Where Nuclear Waste Is Stored

In the wake of the nuclear waste fires at Fukushima, many people are learning for the first time where the nuclear waste is. It should be obvious enough, since there are no nuclear waste disposal facilities in operation, but it’s something the nuclear power industry doesn’t really like to talk about, since no one (in the United States, anyway), seems to have an answer for nuclear waste.

I worked on the economics of nuclear waste during the Reagan/Bush years. The U.S. Department of Energy in those years was so staunchly pro-nuclear that their “base” case, the lowest scenario for the nuclear power industry they allowed us to consider in our nuclear waste analysis, was that all the nuclear reactors that were planned as of 1980 would go on line as scheduled, while no new nuclear power stations were started. The more likely scenarios, as the Department of Energy saw it, was that nuclear electric capacity would double or triple by 2000. The reality, as we knew at the time but could not say in our reports, fell well short of the base case. Nearly every project fell behind schedule, and some were suspended or abandoned.

The U.S. government ultimately has responsibility for disposal of nuclear waste, but has been taking custody of it at an extremely slow pace, only to the extent that it is useful to the military. It has been collecting token fees supposedly to cover the costs of nuclear waste disposal, but the amounts collected are so low that it still does not have the money to open its first disposal site — and even then, there will be no money to pay for processing the nuclear waste for safe storage.

Nuclear waste has to be, at a minimum, encased in glass or ceramics to permanently isolate it from the air, transported in small sturdy containers (plans so far call for oil drums, which makes sense to me), placed underground (probably in a former uranium mine), and surrounded with an inert material such as clay that will absorb radiation and prevent the movement of air for about 100,000 years. We have the technology to do all this — in fact, it could all be done with pre-industrial technology — but we lack the will to spend the money. The government has been waiting around hoping someone will come up with a cheaper way, but at this late date, there is no reason to hold on to that hope. The hesitation is understandable, though. The costs could amount to as much as one fourth of all the revenue from nuclear electricity over the past half century, and the government will have to pay for it, as it has not been collecting nearly enough money from the electric utilities to cover the costs, and the electric companies at this point are unable to pay for such an enormous project.

In the meantime, nuclear waste is stored at every nuclear power station. It is essentially the same story in every country with nuclear power.

The fires that have broken out in at least one nuclear waste pool at Fukushima show that this is not really the right answer. The nuclear waste there has released high levels of radioactivity forcing workers to evacuate the plant for hours at a time and interfering with their efforts to get the plant itself under control.

Most nuclear waste has to be stored on-site for several years, but then we should be encasing it in glass to isolate it from the air and transporting it to a secure military facility away from population centers for temporary storage in an underground building. This will cost a fortune, but as we have now seen, it could save lives in the event of a disaster striking a nuclear power station.

“Experts” Stoking Nuclear Fears

There was an accident at an oil refinery. A series of equipment failures led, eventually, to several explosions and a fire. There were dozens of injuries as workers struggled to bring everything under control. Police had to evacuate the neighborhood. In the middle of all this, many scientists and petrochemical engineers appear on television and in the most public forums they can find. The ongoing disaster is proof, they say, of how safe petroleum really is as an energy source.

No. Obviously, that never happened. No one who works with oil will ever tell you flatly that oil is safe. People who work in a refinery or anywhere there are large amounts of oil are aware of the potential dangers every minute they are there. Rather, the above sequence of events is what is happening right now in the nuclear power industry. I am particularly dismayed to see nuclear scientists exploiting an ongoing disaster to promote their industry.

The nuclear specialists who are so publicly promoting nuclear power have a valid point: people’s fears about radiation leaks from nuclear power stations are sometimes exaggerated. But this is the wrong time to make that point. You cannot brag about safety on a day when people are dying, even if the deaths are not your fault.

It does not help that the public cannot easily separate the legitimate statements on behalf of the nuclear industry from the fake documents that have widely circulated in blogs and e-mail, with more than a few reputable bloggers taken in, claiming to assess the situation at Fukushima. No one has been able to say who really wrote these fake documents, but what is clear is that the authors believe in nuclear safety as a matter of religion or duty rather than science or engineering. Some assert, for example, that it is physically impossible for heavy particles of nuclear material to escape from a reactor core. It is all too easy for people to imagine that this false sense of security is shared by some of the managers of nuclear power stations.

Returning to the more responsible experts who have been heard from, it is still a mistake for them to imply even the slightest criticism of those who are afraid at this point. It must be remembered that we are in the middle of an ongoing disaster with thousands of dead bodies already recovered and so many people missing that it is impossible to get an meaningful estimate of the numbers. It is human nature to be frightened at a time like this. Meanwhile, workers are rushing around a nuclear plant, trying to keep things under control, and running for cover when things blow up. That would be frightening to see even if it were happening at a cookie factory. An entire city has had to be evacuated, and among them, thousands have gone without food for a couple of days. That is no minor inconvenience. Nor is the cost to their customers worldwide, from products that cannot be delivered, a small matter. After the crisis is over, we can ask accountants to add up the numbers and compare the value of the nuclear-generated electricity to the costs of the current evacuation. We can hardly do that now. Anyone who would speak on behalf of the nuclear industry today should be very careful to avoid belittling the efforts and sacrifices of the people most directly affected in Fukushima. Looking or sounding irritated at the inconvenience of the situation while sitting comfortably in a chair, at a time when people are dying and in danger, can easily come across as heartless — and heartless people speaking on behalf of those in positions of power is something people legitimately can fear.

