Millions of miles. Thousands of trips. And we're still making MORE nuclear waste? Are we crazy?

July 18, 2024

A few days ago Terri Sforza of the Orange County Register published a pathetic, poorly researched and highly biased article about the progress (or lack thereof) in getting the toxic nuclear waste, currently left in canisters on the beach after decades of operation at the former San Onofre Nuclear (Waste) Generating Station, moved away to "CIS" (Consolidated Interim Storage) somewhere. Somewhere they don't know.

I'll start with Sforza's apparent crush on the DOE's Paul Murray. She describes him as a "rock star" as he dares us to "judge [him] on it."

Fair enough: I judge him to be an ignorant and/or dishonest blowhard, shifty, and dangerous to our country.

But he's not ignorant: After being involved in making nuclear waste for 40 years (put another way, not nearly as long as I've been opposing its production) -- after making waste in the nuclear industry -- he moved into government and he's now "Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and High Level Waste Disposition." Mr. Murray came from Washington DC to SoCal to bamboozle the locals, and it worked on Sforza especially well.

The man with the "mischievous twinkle in his eye" (according to Sforza) lays out a "simple vision" that is nothing more than an impossible timeline built on hoodwinking some poor community...somewhere, into taking the nuclear waste. His "plan" has no substance, but Sforza says Murray brought "fresh energy and clear-eyed analysis" to what is, in fact, an impossible task at any price.

There are no countries, anywhere, that are making significant progress on storing the radioactive waste. The closest, in Finland, is an iffy project opposed by many, years behind schedule and still not open and many decades from being filled and ready for "permanent" closure. And then what? A million years from now it will still be extremely hazardous. Who will tell them not to dig there?

It's not easy to find a place to store something that should never have existed on earth in the first place. The reason no progress has been made on a permanent repository is NOT because of politics or lack of funds...it's because Yucca Mountain was the only, the last, the best place they could come up with, and it was technically, structurally and physically no good. It leaks. It shifts. It crumbles. And nobody in Nevada wants it.

There is no temporary site available because NOBODY wants this waste. Absolutely nobody. Bribery (or propaganda) might work, but nothing else will. And telling the whole truth about the dangers won't help hoodwink anybody into taking the waste. So that's the last thing the DOE's Murray will ever do.

SMRs -- if they ever exist -- are sure to be neither truly small nor truly modular, and for those and many other reasons, they will come mostly in clusters, if they come at all.

Which begs the question: Why do SanO's owners want to RUSH the destruction of the twin domes? Why not let the residual radiation decrease for, say, 1000 years or so? Knocking the domes down now instead of waiting a millennia (or two) WILL release a lot more radioactivity into the environment. (My guess is MUCH more than the ongoing batch releases, probably by several orders of magnitude, especially for the workers, but it's just a guess. It's very hard to get data to go on. The industry lies about everything, and the government backs them up!)

Instead of destroying the reactor domes, why not put anything that's radioactive that's outside the domes (and that's not in the dry casks) inside the domes? Parts of the turbines, for instance, are highly radioactive, and an enormous amount of piping, valves, condensers, etc. also are (none as "hot" as the reactor vessels themselves, of course!). What unlucky community will get all that stuff? Or will it be "recycled" into children's braces, car engines and whatnot?

Let SCE destroy the control rooms to prove these aren't "zombie" reactors to be restarted some day, like several other reactors around the country are trying to do (it would be much more expensive to restart SanO, but hardly impossible if you don't mind the risk -- or the waste. And especially if you can get state or federal subsidies to restart!).

The answer to why the rush to knock down the domes is, of course, that they want to put SMRs there while they have a favorable government and an ignorant populace. Solar and wind prices already make the whole idea of SMRs utterly absurd from a financial point of view (secret fact: SMRs will always be financially utterly absurd, let alone have many other problems).

And everyone knows those domes are eyesores and constant reminders of the nearly catastrophic failure that caused them to be shut them down permanently. (That might be the BIGGEST advantage of the too-expensive SMRs: They supposedly are small enough to be discretely placed anywhere.)

Maybe they want SMRs in California because they want the spent fuel for future nuclear weapons, and SMR nuclear fuel (both before AND after use in the SMR) is much more highly enriched with the things they want for nuclear weapons than the "junk" in SanO's dry casks.

There has been NO progress regarding moving San Onofre's nuclear waste because that's virtually impossible to do if one criteria is that somebody, somewhere, actually wants the waste. Someone fairly warned, not bamboozled. Not bribed.

No state wants it. No community. No honest politician. Nobody.

And there's been no progress because moving all that waste is no small task, especially with nowhere to put it. Surely if anyone who already has nuclear waste wanted it (Humboldt or Rancho Seco, for instance), a lot of it could have already been shifted from hither to yon, and probably we'd be hither and someone else would be yon.

