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The Fukushima Daiichi accident has been enormously complicated by the spent fuel pools at all the reactors. As in the US, Japanese government plans for disposal of spent fuel have been controversial and slow-moving. That has left operators of aging plants packing the fuel ever more tightly into spent fuel pools.
Many older plants worldwide run out of storage space in their pools and have to offload at least some older fuel to storage casks, but operators also found economic ways to cram more fuel in the pools. The incentive is there to use the pools as much as possible.Trouble is, the more fuel, the more radioactive material at risk should anything go wrong.
But the pools are deep, the fuel is much cooler than it is in the reactor core, and it takes days for the pool water to boil off if it’s left unattended. Nobody thought an accident would ever last long enough for that boil-off to occur. Until now.
Nobody’s sure yet how much of the radioactive material being detected around Fukushima came from the spent fuel pools and how much from the reactor primary systems and cores. But there’s no doubt having the pools where they are in this plant’s design -- outside containment, above grade, and exposed to the environment once hydrogen explosions blew out the tops of the reactor buildings -- has proven a major complicating factor, and danger, for workers trying to get the accident under control.
The oldest U.S. nuclear plants were built when the government had promised to take the spent fuel (in fact, insisted on it because of proliferation worries). In the 1980s, Congress passed laws setting out a process for siting and building underground repositories for both spent fuel and the military’s bomb waste. In 1987, Congress designated a site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, Yucca Mountain became a sizable DOE program that dragged on through bureaucratic mazes with no detectable sense of urgency until 2009. That’s when President Obama kept a promise to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and declared the project dead – though the executive branch’s legal authority to do that is still under fire. In its place, a year later, Energy Secretary Steven Chu named a “Blue Ribbon Panel on America’s Nuclear Future,” which is supposed to recommend ways of managing spent fuel without ever, ever mentioning a specific site. That panel is due to report in July.
At CSIS this week, Alex Flint, a senior vice president at the Nuclear Energy Institute, suggested that the Fukushima problems might convince Congress to take a serious look at whatever the Blue Ribbon commission recommends.
Those recommendations will address long-term management of spent fuel, but the commission may also address shorter-term issues like temporary storage. After 9/11, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission explored ordering more spent fuel be put in dry casks as a security measure. The industry fought that – Flint said because there are multiple types of casks, the industry wanted DOE decisions on a final disposal method so operators could pick the right cask.
Given the record of Yucca Mountain, the chances of a final DOE decision like that anytime soon are pretty dim. But Fukushima has made the risks of continuing to cram spent fuel into crowded fuel pools immediately clear.
So, come July, watch this space – will the Blue Ribbon commission address the risks of spent fuel pools in light of Fukushima? And will Congress, or NRC, or the nuclear industry, act?