[Scott] Coming up on "Energy Switch," we'll look at nuclear waste, and what we should do about it.

- Do we need a new repository?

- Absolutely.

- Yeah.

- And let's just dispel some of the other ideas that folks may be about-- - This is my favorite conversation.

[laughing] We should not shoot it into space.

- No, we should not.

Another no-go is deep sea beds.

Although, from a technical point of view, it actually may be okay.

But these are international waters.

So, the best and globally agreed upon solution is a deep geologic repository.

[Scott] Next on "Energy Switch," potential solutions for nuclear waste.

[Narrator] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by the University of Texas at Austin, leading research in energy and the environment for a better tomorrow.

What starts here changes the world.

And by EarthX, an international nonprofit working towards a more sustainable future.

See more at earthx.org.

[upbeat music] - I'm Scott Tinker, and I'm an energy scientist.

I work in the field, lead research, speak around the world, write articles, and make films about energy.

This show brings together leading experts on vital topics in energy and climate.

They may have different perspectives, but my goal is to learn, and illuminate, and bring diverging views together towards solutions.

Welcome to the "Energy Switch."

For more than 60 years, the U.S. has been running nuclear power plants using uranium fuel.

When it no longer contains enough energy to run the plant, it's still highly radioactive, and will remain so for years.

Surprisingly, the U.S. has not figured out long-term storage for spent nuclear fuel, instead, keeping most of it at the nuclear plants themselves.

We'll talk about the challenges and potential solutions for this nuclear waste with two deep experts.

Katie Huff leads the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy, and before that was a senior advisor to the secretary of energy.

She holds a PhD in nuclear engineering.

Allison MacFarlane was the former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and now directs the School of Public Policy at the University of British Columbia.

On this episode of "Energy Switch," we'll talk about how to handle nuclear waste.

We're starting with really why, why things matter.

We don't hear that much about nuclear waste.

Why should people care?

- As with all energy, you need to sustainably and responsibly manage the waste that comes out of it, whether it's CO2 in the atmosphere, or spent nuclear fuel.

- I would add that, if you benefited from the production of electricity from nuclear energy, the onus is on you to responsibly deal with the mess you made.

Moreover, if you want to add new nuclear energy to the mix, I would hope that you'd fix the problem of nuclear waste before you go ahead and add that new nuclear energy.

- What's the problem?

- The problem in dealing with nuclear waste is political.

It's not technical.

We know what to do.

It's the politics that gets in the way.

- Okay.

So, let's start basic.

What is it?

What's nuclear waste?

- Today, we're largely talking about spent nuclear fuel from the operation of nuclear power plants that provide electricity.

But of course there's nuclear waste from nuclear medicine, from nuclear research reactors, from a variety of other areas in which radioactive materials are used.

- Some people might have heard high-level waste or low-level.

Is that what we're talking about here?

- Yes, we're talking about low-level waste, intermediate-level waste, high-level waste.

And when we mean high-level waste, we usually mean waste that's going to be highly radioactive for a very long time.

And spent nuclear fuel is in that category.

- Okay.

- That would even add naval reactor spent fuel, which is a different kind of reactor.

It does produce power, but for a different purpose.

- You're talking about on-- - On submarines and-- - aircraft carriers.

- Exactly.

- Okay.

- Yeah, you know, and that that produces high-level waste.

We have some legacy waste from the production of weapons in our history in the United States, which is of a particularly challenging type.

We have low-level waste of the type, you know, gloves or things like this that are used in a plant.

Low and intermediate-level waste has some facilities to store and manage it.

But high-level waste really doesn't right now.

- Okay, how dangerous?

- Spent nuclear fuel is pretty dangerous.

And it stays pretty dangerous for many decades, hundreds of years.

- Yeah, that's right.

And that commercial spent fuel, there's about 90,000 metric tons of it that's been amassed here in the United States over the last many decades of commercial power production.

