By MATT WALTERS
Palisades Nuclear Power Plant in Covert, Mich. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
LANSING — The federal government’s long-running failure to open a disposal site in Nevada for high-level nuclear waste is irking some Michigan lawmakers.
A pending House resolution urges the U.S. Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to begin accepting waste at the Yucca Mountain repository, which was supposed to open in 1998.
That hasn’t happened because opponents in the federal government and in Nevada brought the plan to a stand-still over safety and political concerns.
Michigan’s nuclear plants have been storing their waste on-site for decades.
Rep. Aric Nesbitt, R-Lawton, primary sponsor of the resolution, said his main goal is to make sure the federal government keeps its promise.
Resolutions are expressions of legislative opinion and have no legal effect.
“The government has been collecting tax money to pay for the repository for years now but it remains unopened,” Nesbitt said.
People who receive electricity from nuclear plants pay a tax on every kilowatt hour of energy. The money goes toward funding the proposed national repository, he said.
Nesbitt said that’s amounted to approximately $760 million in Michigan since 1982.
There are three operating nuclear power plants in Michigan: Cook Nuclear Plant in Bridgman, Fermi 2 Nuclear Power Plant in Frenchtown Township, and Palisades Nuclear Plant in Covert.
The resolution says those plants generated 21.5 percent of the state’s electricity in 2009.
Palisades is the biggest property taxpayer in his southwest Michigan district, Nesbitt said.
He said a permanent storage facility will help keep the plant operating long-term and the state and country need a place to store nuclear waste.
Hugh McDiarmid, communications director at the Michigan Environmental Council, also stressed the need for a permanent storage facility.
McDiarmid said that a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain would be only a temporary solution since it could hold only the waste already produced.
He said high-level nuclear waste is temporarily stored on-site in spent fuel pools or in concrete-and-steel dry storage casks.
In 2002, the U.S. Department of Energy projected that Michigan’s three operating plants would produce more than 2,800 tons of high-level nuclear waste by the spring of 2010.
Waste is also temporarily stored at the former site of Big Rock Point Nuclear Power Plant in Charlevoix, which closed in 1997.
Kevin Kamps, a member of Beyond Nuclear, a national anti-nuclear energy group based in Maryland, said there are 64 tons of high-level nuclear waste at Big Rock, some of which is 50 years old.
Kamps said research and lawsuits around the country raise questions about the safety of temporary storage methods.
“Fermi 2 is filled to the brim,” said Michael Keegan, co-chair of Don’t Waste Michigan, an anti-nuclear energy group based in Monroe.
He said that Fermi’s spent fuel pools will be loaded to twice their designed capacity by 2015.
“It’s an industry without a disposal system. No one wants the waste and no one knows what to do with it,” Keegan
Guy Cerullo, communications manager for Fermi 2 at DTE Energy, said the spent fuel pools at Fermi contain all the waste that has accumulated since the plant opened in 1988 and are around 70 percent full.
The circular pools are 40 feet deep by 40 feet in diameter, made of concrete and lined with steel. They are the same at every nuclear plant around the country, Cerullo said.
“We are running out of room because the federal government failed to live up to their commitment,” said Cerullo.
DTE has yet to transfer its high-level nuclear waste at Fermi 2 to dry storage casks but plans to do so this summer, Cerullo said.
The waste will be transferred to two or three casks, a process he said takes about a month to complete.
Each cask is approximately 20 feet tall, made of carbon steel and concrete, with 27-inch thick walls. Casks will be placed on large concrete slabs in a high-security area of the plant.
According to Cerullo, the casks are identical to nearly 1,000 others used at 46 nuclear plants around the United States.
Cerullo said DTE will do whatever necessary to make sure the transfer is done safely.
“We go to great lengths to ensure the safety of everything we do at Fermi 2. It is our number-one priority, and this process will be no different,” he said.
McDiarmid, of the MEC, said the day-to-day risk of those methods isn’t high but concern grows as more waste accumulates.
“These storage solutions were not designed to last this long,” he said, adding that a natural disaster could cause serious problems.
According to Keegan of Don’t Waste Michigan, current storage devices were meant to last for only 10 to 12 years.
He also said that keeping potentially dangerous waste on-site increases the risk of a terrorist attack.
But Cerullo said he’s confident that DTE’s dry storage casks will create little-to-no risk to the environment.
“The casks are designed and tested for even the worst conditions, be it an earthquake, hurricane, tornado, flood or sabotage,” Cerullo said.
The casks are licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for 20 years, after which they can be re-licensed for another 20 to 40 years. However, they’re designed to safely store spent fuel for longer periods than that, Cerullo said.
The resolution passed through the House Energy and Technology Committee and is awaiting a full vote. Co-sponsors include Reps. Sharon Tyler, R-Niles; Al Pscholka, R-Stevensville; Dale Zorn, R-Ida; Ray Franz, R-Onekama; Frank Foster, R-Pellston; Douglas Geiss, D-Taylor; Matt Lori, R-Constantine; and Amanda Price, R-Holland.
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Is this a MOX plant?