But that's no solution. That's just pushing the waste around. The ONLY solution is to stop making more waste -- nationally. At Diablo Canyon. And not allow SMRs anywhere. Then at least we can face the problem of handling the toxic left-overs honestly. Right now, moving the waste away from SanO will accomplish only two things: First, it will invite SMRs. And second, it will make the entire nuclear industry pretend there IS a "solution" to the waste problem, even if it's supposedly "only a temporary solution until a permanent repository is found." And they'll keep on making more waste.

One problem with WIPP is that it was never designed to take "high level nuclear waste" but of course, what it will take seems to have drifted up and up and up over the decades: At first it was only going to get the lowest classifications of waste, and -- at least this is what we were led to believe -- no plutonium, at least not in "significant" or "high" or whatever they called it -- quantities.

And the opposition to WIPP remains strong in New Mexico, let alone New Mexico's strong opposition to becoming the nation's "temporary" repository. The proposed Texas site nearby also faces stiff opposition and will probably be dropped from the list. (It's currently blocked by a federal court decision that's been upheld on appeal.)

No one wants the waste.

Dan Stetson has no business being on SCE's Community Engagement Panel, let alone leading it, while claiming ANY progress has been made -- but I'll admit the last guy was even worse (or at least seemed that way). In any case, SCE's hand-picked CEP has never had more than one half-way reasonable person on the panel at a time, and usually less than that.

So what can be done? The real problem is that no solution is WORTH THE MONEY. If it's going to bankrupt the nuclear industry, they don't want it. And the entire industry wants to pretend it's a solvable problem, when it simply isn't. Not safely, quickly, and permanently. And certainly not cheaply, either.

So anything even slightly approaching an adequate solution is NOT available. And never will be, unless we shut down the entire industry, as we must. As the whole planet must, because we can't afford to do anything else. The future health care costs alone, after one more accident after another...and another...and another.

Renewables are cheaper in every way.

In the meantime, the nuclear industry wants America to spend the money that was set aside for a permanent repository on THEIR problem storing the nuclear waste THEY MADE -- much of it long after they KNEW Yucca Mountain was never going to open. Why are WE paying THEM? Who let that happen? The same politicians who now claim a real solution is just a matter of finding a community that wants to take the waste "temporarily" which means for their lifetime, and probably several more lifetimes.

But it won't be a safe place, that's why it's "temporary."

Why are we still making more nuclear waste if "temporary" storage is still the best we can do to get rid of the waste we continue to make?

Yet Sforza's star-glazed eyes see Murray say: "the only thing stopping us is public trust" and believes it. Believes the simulations such as crashing an empty cask into a (non-reinforced) concrete wall, or shaking a NEW "real" dry cask with "simulated" nuclear waste as if in a simulated earthquake -- not a cask that's decades old and highly embrittled (which can happen in less than two decades, so some of ours might have hidden cracks already).

Sforza believes the tests that indicate how far the casks can fall and what they might land on are adequate. But the criteria were utterly insufficient! And the DOE knows that! Murray undoubtedly knows it too. They know far worse accidents can happen that they will not be able to handle. They know terrorists can overwhelm their security -- with airplanes, with drones, and with missiles launched from nearby buildings. They know a dry cask fire in a tunnel could be impossible to reach.

They're just willing to make you, me and everyone else take the risks they see as minimal, despite the fact that thousands of casks all over the country must travel thousands of miles over our pot-holed old highway system. They completely ignore that a bridge can fall ONTO a traveling dry cask, or the fact that a lot of bridge's roadways are far higher than the DOE's test drop height test.

In the 1980s, for a while I traveled every day over the Mianus River Bridge in Connecticut, but fortunately mine was not one of the vehicles -- two tractor trailer trucks and two cars -- that suddenly fell ~80 feet along with a large section of the bridge (three people were killed and three injured). But it wasn't really so sudden: I heard the bridge screeching at least once a few days before it fell, as a poorly anchored pin holding the girders underneath was being sheared whenever a heavy truck passed over it. I followed the truck for several miles to prove to myself it wasn't the truck I had heard screech (so it had to be the bridge!). Local residents had already tried to get the state highway department to investigate for weeks by then. And then suddenly the bridge section fell.

We'll already have to crisscross the country thousands of times, covering millions of miles, to put all the nuclear waste we already have somewhere -- if we ever decide where, and how.

And yet we're still making MORE of this stuff? Are we crazy or something?

