The US Has $50 Billion For Nuclear Waste And Nowhere To Put It

Authored by Haley Zaremba via OilPrice,

Finland and the United States are exemplifying two opposing approaches to managing the mounting problem of spent nuclear fuel. Finland is about to open the world’s first permanent nuclear waste disposal facility. The United States is stuck in a cycle of endless political turnover and resultant gridlock about how to address the more than 90,000 metric tons of spent fuel sitting in temporary facilities around the country, posing a mounting public health hazard and tax dollar sink.

The Onkalo site (named after the Finnish for ‘cave’) will encapsulate radioactive spent nuclear fuel in copper canisters designed to safely store the hazardous materials, and then store them 400 meters (1,312 feet) under the ground within the bedrock, where they will be insulated with shock-absorbent clay. The canisters are designed to safely store the waste for 100,000 years, after which the radioactivity of the uranium within will be neutralized due to natural exponential decay. The repository will be able to store up to 6,500 tonnes (7,200 tons) of spent nuclear fuel. When it reaches maximum capacity, it will be backfilled, sealed and handed over to the Finnish government for maintenance and oversight.

Just last month, Finland’s Onkalo facility secured its official operating license from the Finnish government after construction began 22 years ago. This may seem like a remarkably long timeline, and it is indeed remarkable in several ways.

“Onkalo is a remarkable feat of engineering. The political achievement is just as striking,” states an op-ed published in the Washington Post this week. “Finland kept its nuclear waste program on track for more than four decades, weathering changing governments and keeping its host municipality, Eurajoki, at the table.” By contrast, “In the United States, where nuclear waste policy lurches from one administration to the next, that consistency is almost unimaginable.”

According to federal law, the United States has just one official nuclear fuel repository site – Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, which congress hasn’t provided funding for in over 15 years. But in reality, approximately 97,000 metric tons of hazardous spent nuclear fuel are sitting stranded at nearly 75 sites in more than 30 states, housed by communities that never consented to this arrangement. And while the United States federal government has made attempts to redress this sloppy and piecemeal approach, it has allowed deadline after deadline to lapse as political turnover continues to relegate nuclear waste storage to the back burner.

The United States’ political spin cycle is not just affecting its ability to commit to long-term nuclear waste disposal and management projects, it’s negatively impacting the nation’s overall energy policy, to the detriment of taxpayers. As noted by the Atlantic Council in a report on United States energy policy published last week, “political volatility has become an energy cost” as each successive regime change has scrapped or otherwise overhauled the energy progress of its predecessor over the last several federal election cycles.

“Technology-specific incentives amplify that cycle,” notes the Atlantic Council. “They can accelerate deployment, especially for growing industries, but they also tie project economics to the political durability of a particular credit, grant, mandate, or regulatory interpretation.” This means that an abrupt change in priorities every four years causes a major and expensive disruption to federal funding cycles, which makes projects like the long-term management of spent nuclear fuel nigh on impossible to achieve and sustain.

It’s not that the United States doesn’t have the money – the country’s Nuclear Waste Fund holds over $50 billion. “But spending the money requires approval from a Congress racked by partisanship,” concludes Vincent Ialenti, a former Energy Department program manager, in his Washington Post op-ed. “This is a precarious framework for commitments measured in decades.”