Here are two things to keep in mind about nuclear waste:
1.) Simple and inexpensive processes for destroying the radioactivity in nuclear waste have been known for decades:
“Radioactive isotope decay rate or half-life can be increased or decreased as needed to deactivate radioactivity or to increase shelf life of radioactive isotopes. Currently many investigators/experimenters have reported half-life anomalies and have demonstrated repeatability of the various processes. The deactivation/neutralization of radioactivity in isotopes by the several demonstrated processes clearly suggest the possibility of full scale processing of radioactive nuclear materials to deactivate radioactive nuclear materials. ”
“In 1964 we thought and believed that radioactivity in nuclear waste would soon be history on planet earth. As history has proven us wrong, we now know and understand that there is a fortune, billions yearly, to be made by saving every scrap of radioactive nuclear waste and trying to bury it in Yucca Mountain and in cleaning up spills, leaks, and escaping radioactive particles from decaying containment schemes. We were just looking at the wrong goal post. No one receiving the funds has any interest in eliminating radioactivity in nuclear waste. Nuclear Half-Life Modification Technology could reduce the cost to a fraction of the cost that is experienced today.” ( “Radioactivity Deactivation at High Temperature in an Applied DC Voltage Field Demonstrated in 1964”. Larry Geer & Cecil Baumgartner, http://www.gdr.org/nuclear_half.htm )
Destroying radioactive waste on site obviates concerns about reprocessing, packaging, transportation, storage, and worries about terrorism and off-site accidents.
There are more details, and other processes, described in my article “Adventures in Energy Destruction” at scripturalphysics.org/qm/adven.html
2.) I am told that about 96% of high level nuclear waste can be reprocessed and reused as fuel. So why would we want to destroy it permanently? There is certainly one good reason (among others): the nuclear power industry is headed for the junk yard. It will be going the way of the Linotype machine, the mechanical typewriter, the landline telephone, and the incandescent light bulb. Already consumers are becoming able to sell power back to the utility companies from their homes. Eventually, even the Grid will disappear. There are political developments too: Germany is trying to shut down its nuclear power industry. And Japan is probably having second thoughts.
But the thing that will destroy the nuclear power industry is economics and lack of investors. Rapid advances in other energy fields will make nuclear power obsolete. Here is one example from solar power:
RSi’s ChemArc Process has greatly reduced the cost of photovoltaic silicon.
http://www.engineeringtv.com/video/The-Chemistry-of-RSis-ChemArc-P
And relevant advances are being made in storage of electrical power:
“Utilization of poly(ethylene terephthalate) plastic and composition-modified barium titanate powders in a matrix that allows polarization and the use of integrated-circuit technologies for the production of lightweight ultrahigh electrical energy storage units (EESU)” http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7466536.html , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EEStor
“This paper reports the successful creation of a new ultracapacitor structure that offers a capacitance density on the order of 100 to 200 Farads per cubic centimeter; versus the current state of the art capacitance density of 1 F/cm3. ” (“New mega-farad ultracapacitors”, Bakhoum, E., 2009, ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4775259
“We report the observation of extremely high dielectric permittivity exceeding 10^9 and magnetocapacitance of the order of 10^4% in La0.875Sr0.125MnO3 single crystal.” (“Giant dielectric permittivity and magnetocapacitance in La0.875Sr0.125MnO3 single crystals”, R. F. Mamin, T. Egami, Z. Marton, and S. A. Migachev, 29 March 2007; DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.75.115129 ; PACS numbers: 77.22.d, repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1158&context=physics_papers
In the last citation, a dielectric permitivity of over a BILLION (one thousand million) is simply astounding, and would also be useful in antigravity research. (scripturalphysics.org/4v4a/ADVPROP.html#Biefeld-BrownEffect )
Old battery charging technology is being pulled out of the closet too. One implementation uses an AC electropolishing technique to increase the charge/discharge cycling life times of ordinary batteries by a factor of 20 to 30 times the usual.
pages.ripco.net/~marnow/uk/NASA_Vargo_Start.html
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/2752550.pdf
This is just ONE example in ONE industry. There are many others, and some are astonishing–real “poop-a-brick” developments!
The nuclear power industry has only a short, limited future. This is NOT a good time to build new nuclear plants. But it is a good time to DESTROY radioactive waste ( or “spent fuel”) permanently by simple, safe, inexpensive processes that have been known for decades. Some additional research will be needed to convert this knowhow into an industrial process, but that will still be MUCH cheaper than digging more 100 billion dollar holes in the ground. The nuclear power industry would have quickly solved these problems if it had been required to dispose of its own nuclear waste on-site at the power plant WITHOUT help (subsidies) from the federal government!
Brian Fraser
The recent events in Japan have shown just how dangerous the nuclear option is. We need alternative sources of energy!
Hey, LuAnne Kozma why don’t we stick some hamsters in a wheel and make em run!!!
The fact of the matter is solar and wind power are great options and can be used year round. However at certain times of the year and in certain weather situations you may not receive the power that we get from Coal or Nuclear…
Nuclear power plants were never the best option. They must be shut down and certainly no more of them.
Whatever happened to solar power? Remember that bright idea?
If we let the “unnatural” gas mining catastrophe known as hydrofracking –already a runaway train –get a stronger hold in Michigan as a result of any anti-nuke sentiment. And I do hope there will be a tremendous outcry against nukes.
Ban fracking in Michigan! Join us at http://www.dontfrackmichigan.org
Good thing that we have a good supply of nice, safe, coal!
Well, I think the recent events in Japan have dealt a death blow to nuclear energy. I’m quite sure that those nuclear plants were built with every safeguard possible, including hardening to withstand an earthquake. It is unfortunate because nuclear electric plants probably were the best option to fossil fuel plants. Also, a recycling use for high level nuclear waste and spent fuel rods must be developed if we are ever to go down that path.