US Dept. of Energy

Dead End? The giant boring machine pokes through a rock face at Yucca Mountain.

In its final report, a federal blue-ribbon commission suggests that it may be time to throw in the towel on Yucca Mountain, the embattled project to store high-level nuclear waste in Nevada. Billions have already been spent on the project, which appears to have reached a dead end.

But the urgency to find a safe, permanent home for nuclear waste in the U.S. was tragically underscored last March by the destruction of three Japanese reactors and their storage pools of spent fuel rods, after an ocean tsunami overwhelmed the Fukushima plant’s coastal defenses.

According to the Commission:

“The need for a new strategy is urgent, not just to address these damages and costs but because this generation has a fundamental, ethical obligation to avoid burdening future generations with the entire task of finding a safe, permanent solution for managing hazardous nuclear materials they had no part in creating…”

The report is the culmination of two years’ work by the commission, and says its recommendations offer, “the best chance of success going forward, based on previous nuclear waste management experience in the U.S. and abroad.”

Toward that end, the commission is urging an immediate search for a new underground storage site, as well as transitional sites to provide an alternative to storing highly radioactive used fuel rods at the nation’s nuclear power plants. As Ingrid Becker and I reported last year, the technology already exists for permanent storage of the 65,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel currently parked at about 75 operating and shutdown reactor sites around the country (more than 3,000 tons in California). Meanwhile, working power plants nationwide are generating another 2,000 tons of waste every year.

The government has another 2,500 tons of nuclear waste, mostly from past weapons programs, at a handful of government-owned sites, including an underground site near Carlsbad, New Mexico, the world’s only fully operational geologic repository for radioactive waste.

Christopher Joyce reports for NPR News on the commission’s final report and the growing consensus that active local involvement is critical in siting decisions.

Ingrid Becker

The Forsmark nuclear power plant is one of three in Sweden where about half the nation's electricity comes from 10 reactors built on the coast.

Sweden gets a lot of press as the country that’s figured out not only how and where to dispose of its nuclear waste but – significantly — how to win community support.

Today, in the second installment of our radio series, we’ll hear the Swedes explain what it took to change public attitudes.  You can also take a visual tour here of some of the places I visited and people I met while tracking Sweden’s progress.

While the U.S. – and pretty much everywhere else in the world – is in a political meltdown over the topic, The Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company or SKB, is making strides toward a deep geologic disposal site at Forsmark in Eastern Sweden. In this video, a company representative explains how the company plans to encapsulate the fuel in copper canisters before burying it.

And you can peek inside the central interim storage facility with this video that shows where the waste is currently stored in what looks like large swimming pools.

Ingrid Becker

Inger Nordholm at the site on the Baltic Sea where the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company hopes to open a geologic repository in 2025 -- if regulators grant them a license.

Forsmark is part of the 22,000-person community of Osthammar which has been deeply involved in the repository issue for at least 15 years. You can read more about its work on the community website.

While there are still plenty of critics and some unresolved questions about whether the company’s proposed disposal method can withstand the test of time, local residents so far are willing to trust that the waste can be managed safely.  And they’ve come to accept that the stable bedrock in their region could be one of the safest places to bury all of Sweden’s nuclear waste for the next 100,000 years.

Osthammar of course stands to benefit from the jobs and investment that would come along with a repository, but everyone I talked with in Sweden told me this willingness to step forward is much more than financial.

“We have a Swedish expression, when you hunt the fox, you have to deal with the bite, says Brita Freudenthal, a spokeswoman for SKB. “We have the nuclear power, we use the electricity and we created the spent fuel and this is our responsibility. Most Swedes are very much aware of that.”

Jacob Spangenberg, the Mayor of Osthammar, told me he doesn’t  believe burying the waste in his community will create a stigma or hurt tourism in this  picturesque area on the Baltic. Rather, he says, it will generate global interest “In how to solve this very difficult issue, that people in Japan, and California and Germany must solve in one way or another.”