Shifting Energy Policy After Nuclear Accident

The MarketWatch headline this morning summed it up well enough: “Winter for Nuclear Industry” (later shortened to “Nuclear Winter”). Elsewhere, stories tell of a new caution about nuclear power after a combination of earthquake, tsunami, and power outage damaged reactors in Fukushima, Japan, enough to lead to explosions and minor releases of radioactive particles.

• India will conduct an engineering study to see how its reactors might fare in a similar emergency. (The Times of India)
• Switzerland has suspended licensing for nuclear facilities as it conducts an engineering study, and there is a call for a similar study across the European Union. (Irish Examiner)
• U.S. politicians are calling for a safety study before any new reactors are put online or built. (CBS News)
• Analysts think the pro-nuclear CDU party in Germany will lose the upcoming elections because of declining support for nuclear power among voters. (CNBC; Speigel)

It is hard to fund a nuclear power station in the best of times, so it’s likely that many of the stations currently seeking funding or in the early stages of construction will be halted. This is a good thing for several reasons, most fundamentally because there isn’t enough uranium in the world to supply the nuclear power stations currently operating for as long as they could last. Based on mining industry estimates, we will use up all the uranium we can find around 2110, but shortages will develop as soon as 2020 if the nuclear power industry is expanded as currently planned.

A slowdown in nuclear power requires a speedup in energy conservation measures and sustainable forms of energy generation. The United States has made that a lower priority because of the state of the economy, but the uncertainty over energy is one of the key reasons why an economic recovery is so slow to take hold.

Insurers Sell Stocks After Japan Quake

As I write this, the stock market has just opened again in Japan, and it opened down more than 5 percent. In the United States, CNBC is reporting a wave of selling of blue-chip stocks, which will send the Dow Jones Industrial average down sharply when the markets open in the morning.

Financial stocks were down on Friday in the United States, but stocks were not down much, as the extent of the damage in Japan didn’t immediately sink in on Wall Street. On Friday people were comparing the 2011 Sendai earthquake and tsunami to Hurricane Katrina, partly because in the United States, we were mostly hearing the reports from Tokyo, which was far removed from the most serious damage. We saw more video over the weekend and heard reports of towns wiped away, survivors searching for water, and the prime minister declaring the situation the worst crisis in Japan in almost a lifetime.

It makes sense that financial stocks would decline after a large-scale disaster — insurance companies have new claims to pay and banks may be holding loans that can’t be repaid — but why a selling wave in blue-chip stocks? The first part of the answer is the insurance companies. Insurance companies may hold money for years between collecting premiums and paying claims, and some of that money is in stocks, with an emphasis on stable, predictable companies that will be more likely to maintain their value over a period of a few years. Now insurance companies will be needing cash to pay claims for people who died and buildings and equipment destroyed, so they’ll have to sell some of their stocks. They may want to sell quickly in this case, because there was already a worry that the U.S. stock market was at its peak for the year. If the wave of selling makes other investors nervous, that could lead to more than one day of declines in stocks.

There are other reasons why U.S. stocks should decline after a disaster in Japan. Japan is one of the richest countries in the world, but people there won’t be in a position to buy quite so much for the next five years or so as they focus on rebuilding. Another reason, perhaps the main reason this week, is a sort of battle fatigue on Wall Street as the news this year has brought stories of one extraordinary event after another, including more than a year’s worth of disasters in the last two months. Psychologically, at some point, “We can’t get a break, can we?” goes from being a complaint to an assumption. When that happens, all durable institutions look more risky and less valuable than they did before.

Big Disaster and a Nuclear Emergency in Japan

The scale of the disaster in Japan is hard to pick up from the news. The word “quake” may be slightly larger in a printed newspaper headline, but the estimated magnitude of 9.1 would make it not just a big quake, but the fourth most powerful earthquake ever observed. Combined with the resulting tsunami, which caused damage as far away as San Francisco but wiped away ports and coastal villages in Japan, it is likely the most damaging event in Japan’s history. With aftershocks continuing, the tsunami risk in Japan is not over yet.

In the middle of this natural disaster, the government’s stated top priority has been to stabilize two damaged nuclear power stations in Fukushima. The more serious problems are at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which shut down properly when the earthquake hit but then was damaged by the tsunami, causing the loss of cooling at one reactor. A day later, after the available emergency power in the cooling system was exhausted and the reactor overheated, an explosion destroyed the reactor’s containment building. Officials say it will take at least one more day to bring the reactor under control. The situation contains the potential for a catastrophic nuclear event if other problems occur before that can be accomplished, for example, if there is a particularly large aftershock that causes further damage.

All nuclear power plants are designed to stand up to earthquakes, flooding, and other disasters, and Japan is more cautious than most countries in the operation of its nuclear plants. Therefore, the number of failures that occurred following the Japan earthquake is likely to give the nuclear industry worldwide a reason to reconsider the safety of current nuclear power plants and ones under construction. It is easy to say now that it is especially important to take steps to avoid a nuclear emergency that might occur in the middle of a natural disaster, when local authorities have the least ability to respond. But when nuclear plants have to be shut down or delayed for engineering changes, this puts more pressure on oil as an energy source, making it that much more likely that oil prices will go higher than they are now.