one nuclear plant, 48 tons of waste per year

first rule for getting out of a hole: stop digging immediately.

Nuclear waste: 1 plant, 48 tons a year
In an age of terrorism fears, no plan to dispose of society's most lethal toxin

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At the Department of Energy, Sell argues that deep geologic storage of the waste at Yucca Mountain would be the best technical solution. He believes the project will eventually be completed. But the loss of a key court case last year and political resistance in Congress have put the dump at least 14 years behind schedule.

Without a dump, utilities have few options short of shutting down their reactors and eliminating 20 percent of the U.S. electricity supply that comes from nuclear power. And without a solution to the waste, the proposal by President Bush to start a new era of nuclear plant construction could go nowhere.
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Nuclear waste at power plants will remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. The fission of uranium inside reactors produces heat for electricity production. Afterward, the uranium fuel rods are far more radioactive than when they entered the reactor.

To maximize storage capacity for the spent fuel rods, the nuclear industry devised a way to pack them more closely in the 50-foot-deep storage pools than initially planned. Critics say this kind of dense packing poses a safety risk, however. If terrorists were to puncture the pool wall and drain the water, the rods could ignite and disperse lethal amounts of radiation, according to a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences.
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The logistics of nuclear waste ensure it will be around a long time. Even if the federal government gets a license to operate Yucca Mountain, the earliest it could accept waste shipments would be 2012. By that year, more than 60,000 tons of civilian nuclear waste would be spread across about three dozen states.

It would take about 50 years to work down the backlog, according to Frank von Hippel, a nuclear expert at Princeton University and former White House national security adviser. That's because under current plans Yucca could process a maximum of 3,000 tons of waste annually, while nuclear power plants would be generating 2,000 tons of waste each year. That means a net reduction of just 1,000 tons each year, he said.

"We have to assume that these casks will be around for a very long time," Von Hippel said. "It will take quite a while to move them, even if we had someplace to send them today."

In any case, "on the day Yucca Mountain opens" it would be too small to handle all the waste, said Sell, the Energy Department official. There is no Plan B. Under federal law, the department can pursue only Yucca Mountain.

Further complicating matters are the divided lines of authority between the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Energy Department. The commission regulates waste at plant sites and authorizes dry cask storage but has no role in national policy for disposing of nuclear waste. That policy responsibility rests with the Energy Department, which has no voice or authority in the use of dry casks.

In the vacuum, a private consortium is planning to build an above-ground storage site for hundreds of casks on an Indian reservation in Utah. Despite state opposition, it is getting approval from the nuclear commission.
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