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National Academy Urges Dry Storage for Spent Fuel
A group of nuclear experts has criticized the U.S. nuclear power industry’s practice of storing highly radioactive spent reactor fuel rods in cooling pools that are vulnerable to terrorist attack, the Washington Post reported today (see GSN, June 4, 2004). Such an attack could cause the pools to lose their water, possibly resulting in a radiation release, warned a classified report by the National Academy of Sciences. The report urges plant operators to move their spent fuel into more secure dry-storage casks as soon as the fuel can be safely moved, according to the Post. Fuel rods removed from power reactors require about five years to shed their greatest radioactivity, and pools located at the nation’s 103 nuclear commercial reactors dissipate the heat and contain the radiation emitted from the rods. However, plant operators use the pools for longer-term storage as well, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has determined that storage pools are just as safe as casks. Long-range plans call for moving all of the nation’s spent fuel to a permanent depository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but that project has been delayed and is years from completion (see GSN, March 17). Until that facility is available, the nuclear industry has opted to keep its spent fuel in cooling ponds. “If the pool is safe and the casks are safe and they both meet the requirements, there is no justification for going through what is a huge amount of expense and worker exposure,” to move spent fuel to dry storage, said Steven Kraft, director of waste management at the Nuclear Energy Institute. Nonindustry experts do not concur that the pools are as safe as casks. They have also criticized the decision to keep the National Academy study secret. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission received the study last summer. “I am concerned that the totality of the commission’s actions reflect a systemic effort to withhold important information from … the public, rather than a genuine effort to be protective of national security,” said U.S. Representative Edward Markey (D-Mass.) in a March 21 letter to the commission (Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post, March 28).
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