So, that's the size of the problem that we're talking about.

- Ninety thousand metric tons.

Give me a feel for volume.

- So, a lot of people like to use a football field, 10 yards deep or so.

If you include all the shielding and packaging that you have to put around it so that you can stand near it, then it starts to be a larger physical space.

- Right.

- We look at facilities that are a Super Walmart or so, could hold most of those packages.

- It's misleading in a way to think of waste that way, because you would never package it that way.

You would never stack it up next to itself unless you want it to all melt.

So, it's gonna take a large volume to get rid of the stuff.

But we're not talking anything like the waste volumes from coal plants for instance.

- I think that's an incredibly important point.

If you take all the natural gas, petroleum, and coal emissions of CO2 that goes straight up into the air, it's a million times the mass we're talking about in terms of spent nuclear fuel.

- Options then.

What are we doing with low-level waste?

- It's stored and regulated in a handful of locations around the country in near surface low-level waste disposal sites.

- Shallow land burial.

- There you go.

- In about four sites around the U.S. [Scott] Okay, what are the big ones?

- There's one in Texas, in the Panhandle.

There's one in Utah, there's one in Richland, Washington, and there's one in South Carolina.

- Okay, okay.

How about high-level?

Do we have any?

- There's this many.

- Yeah.

[laughing] - Zero permits, it's all waiting in about 35 different states where it was produced.

Most of it's either in a pool somewhat similar to that, or in dry casks just outside of the plant.

In some of those locations, the plant has already retired.

- Interesting.

Real briefly, what's a dry cask?

- Yeah, so the spent fuel itself is a ceramic and little pellets.

They're in long, long metal tubes, bunched together in assemblies.

You have them in a storage pool, and it's all wet.

And then, you take it out, dry it, and put it in a big, round, steel canister.

And then, you surround that canister with concrete.

And that's usually what a dry cask looks like.

- Yeah, the spent fuel just sits, it's passively cooled, and it sits on a concrete pad.

- And I want to try to be clear for our listeners, because maybe they hear, "Oh, no, it's sitting on the surface on concrete."

It's pretty safe.

- Yeah, and in fact, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a statement around, you know, their assessment of the robustness of the canisters, the not particularly attractiveness of the spent fuel as a weapons material.

And so, stealing it in order to make a weapon is very unlikely.

It is deemed uncredible.

- So, let's just hold here.

[Scott laughing] What that rule says is that after a reactor closes, spent fuel is going to have low environmental impacts indefinitely.

Star.

Assuming institutional controls last indefinitely.

Now who in this day and age believes institutional controls are gonna last indefinitely?

- Thank you.

- You act like you were chairman of the NRC.

[laughing] Oh, wait.

[laughing] - When that was passed.

And actually I think it was a mistake.

- Interesting.

- It was NRC basically washing its hands of any way to force a solution.

- I completely agree.

The component around just the long-term safety does rely on this long-term institutional control.

I will say the U.S. federal government takes this responsibility extremely seriously.

- The current U.S. federal government does.

- That's right.

- I'm not convinced that future U.S. federal governments will.

And those casks aren't gonna last forever.

- True.

- Right?

- Right.

- We don't know how long they're gonna last.

[Katie] That's right.

- You guys are doing some research on how long they're gonna last, which is great.

- These concrete casks.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- But are they gonna last hundreds of years?

Highly doubtful.

So, that means you're gonna have to change them.

Who's gonna change them?

Who's gonna pay?

- Aren't all of us paying a little bit of a tax to manage it though?

- Yes, yes, this is a mess.

- The fee that was paid by the utilities originally, the one mil per kilowatt hour, which they stopped paying after a lawsuit against the federal government who was not doing our part of the job.

And then, there's a separate part, the judgment fund, which we've now paid $10 billion in.

It presents a liability to the tax payer.

[Scott] We the people.

- We the people out of this judgment fund that, annually, is paying to continue the maintenance of these.

