We know that nuclear in real life is nothing like it is in The Simpsons. There's no green goo. But you might not know what actually happens with used fuel. That’s where today’s episode comes into play.
Want to learn more about what is going on with used fuel? We’re asking the expert, Rod McCullum, NEI’s Senior Director of Fuel and Decommissioning.
In regards to nuclear energy, what is waste?
Waste is the inevitable radioactive byproduct of splitting atoms to make energy, which we're very good at. When you split an atom, an atom of uranium, for example, you have many smaller atoms that are known as fission products, and then those atoms are radioactive. There are some incidental things in the plant that pick up a little bit of radioactivity.
Those are called low level waste, and those are routinely disposed of. But when people think of nuclear waste, capital ‘N’ and capital ‘W’, they're talking about those fragments that come from the splitting of atoms. The really good news here is all of those stay in the fuel in which they were created. So, they're all very well contained from the very beginning.
Is nuclear waste handled safely?
Absolutely. And it has been done so for decades. We started discharging nuclear waste from the first of the current generation of commercial reactors back in the 1960s into pools. We then filled up the pools, and we began developing dry cask storage technology that's been operational since the mid 1980s. We've licensed these systems already out to the 2060s.
And, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said that they would be good for at least 100 years. A couple things that are very important in understanding why this is safe: Remember I said, initially that, all of the waste products remain in the fuel? The fuel is very robust. It is designed to maintain its integrity inside a reactor under high pressures, high temperatures, surrounded sometimes by boiling water, sometimes by pressurized water reactor.
When it comes out of the reactor, it will never be challenged by those conditions again. And we've gotten to the 90% plus capacity factors in operating our reactors because of something called zero defects. We don't want any defects in the fuel. It comes out looking like it went in. And because it doesn't have defects, it still successfully contains the waste products.
What happens to the used fuel?
Well, after it comes out of the reactor, it's pretty boring because, remember, inside the reactor, it's designed to withstand extreme conditions, never sees extreme conditions again. It goes into a pool of water where it cools for a few years. Under about 20ft of water, you can stand right on top of one of these pools, and you never get exposed to any radiation when you do that.
And then when the pools fill up, it goes into what we call dry cask storage systems. These are big concrete and steel silos. That we put the stuff in. We've been doing that since the mid 1980s. Very safe, secure technologies. And it's important to note here, there's just not a lot of used fuel.
And that's because you get a lot of energy by splitting a relatively [small] volume of atoms. So, a gummy bear-sized piece of this fuel, and it's a solid ceramic inside these steel tubes. Again, a very robust fuel form. The gummy bear-sized piece of fuel produces the same amount of energy as a ton of coal or 17,000 Cubic feet of natural gas or three barrels of oil. And because the waste stays in the fuel, as I mentioned earlier, we really have a small volume of this. All of those gummy bears and all of their containers and pools and everything else that keeps them safe could be stored in a single warehouse. About the size of, you know, if you drive down the highway, you see an Amazon or a Walmart or any kind of big box store warehouse.
One of those buildings could hold all of those canisters and all of those pools and all of that. It does need to go to a permanent disposal because some of those radioactive byproducts, while most of them decay off quite rapidly, some lasts for millions of years. So, we have to put them in permanent disposal.
And there is also the option to recycle the fuel where you separate the things that you will dispose and continue to store them until you have a permanent site. And then you extract energy. Some of these radioactive things that come out of the fission process are able to produce energy again. France does that quite frequently.
What’s the biggest hurdle this country is facing when it comes to used fuel?
I think it's finding the final disposal solution, the very end of the process. You know, we have, as I mentioned, succeeded in assuring storage for periods of times that will be adequate for me, my children, if they have children and their children, so many generations are already protected. But we do need a permanent solution because some of these materials remain radioactive for very long periods of time.
We pursued a site to do that at Yucca mountain in Nevada, here in the United States, that site got taken off the table because, well, we didn't go about it. Right. You know, if you ask, a state, a community, do you want a nuclear waste dump in your backyard? They should say no.
If you talk to them about being part of a geologic repository program, about the science involved, about the scientific jobs that come to the community, about follow-on nuclear projects that can also come along with that. You can reach a collaborative solution where you have buy-in at the state of the community and very important to tribal level.
You know, the Native Americans have been here longer than us. They know a lot about protecting Mother Earth that we can learn from. And that's what's happening in Canada. Canada has just selected a site in partnership with, what they call First Nations community. Finland is, building their final disposal site. Sweden and France and Switzerland have all selected sites, all using collaborative processes.
What is the biggest myth you hear about waste? Why is it wrong?
Well, I would say the Homer Simpson it's oozing green goo, but, I think most Americans these days are smart enough to know that Homer Simpson is not real. As I've mentioned, it's in a very robust form. It's ceramic pellets inside steel tubes, inside concrete and steel containers. It is not oozing green goo. It isn't even capable of oozing.
But really, it's this myth that there's not a solution. People say, well, nuclear is great, except there's no solution for the waste. That's absolutely not true. As I mentioned, geologic disposal, the permanent disposal of these materials has been proven as being implemented in other countries, and we should not undersell the success we've had with the storage with our dry cask storage systems.
These systems we've never had, an unintended exposure of radiation, any kind of a release or an incident or an accident, of harmful consequence in, you know, 60 years of storage. So, we do have a solution, and the solution will evolve over time. Maybe we'll bring in recycling technologies and improve, make it in an even stronger form while getting additional energy out of it.
So, the myth that I'd like to knock down is that we don't have a solution. We have many solutions, many of which exist here today in America, the rest of which are proven and will be ready for us when we're ready for that.