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, California, USA

This essay is available online here:
https://acehoffman.blogspot.com/2024/07/millions-of-miles-thousands-of-trips.html

Addendum: There is another potential option, full of its own pitfalls and not a reason to keep making more waste. That is NEUTRALIZING the waste. It's hardly a perfect solution, but the worst of the waste -- the plutonium and some of the uranium -- can be converted to shorter-lived isotopes, to some extent, so that most of what remains is "hot" for tens of centuries rather than thousands of millennia. But of course, it's sure to be expensive (at least to set up, but it does generate heat as a "waste" product). And worst of all it would make MORE of the short-lived, most dangerous (in some ways) isotopes. And an industrial process has not been established (although the neutralization idea has been patented already). Perhaps the best advantage of neutralization is that it destroys the ability to use the nuclear waste to make weapons or to reprocess it for reuse in nuclear reactors.

Additional information about the nuclear waste neutralization process, its advantages and disadvantages, is available in an essay I wrote in 2017:
https://acehoffman.blogspot.com/2017/11/what-is-spent-nuclear-fuel.html

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Article in the OC Register July 14, 2024:
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https://www.ocregister.com/2024/07/14/progress-on-san-onofre-spent-nuclear-fuel-tests-and-boring-results-help/

NEWS Opinion Columnist
Progress on San Onofre spent nuclear fuel? Tests and boring results help
Column: DOE official wants to instill public confidence in nuclear waste storage. Paralysis costs taxpayers more than $2 million every day.

The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station as seen from Trail 1 at San Onofre State Beach south of San Clemente on Tuesday, August 27, 2019. (Photo by Leonard Ortiz, Orange County Register/SCNG)
Teri Sforza. OC Watchdog Blog.

By TERI SFORZA | tsforza@scng.com | Orange County Register
UPDATED: July 14, 2024 at 8:28 a.m.

Take a last look: Those iconic twin domes should be gone by mid-2027.

“Final backfill” at what was once San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station is slated for 2028.

And the highly radioactive spent fuel that has built up over so many decades — now encased in steel and concrete on a bluff over the blue Pacific — could begin exiting by 2040 to one of, say, five temporary storage sites.

“I hope I laid out a really simple vision for where we’re going,” said Paul Murray, the rock star of the recent SONGS Community Engagement Panel/Spent Fuel Solutions meeting. “Judge me on it. We have to make progress.”

Murray has a divine British accent, a mechanical engineer’s practicality and a mischievous twinkle in his eye. He was a bigwig in the nuclear industry for more than 40 years and is now the U.S. Department of Energy’s new “Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and High Level Waste Disposition,” bringing fresh energy and clear-eyed analysis to what has seemed a doomed and quixotic exercise: figuring out what to do with America’s commercial nuclear waste.

Why, exactly, is the U.S. the only Western nation — besides Ukraine! — that has no permanent repository program underway, despite nearly 75 years lead time and billions spent on moribund Yucca Mountain?

“It wasn’t a consent-based process,” Murray said flatly. “We basically forced Nevada to take the repository.”

Under the guidance of the US Department of Energy, the Sandia National Laboratory used the Large High-Performance Outdoor Shake Table at UC San Diego on June 12 to demonstrate the performance of dry storage systems under simulated earthquake conditions. (Courtesy Southern California Edison) Nevada doesn’t have any nuclear power plants, and clearly, coercion doesn’t work. Nations with repository programs underway worked hard to get consent from host communities — and the DOE’s reborn effort is committed to doing the same.

“The only thing stopping us is public trust and political will to actually do it,” he said.

Gaining the public trust is vital, he said, detailing “performance demonstrations” where waste canisters can crash into bridges, drop from on high, endure showers of dead chickens — or whatever it takes to prove that they’re “robust and nothing is going to happen” when the time to transport waste to disposal sites finally comes.

To that end, a canister from San Onofre was recently taken to Sandia National Labs, loaded with dummy fuel assemblies, then placed on the shaker table at UC San Diego — one of the two largest earthquake simulators in the world — and subjected to myriad quakes to test their soundness.

“It was a bit underwhelming,” Murray said. “Nothing happened. But we will do this to help build public confidence that these systems are safe in an earthquake.”

Dan Stetson, chair of the volunteer Community Engagement Panel, agreed. “Yes, it was kind of boring,” he said. “Which was good.”

Muscling forward
Paralysis on the waste disposal front is extremely expensive.

U.S. taxpayers — whether they’ve reaped the fruits of nuclear energy or not — are forking over more than $2 million every day to reimburse utilities for the costs of babysitting — er, we mean, storing — this spent fuel. That’s some $800 million every single year.

Why are taxpayers on the hook? Because the federal government was contractually obligated to start picking up commercial nuclear waste for permanent disposal in 1998. Utility customers paid billions into the Nuclear Waste Fund to cover those costs. That fund has $47.7 billion, and earned about $1.7 billion in interest last year — but the feds still haven’t accepted an ounce of commercial fuel for permanent disposal.

Taxpayers stand to shell out another $35 billion to the utilities for storing this waste before an interim site (or sites) opens. Some say that liability could exceed $50 billion.

