Columnist Benjamin Grove: Dry casks bolster argument against Yucca

Benjamin Grove

Friday, Jan. 31, 2003 | 5:11 a.m.

A REPORT RELEASED last week said a terrorist attack on nuclear power plant waste pools could be"significantly worse than Chernobyl."

The report recommends that the plants transfer as much waste as they can from their cooling pools to metal waste containers called dry casks, where it would be safer. (The nuclear industry downplayed the report, saying a successful attack on the tightly guarded pools was extremely unlikely.)

Missing from the report was any examination of terrorism risks associated with eventually shipping and storing waste at Yucca Mountain. The study, compiled by eight nuclear waste experts for publication this spring in a Princeton University scientific journal, focused on how waste is stored now in pools and casks at 103 nuclear reactors nationwide.

At first glance, the relatively obscure report may not seem to have much significance in the broader debate over Yucca Mountain. If anything, the report may bolster the nuclear industry's argument that waste would be safer out of the pools -- and inside Yucca Mountain.

But look closer, Nevada officials say. The report's argument for dry casks could also bolster their argument against Yucca. Nevada officials say the report supports their stance -- that nuclear waste is perfectly safe in the well-protected, robust dry casks and there is no reason to ship it across the country to Nevada.

At issue in the report are waste pools, resembling swimming pools, used at every plant to cool the old uranium fuel rods that get burned up in plant reactor cores. The waste must cool in the pools for about five years before it is safe to remove it.

About two-thirds of the nation's plants store all their waste in the pools because they don't have anywhere else to put it. The other third have run out of pool space and have begun transferring their oldest waste from the pools to dry casks.

The report was cobbled together by experts who are concerned that a terrorist attack -- albeit extremely unlikely -- could contaminate a small state. The biggest problem is that many of the pools are stuffed to capacity. If the pools could somehow be drained by a terrorist -- many of the pools are well above ground level -- the blaze that would consume the waste within a few hours would be catastrophic, the report said.

The report concludes that metal dry casks, often stored in outdoor concrete vaults, are safer.

The report's authors argue that the waste would be put in shipping containers anyway for eventual transport to Yucca, so why not load it into containers now for storage until it's ready to go?

But nuclear plant operators don't like dry casks. The casks cost between $1 million and $2 million each. And the casks draw controversy; communities around plants typically don't like the outdoor casks so close to their neighborhoods.

But there's another reason the nuclear industry doesn't like the idea of the "temporary" dry cask storage areas: they may not be temporary after all.

Nuclear industry officials quietly fret that the more waste they move into the dry casks, the more likely they are to get stuck permanently with the waste. They worry that the dry cask sites could be viewed as a permanent solution as the Yucca project sinks under the weight of spiraling costs, regulatory snares, lawsuits and debates over transportation.

Industry officials know the dry casks are extremely safe from terrorist threats, said Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency director Bob Loux. Once waste is transferred to dry casks at every plant, the industry loses its argument that it desperately needs Yucca because it has run out of space in the pools, he said.

"The utilities want to keep the heat on the crisis," Loux said.

The dry casks are also a lot cheaper than Yucca would be. Loux said Yucca's pricetag could top $100 billion, although Energy Department estimates are still about $58 billion. It would cost no more than $7 billion to put waste in dry casks, the report said.

So while the 41-page report scarcely mentions Yucca Mountain, it may offer Nevada its strongest case yet that dry casks are the safest, cheapest, most convenient solution to the nation's nuclear waste problem.