- So, let's just take a few steps back.

- Okay.

- In 1983, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act which said, we're gonna take this spent fuel and put it in a repository, and you, DOE, are gonna find that repository, and characterize it, and run it.

And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is going to regulate it based on standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency.

And the original idea was to look at at least three sites, and compare them and pick the best.

Well, politics intervened.

And Congress decided in 1987 to select a site itself.

And they selected Yucca Mountain, Nevada to be the only site that would be characterized.

So, fast forward, Congress has not provided any funds for nuclear waste disposal since 2010.

Why?

Because there's $45 billion in the nuclear waste fund, as Katie said, paid for by the rate payer.

It was supposed to be an escrow fund, but Congress treated it like it's appropriations money.

They treated it like it's taxpayer money.

- So, it's being spent in other things.

- Oh, yes.

And then, in that Nuclear Waste Policy Act, there was a contract, and it promised the utilities that owned nuclear power plants that the Department of Energy would start picking up the spent fuel from these sites by January 31st, 1998.

And of course, that was 25 years ago.

So, all these utilities sued, and said breach of contract.

Now the taxpayer is paying reparations to all these utilities to store the spent fuel at their sites.

- So, you mentioned Yucca Mountain, Allison, say a little bit more about that.

What was it and what happened to it?

- So, it's this site that's in Southern Nevada, I don't know, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

And the idea was to tunnel down hundreds of feet below the surface, and place the waste there in these special canisters.

- Okay.

- Now the state of Nevada has consistently resisted putting the repository there since the passage of the amendments to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which they refer to, and have always referred to as the Screw Nevada Bill.

- But it's federally owned.

We dug the tunnel, right?

The hole is there.

- We can imagine why they might not want it there.

The state of Nevada doesn't have any commercial nuclear power plants for example.

If we come back to this notion that perhaps the folks who benefited from the power could be more inclined to be the ones taking responsibility for it.

And you can really empathize with the people of Nevada.

- Do we need one?

Do we need a new repository?

- Absolutely.

- Yeah.

- Do you wanna say that more clearly?

[laughing] - And let's just dispel some of the other ideas that folks may be-- - This is my favorite conversation.

[laughing] We should not shoot it into space.

- No, we should not.

Why?

- You know, a lot of things-- - The Challenger.

- Go up into space, come right back down.

- That's right.

- They do.

Sometimes they don't even leave the launch pad.

- The other feature of space, it's very expensive to get things up by the gram.

And we're talking about masses.

- Okay, another-- - No space lunches.

- Another no-go is deep sea beds.

Although from a technical point of view, it actually may be okay, because it's a nice, anoxic environment.

No free oxygen present.

The waste is probably just gonna sit there embedded in deep sea muds.

But these are international waters.

And you're never gonna get agreement from the rest of the world that this is okay.

- We wouldn't want somebody else doing it either.

[Allison] That's right, that's right.

- And as a geoscientist, it's amazing how much life we're finding in these places that we didn't-- - Exactly, exactly, exactly.

So, the best and globally agreed upon solution is a deep geologic repository.

Now the other thing that you'll hear is, let's just leave it in interim storage and either monitor it forever or wait until we learn more.

But I promise you we're not gonna learn more.

Physics is not gonna change significantly enough for us to say, "Oh, well, we can do X with it."

- The Blue Ribbon Commission, as I recall, thought that there was some positive aspects of keeping it in terms of access to fuel that we could repurpose, reprocess, reuse.

- No, no.

In theory, you can use the existing stock pile of spent fuel.

But, it will cost so many, probably hundreds of billions of dollars to do so.

And it will take so long, that it is absolutely not worth it.

- How does reprocessing work?

I've been to the hog.

I've seen the big facility.

In a real high-level sense, what is that and how does it work?

- Reprocessing is a way to manage the spent fuel.

It is not a solution to get rid of the spent fuel, although you may reduce the volume of the high-level waste, you vastly increase the volume of the low-level waste and the intermediate-level waste.