“The federal government has to take title to the fuel,” Murray said. “The only way to stop that liability is to take title to the fuel.”

Dry storage of used fuel rods at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station on Thursday, December 16, 2021. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG) Here at San Onofre, dry storage cost some $300 million to build and $20 million a year to run, Stetson said.

Murray has lots of ideas on how to muscle temporary storage forward.

There are 20 sites like San Onofre — shuttered reactors stuck with millions of pounds of highly radioactive waste. Might any be willing to host waste from other reactors until a permanent repository is built? “I want to explore this option,” he said. “It could save money overall.”

U.S. industry is working on repositories with governments overseas; Murray wants to mine that expertise and bring it home.

And why, he wonders, does everyone look past America’s one and only deep geologic repository, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico? It’s been operating for 25 years, disposing of waste from the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons programs, in salt beds thousands of feet below the earth’s crust. “How can my program collaborate?” he asked.

(Murray didn’t mention the two accidents at WIPP in 2014 that shut the program down for three years, but lessons have allegedly been learned and there hasn’t been much drama there over the past decade.)

Anyway, the DOE’s consent-based siting consortia is in the “Planning and Capacity Building” stage right now, trying to earn the trust of local communities and encouraging “mutual learning” and understanding of how nuclear waste management works. That’s slated to wrap up next year.

It’ll be followed by the “Site Screening and Assessment” stage, where DOE examines potential sites hand-in-hand with those communities (figure another 4-7 years here), wrapping up with the final “Negotiation and Implementation” stage, where agreements are struck with “willing and informed host communities, with licensing, construction and operation activities to follow” (another 4-5 years).

Keep in mind that this push for temporary storage is just a stopgap until a deep geologic disposal site (or sites) is built. It will require Congress to make changes to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to allow money to be spent on the effort, and Murray insists that the U.S. must have a dedicated office for nuclear waste disposal — and serious funding — to keep the process on track over what will literally be hundreds of years of work.

If temporary storage opens in 2040, and the oldest fuel is moved first from the nation’s reactors, it’ll take some 50 years before it’s all there. Expect a half-century to get a permanent repository open, and 100 years until it closes. That puts us at about 2300.

“This is a multi-generational project,” he said. “Slow but steady progress to build public and political trust. … Strong engagement with tribal representatives. … A simple vision everyone can understand. We’re moving, we’re making progress. Everyone can see it.”

Southern California Edison’s projected work schedule for San Onofre
Rallying
It’s with cautious optimism we note that things do seem to be moving forward.

The U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy, Climate and Grid Security held a hearing on “American Nuclear Energy Expansion; Spent Fuel Policy and Innovation” in the spring. Stetson was there, testifying about the importance of interim storage because it can get waste moved off-site decades earlier than deep geologic repositories. San Onofre, of course, is in an earthquake zone close to some 10 million people; not an ideal place to store nuclear waste.

“I was really surprised and felt good after the meeting,” Stetson said. “The amount of bipartisan engagement really surprised me and warmed my heart. I left feeling very optimistic.”

Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley and San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond recently trouped to Washington D.C. to stress the urgency of dealing with the nuclear waste conundrum upon congressional leaders and other federal officials. In Sacramento, Joint Resolution 18 was introduced in May by Assemblymember Laurie Davies, R-Laguna Niguel, and Sen. Catherine Blakespear, D-Encinitas, urging Congress “to prioritize fulfilling the federal government’s legal and contractual obligation to provide a home for spent nuclear fuel within California and 33 other states across the nation.”

U.S. Rep. Mike Levin, D-San Juan Capistrano, has made the issue a priority since arriving in Congress, helping forge a bipartisan caucus on the issue and shepherd through the funding to restart the consent-based siting initiative.

“I want to be clear-eyed,” he said. “It took years to make this mess, and it will take years to fix it.”

On July 1, the DOE issued a request for information “to identify industry partners interested in contributing to the development of federal consolidated interim storage facilities for the management of spent nuclear fuel. DOE is also seeking information from parties interested in providing engineering design, project management, integration, and other services needed to build and manage consolidated interim storage facilities.” Folks must submit responses by Sept. 5.

That feedback will inform a competitive request for proposals for the engineering design of an actual, real federal consolidated interim storage facility.

“While it may appear to be glacially slow,” Stetson said, “we are making progress.”

RELATED LINKS

Concerns about San Onofre are real, but experts debate level of risk
King tides, groundwater rise: Threats to nuclear waste at San Onofre?
Big changes underway as San Onofre nuclear plant comes down
Nuclear Regulatory Commission finds two violations at San Onofre, but no safety threat
Feds hand out $26 million to help find home for nuclear waste
Originally Published: July 14, 2024 at 7:00 a.m.

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