Among the people I ran across in Scandinavia was Janet Kotra, a senior staffer with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. She  was there for a meeting of international nuclear communities and told me  the United States can learn a few things from Sweden, which admitted a long time ago that solving the nuclear waste dilemma is not just a technical issue.

With plans for a repository at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain on hold — perhaps permanently —  Kotra says the US government is already thinking differently when it comes to community engagement. Regulators and  government agencies need a commitment, she says “that the  process for making regulatory decisions is available and accessible to a broader public so there can be that social acceptability.” If not, Kotra adds, “We’ll find ourselves right  back where we are today and we’ll find ourselves once again looking for another alternative.”

Tune in to the companion radio series: Part 1: California’s nuclear waste profile. Part 2 (Tue): What we can learn from Sweden. Part 3 (Wed): The town that said: “Yes, in our back yard.”

See Monday’s blog post to see where California’s nuclear waste is located and to explore an interactive timeline of the history nuclear waster disposal.

"Dry casks" waiting to be loaded with spent fuel at Diablo Canyon. (Photo: Craig Miller)

It could be worse. This could be Illinois, the undisputed spent fuel champ, with more than 8,000 tons piled up at plants. As it is, California ranks eighth in the nation.

“This country has an obligation to those states and those communities to take those materials and put them into deep geologic disposal, where they can be safely isolated for a very long period of time,” says Per Peterson, who chairs the nuclear engineering department at UC Berkeley.

Trouble is, the country seems farther now from meeting that obligation than it was in 1998, the original legislative deadline for opening a permanent repository for spent nuclear fuel.

Peterson is also member of a White House commission on nuclear waste solutions, due to report its findings next Friday. Between now and then, Climate Watch and KQED’s The California Report will collaborate on a three-part series on the issue of high-level nuclear waste.

“We’ve made progress but it’s taken an enormous amount of time,” Peterson told The California Report’s Senior Producer Ingrid Becker, in a recent interview.

The Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future is not expected to offer specific site recommendations for long-term storage. More likely, it will suggest an interim strategy of sort-of-long-term storage for the 65,000 tons of accumulated waste sitting more or less literally in the back yards and “attics” of US plants.

Peterson thinks a good place to start is with the spent fuel still sitting in dry storage at two decommissioned plants in California:

- Humboldt Bay, the state’s first commercial nuclear plant, which went online in 1963 (160 tons), and

- Rancho Seco, east of Stockton, which Sacramento voters shut down by referendum in 1989 (202 tons)

Peterson suggests consolidating the “relatively modest amounts” of fuel from those locations somewhere that can serve as a pilot project for “informing decisions as to what do with the spent fuel of larger quantities at Diablo Canyon and San Onofre” (California’s two operating plants). Peterson says that “getting to the development” of a permanent tomb for spent fuel “conceivably could happen in 20 to 30 years.” From some estimates we’ve seen, that’s at the optimistic end of the timeline.

Speaking of timelines, you can explore the history of commercial nuclear power in California, with our interactive timeline, assembled by Chris Penalosa.

Experts agree that most vulnerable to both terrorist attack and natural disaster are the uranium fuel rods suspended in pools of water at reactor sites. Utilities operating Diablo Canyon and San Onofre have both begun moving older, less radioactive rods to more durable “dry casks.” The bad news is that two-thirds of California’s spent fuel remains in “wet pools.”

The good news is that Gregory Jaczko, chairman of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told a Senate hearing that he believes the temporary storage methods used in this country are adequate for the next 100 years or so. Let’s hope he’s right because at this rate, it might take that long to find a permanent home.

Where the Waste Resides

This interactive map shows the current locations and amounts of spent nuclear fuel at commercial reactor sites in California.
View California Nuclear Power Plants in a larger map

Tune in to the companion radio series: Part 1: California’s nuclear waste profile. Part 2 (Tue): What we can learn from Sweden. Part 3 (Wed): The town that said: “Yes, in our back yard.”

A fresh poll from the Field Research Corporation shows statewide support for nuclear power plummeting.