So, you've shifted your waste problem, you still have a waste problem, and then you have a proliferation problem, because you've separated this plutonium, which could then be used directly in nuclear weapons.

- Well, it is certainly the case that there are other ways to go about this.

There certainly are some opportunities for recycling processes to not separate plutonium all by itself.

Some of the reprocessing can lower the heat burden, and change what's required of the repository.

But largely, you're gonna have the same fission products in it.

You might reduce the amount of time that that heat burden is important.

- I'll disagree with you, Katie.

So, maybe you've reduced the heat burden by taking the plutonium out from that particular high-level waste.

But what have you put the plutonium in?

So, if you put it in a mixed oxide fuel, a MOX fuel, once you put that in a reactor, and it comes out, it's gonna emit three times the amount of heat as regular spent fuel.

So, you have not solved the heat problem, you've made it worse.

- Do next generation reactors address some of this?

Do they use more of the heat?

- We have demonstrated that you can do multi-cycle recycling in some metal fueled reactors like a sodium cooled fast reactor for example.

But we have a small amount of volume of fuel that is retained from that process.

But we did use that more, separating the plutonium all by itself process to do that.

But we can actually recover some of the high assay, low enriched uranium from that that we intend to use in some advanced reactors in the very near term.

- So, it costs more to make.

- It does.

- Nobody makes it except the Russians.

- That's true.

- And it's got its own set of problems.

It brings us that much closer to weapons grade uranium.

- So, you're still lightwater reactors is kind of the-- - I think that's the most-- - We test it, it's known.

- Exactly.

That's the most practical way forward.

- Okay.

So, deep underground into rocks.

What are some strategies there?

Is it a big, open sub mountain thing, or can we put it down in big wellbores, and other kinds of rocks?

Are these all reasonable strategies, favorites over others?

- So, there are some challenges with deep borehole fitting as much volume as you need to fit.

They can be somewhat constrained in radius too.

And so many deep borehole concepts would require repackaging a lot of that spent fuel.

So, there may be some types of waste or packages of waste that would be appropriate for deep borehole disposal.

Right now I think a mind geologic repository is where most countries that are doing this are going.

Finland has their repository, it's ready to go.

And Sweden, France, Canada, they're all making progress on mined deep geologic repositories that are more dug into the rock at a few hundred meters deep or similar.

- Part of the problem is exactly what Katie said, is the maximum diameter of the borehole will be 45 centimeters.

- That size is limited by, not bit technology?

- No, I think in the future, who knows?

Maybe we will be able to drill wide and deep.

But I think there is a challenge to drill both wide and deep.

We can drill thin and deep, or wide and shallow.

- There are lots of constraints.

And actually trying to seal that borehole is a lot more difficult than you might think.

- So, we're back to the surface.

Where would that be built?

- I'm lucky to be in this position right now with the responsibility to find a location for consent-based interim storage, which would consolidate those storage facilities that are holding it on pads across the country into one or maybe two locations in the interim before we get to a repository.

- And what's the advantage of having more of it together in one place rather than disseminated?

- There are a few good features.

Security is reduced per cask.

You have one security force.

You have the DOE can be in control of it in a single location or a couple of locations, and truly take title to it.

So, we're no longer paying from that judgment fund, which is a liability to the American taxpayer on the order of a billion dollars a year.

And most importantly, for me at least, is that the communities that currently are hosting that spent nuclear fuel never agreed to it in the long-term.

And they deserve us to take title, and take responsibility, and take it off of their land, if that's what they're ready for.

And most of them are.

- Yeah, I don't think everybody's opposed to these kinds of things.

- No, they aren't.

They aren't.

Some communities see opportunity in this.

And some don't.

- Right.

And if they welcome it, then you're gonna be able to actually pull it off, as long as we can move it there.

- Right, right.

- Is transporting it, is moving it safe?

