New ways to handle nuclear waste

The amount of radioactive waste and spent fuel rods will continue to grow and be stored at TVA’s three nuclear plants now that plans for a permanent storage site in Nevada have been shelved.

TVA already stores almost 3,000 metric tons of nuclear waste at the Sequoyah plant in Soddy-Daisy; Watts Bar near Spring City, Tenn.; and Browns Ferry in Athens, Ala., according to utility officials.

TVA spokesman Terry Johnson said on-site storage used at nuclear plants is a “proven, safe and secure solution for the foreseeable future.” However, securing a permanent storage solution is “key” for the future.

Both nuclear opponents and advocates say the growing debate about nuclear waste storage also will widen to include questions about the proposed nuclear expansions at TVA and other utilities.

TVA is expanding its Watts Bar plant and considering whether to finish the Bellefonte Nuclear Plant in Hollywood, Ala., about 55 miles southwest of Chattanooga.

Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, said creating nuclear waste, let alone storing it locally, isn’t safe.

“It’s irresponsible to be producing it when there is no safe storage solution for it, and the nuclear industry has passed the buck over and over, and then blamed the government. Meanwhile, the toxic, radioactive waste just keeps piling up.”

Nuclear power provides about 20 percent of the electricity used in the United States, and TVA’s nuclear plants provide up to about 30 percent of electricity used in Tennessee Valley.

The Obama administration’s decision to scrap plans to develop a storage site at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, reopens the question of where a regional, interim storage site, or even a spent fuel reprocessing facility, might be located.

And one answer could be Oak Ridge in East Tennessee, where scientists in the town that built the atom bomb went on record in 2006 to say they wanted to be the first to recycle spent fuel in the United States.

Oak Ridge National Laboratories spokesman Mike Bradley said pilot research there has succeeded in producing “pellet-sized quantities of reprocessed fuel.”

“The goal is to scale the process to the point where metric tons of spent fuel could be recycled instead of stored indefinitely,” he said in a statement from ORNL nuclear programs management.

Should the goals be realized, “the discussion about a permanent nuclear repository and the expansion of America’s nuclear capacity would be changed in a profound way,” according to the statement. “In the meantime, the existing inventory of spent fuel housed at various nuclear reactors such as those at TVA could be gradually reduced instead of expanded.”

In 2006, the Department of Energy announced that Oak Ridge was one of 11 sites chosen to receive up to $16 million in grants for “detailed siting studies” of reprocessing plants and, at the least, interim storage facilities.

Representatives of a Oak Ridge development organization that finds uses for former Oak Ridge Laboratory land said the city is ideal for such a new nuclear technology.

“We invented it, and we have the world’s first nuclear reactor here,” said Joe Lenhard at the time. Mr. Lenhard is a former Oak Ridge National Laboratory manager and founding chairman of the community organization.

Since then, the Bush administration plan that paid for the studies, called the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, has moved away from specifying locations for the technologies it advances to double nuclear energy use and reprocess nuclear waste. Nuclear trade groups have said they doubt President Obama will continue to support the GNEP plan, but the energy issues will continue to be debated.

“Nobody wants this stuff. And rightly so,” said Mr. Smith with the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. “Trying to create another nuclear fuel out of this spent fuel turned out to be phenomenally expensive and produced even more waste that is a nuclear proliferation risk.”