliferation of nuclear weapons material and the necessity for police-state measures to keep the fuel secure...
...some are leaking...
...If an accident should occur in the pool or in the reactor, there could be twenty times more strontium-90 in the spent fuel pool than in the reactor itself...
...General Electric has applied for permission to increase the capacity of its Morris storage plant, now almost half filled, from 750 to 1,850 tons...
...There are signs, though, that this fear may be playing into the hands of the industry...
...And the NRC has given preliminary approval to a standardized design for a 7,000-ton storage facility, the first of which would be built at Oak Ridge, Tennessee...
...The spent fuel is the pea in a shell game designed to take the public's eye off the fact that there really are no plans to put it in permanent disposal sites...
...If the increase were really only a short-term solution to a crisis situation, it would be limited in duration, but there are no such limitations in the applications or approvals of on-site storage...
...Richard Webb, author of The Accident Hazards of Nuclear Power Plants, warns, "If a reactor accident occurred which heavily contaminates the reactor plant, it is likely that the storage pool cooling equipment could 'The...policy is at odds with [the] rhetoric' not be maintained, and that the spent fuel would eventually melt down...
...Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has decided to cope with the spent fuel overflow by letting about 55 per cent of it accumulate at the reactor sites and authorizing storage of most of the rest at a few off-site locations such as Morris...
...The .answer must be continued interim storage in pools...
...If it is true, then more than half the states — those in which the country's seventy-two commercial nuclear power reactors are situated — will wind up as nuclear garbage dumps...
...According to L. Manning Muntzing, former director of the U.S...
...In June 1972, a shipping cask accident at the Morris facility ruptured the unloading pit basin liner...
...f Reprocessing on-site becomes more likely with on-site storage...
...Unless that option is taken, the garbage that rightfully worries so many today will become residue of an infinitely more dangerous sort...
...The storage pools produce more low-level wastes...
...Is it possible that the Federal Government has not worked to find a suitable permanent burial place for spent fuel because it chooses not to find one...
...The U.S...
...Other likely locations are West Valley, New York, and Barnwell, South Carolina, where reprocessing equipment is already in place...
...The magnitude of damage in case of a reactor or pool accident increases with every assembly added to the spent fuel pool...
...One was that the early reprocessing centers ran into technical problems and had to shut down...
...Each year, more than a thousand gallons of low-level solid waste are shipped from the Morris pool to the low-level waste dump near Sheffield, Illinois...
...Remodeling the pool, handling and moving fuel and wastes, and the pool itself will contribute to higher radiation levels at the plant...
...With all these concerns, it is surprising that few state officials have raised questions about the expansion of on-site storage at reactors...
...But the Administration's foot-dragging on permanent waste disposal and its support for enhanced interim storage suggests that its policy is at odds with its rhetoric...
...As a Presidential candidate and in the first years of his Administration, President Carter scored points with a concerned public by opposing the nuclear industry's grand design for recycling plutonium and producing more of it in "breeder reactors" to stretch out the fuel supply...
...The Rasmussen report, the Atomic Energy Commission's 1975 reactor safety study, concluded that spent fuel could overheat and melt if the storage basin were drained...
...The highly radioactive fuel does not have the same degree of physical protection as that provided to the reactor core by the reactor containment...
...The drums of waste are simply buried in shallow trenches...
...By then it may well be too late for the public to exercise an option which, even at this eleventh hour, is still open — ceasing production of further waste and permanent burial of what remains...
...Most of it has stayed in the holding ponds (they're called "swimming pools") of the reactors which produced it...
...Nearby residents should be concerned that the Zion nuclear energy center, for example, could eventually contain a reprocessing plant which would separate pure plutonium from the fuel rods...
...So the question may have been rhetorical when Commissioner Gilinsky asked, "Will the states, in exercising their own responsibility, be content to leave the matter in the hands of the power companies...
...But two things went wrong...
...Considering that the industry and its military counterpart produce wastes that can remain toxic for a quarter of a million years, public reluctance to take in the garbage is understandable...
...All of which raises such problems as these: 1f A radioactive waste dump is, in effect, being created at each reactor site...
...Some 2,500 gallons of radioactive water leaked out...
...Mounting evidence suggests this may be happening...
...Atomic Energy Commission, a spent fuel storage pool is more accessible and vulnerable to sabotage than the reactor core...
...Commonwealth Edison, for example, wants to increase the licensed storage capacity of its Zion plant, 30 miles north of Chicago, from 434 to 1,056 tons...
...The original plan was that power reactors would store a few spent fuel cores on site and then ship them to "reprocessing centers," where plutonium and unburned uranium would be recovered and recycled back into the fuel supply...
...Is it possible that the Carter Administration, despite its much publicized stand against the dangers of reprocessing, is tacitly backing an industry program that will make it inevitable...
...Hundreds of millions of curies of radioactivity will be the typical activity at each reactor pool as the pool fills to capacity...
...General Electric said no groundwater was contaminated — but then GE had also said the accident could never happen and if it did the pump system would be quite adequate to the situation...
...lation that now amounts to about 4,000 tons and could reach 100,000 tons by the year 2000...
...Utilities prefer to keep radioactive spent fuel on-site because it saves the expense of shipping and maintaining it in a distant repository, and because it allows them to keep the reprocessing option open...
...Could it be that the nuclear establishment doesn't really want to put its wastes in permanent, irretrievable storage...
...Some has been shipped to the only operating off-site storage facility in the United States, at Morris, Illinois, designed by General Electric as a reprocessing center and then converted to this makeshift use...
...Could it be that the continuing lack of an acceptable long-term disposal site serves the industry's desire for scores of more convenient sites where the waste can be stored and then retrieved...
...The nuclear power industry wasn't designed to carry such huge inventories of intensely radioactive wastes...
...There is no assurance that the spent fuel will leave the site at any time, given the absence of permanent storage sites...
...The other was that concern about the hazards of recycling plutonium — concern shared by the Carter Administration, among others — led to the shelving of further reprocessing plans...
...Any doubts about this will be dispelled when, years hence, the expanded reactor pools and the new interim storage sites are filled, as eventually they must be...
...f Workers will be subjected to higher radiation doses...
...It also stated that stored spent fuel could suffer a runaway chain reaction and subsequent fuel melting if the fuel were pushed together by a heavy weight...
...Each reactor produces about thirty tons of spent fuel a year — an accumuCatherine Quigg is research director of Pollution and Environmental Problems, Inc., a Palatine, Illinois citizens' group, and co-chairman of the Illinois Safe Energy A lliance, a coalition of twenty Midwest organizations dedicated to a non-nuclec future...
...The enlargement of some reactor storage capacities and the licensing of additional off-site fuel storage facilities suggests that — rhetoric to the contrary — the Federal Government is more interested in interim storage than in permanent disposal of the industry's most radioactive wastes...
...One of the few is Illinois Attorney General William Scott...
Vol. 43 • April 1979 • No. 4