- Yeah.

There have been about 2,500 transportations of commercial spent nuclear fuel across this very country on public roads and railways with no accidental releases to the public, no accidents.

The naval reactors also move spent fuel routinely across the country.

And that's not even getting into other radioactive sources and radioactive material that moves across this country every day.

- Well, there are many agencies involved, the Department of Energy perhaps.

But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is involved.

The Department of Transportation is involved.

And state and local agencies are involved, because you need the first responders to be ready in the case of an accident.

And you also need security.

- Yeah.

So, how are we gonna do it?

How's one gonna come online?

Are we gonna continue to talk till you're as old as me, and... - Maybe.

- Where's the sticking point?

- Right now, for a final repository, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act restricts the Department of Energy's ability to do any repository citing other than Yucca Mountain.

And so it would require a change to law if we were to proceed past that position.

In fact, we are limited right now just to finding and citing a consolidated interim storage facility.

We can't currently actually start operating it until there's some action on a repository.

They're linked in the law.

- Before, I mentioned the financial piece.

That has to get fixed.

And the only ones who can fix it is Congress.

But another really important piece of this, and no disrespect at all, but it's the implementer, the organization that manages nuclear waste disposal.

Both the Blue Ribbon Commission, endless reports really, have repeatedly said, "We need a single mission entity agency to manage this material."

Why?

Because they're subject to continual political changes, and appointees, and different whims of different administrations.

It doesn't have to be a government agency.

Most of the successful implementers are not government.

They are independent organizations that are set up by industry.

And in some senses, industry knows the most about its waste.

And they can start managing it right now, while it's on site, and make sensible decisions that save money to shepherd it all along the way.

- Now it would be able to use the money that the people, through various means, they put into that-- - The rate payers have paid.

Right, right, exactly.

- And dedicate it to what it-- - Yeah.

- That's interesting.

And that gets us to our closing thoughts.

What should our plan be, Allison?

- I think it's possible to solve this problem in the United States, why?

Because we've already done it.

We are the only country with an operating deep geologic repository.

Not for high-level waste.

It's for intermediate-level waste.

But we're the only country doing it.

Now that didn't happen quickly.

There was a lot of back and forth.

There was a lot of negotiation.

They built a whole new road around Santa Fe to accommodate concerns.

But it was done.

- Right.

Right, yeah.

- Yeah, I would really like to see us move forward with consent-based sighting of interim storage.

I would love direction from Congress that enables us to create an integrated waste management system inclusive of, for example, a final repository, so that advanced reactor developers and small modular reactor developers can go out confidently, and say, "We are gonna help with the climate crisis.

We're gonna solve this challenge for humanity.

And the federal government has our back.

And it's gonna take its responsibility seriously."

And that's the gift that the federal government should give to vendors who would like to help meet this moment.

- That's eloquent.

Yeah, that's a nice way to say that.

That was terrific.

- That was fun.

- Thank you so much for spending the time, and your candor, and, gah, your knowledge.

- That was fun.

[Scott] There are several levels of nuclear waste.

The U.S. is the only country that has built permanent storage for low and intermediate-level waste.

But we're one of the few countries with nuclear power plants that is not working on a high-level waste solution.

And that's the problem.

Spent nuclear fuel will remain hot for centuries.

Of the several options proposed for its disposal, these two experts believe the most viable is a geologic repository, although others see potential in deep wellbores.

We spent billions building a repository decades ago at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.

But politics derailed it.

Tax funds exist to start another one, but are currently repurposed for other things, and used to pay nuclear power plants to store the waste on site.

Opening a new geologic repository will require laws to be changed and political determination that few U.S. lawmakers have shown.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] Funding for "Energy Switch" was provided in part by the University of Texas at Austin, leading research in energy and the environment for a better tomorrow.

What starts here changes the world.

And by EarthX, an international nonprofit working towards a more sustainable future.

See more at earthx.org.