PG&E's Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, near Avila Beach. (Photo: Craig Miller)

The survey, taken earlier this month, shows that support for expanding nuclear power in California has dropped to 38%, from 48% last year, when only 44% opposed the idea. In the newest poll, 58% surveyed said they did not agree that more nuclear power plants should be built in the state.

Field analysts say the numbers are a clear reflection of the shift in sentiment worldwide, since the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan, a tense series of events that have remained front page news since March 11. Since then, Germany, Switzerland and Italy have all decided to scrap their nuclear energy programs.

In spite of it all, confidence in California’s existing nuclear plants remains high. Only two plants remain in service, PG&E’s Diablo Canyon facility on the Central Coast, and the San Onofre plant, operated jointly by Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric. And according to the Field Poll, Californians expressed confidence in the safety of those installations by almost two-to-one (56%-32%). Just 39% of respondents said that the state should phase out nuclear power over ten years.

A report accompanying the poll results says that attitudes toward nuclear power have closely tracked high-profile incidents over the years, with support dropping after accidents at Three Mile Island (PA) in 1979 and Chernobyl (Ukraine) in 1986. Support peaked in 1976 at 69% and has not crested 50% since the Three Mile Island incident. Statewide, opposition is most concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area, according to Field.

The poll has a margin of error of +/- 4.6 percentage points.

UPCOMING Coverage: In July, Climate Watch and our content partners will provide a series of reports on seismic safety and the problem of accumulating nuclear waste at California’s nuclear power plants. The latter will include a three-part radio series, to air on KQED’s The California Report, in advance of a national commission report, due out on July 29.

How Sweden is getting some to say, “Yes, in my backyard,” Part 1

The country that brought the world Alfred Nobel and his dynamite, Volvo cars and IKEA furniture is busy touting another invention.  The Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company, or SKB, has asked for government permission to build what could become one of the world’s first permanent geologic repositories for spent nuclear fuel.

SKB public relations officer Brita Freudenthal encourages visitors to touch models of the copper canisters at the Äspö Hard Rock Laboratory, where plans are being developed for permanent storage of nuclear waste. (Photo: Ingrid Becker)

I’m in Sweden this month to learn just what this environmentally-conscious nation of nine million people can teach us about managing the radioactive refuse from commercial reactors. While the waste from California’s two nuclear power plants — Diablo Canyon and San Onofre – is piling up in temporary storage containers (with still more at the decommissioned Rancho Seco plant, near Lodi), Sweden is moving forward with a program 30 years in the making, to safely dispose of the spent uranium dioxide pellets that fuel its ten reactors

”I believe it has been a strength that industry has had a clear task to solve the (waste) problem,” says SKB’s Chief Executive Officer Claes Thegerström, in a recent interview for the company website. “When we began, we had right from the beginning a mix of experienced people from the industry. We had outgoing academics and, strong authorities, which allowed us – in contrast to the American way – to own the mission.”

This week I’m in Stockholm where we’ll hear more about the Swedish example during a two-day gathering of social scientists, legal scholars, and industry experts, as well as political and community leaders from Sweden and abroad.

One of my first stops on this Scandinavian tour was the underground laboratory where the Swedes are pioneering the so-called KBS-3 concept. The plan is to isolate the nuclear waste in copper canisters buffered by bentonite clay and then bury it 500 meters deep in crystalline bedrock, where it will remain for the next 100,000 years.

Last fall, a delegation from President Obama’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Nuclear Waste also came to explore the Äspö Hard Rock Laboratory that sits outside the scenic town of Oskarshamn on Sweden’s east coast. Now it was my turn.

Buses carry an estimated 10,000 visitors a year into the tunnels at the Äspö Hard Rock Laboratory in Southern Sweden. (Photo: Ingrid Becker)

Next post: “Hard Rock Cafe” — Ingrid goes underground to experience the Hard Rock Lab. Later this month she’ll tour the interim storage facility for all of Sweden’s high-level nuclear waste and visit the towns where more than 80% of the population said it would be okay to put a spent fuel repository in their backyard.