National Academies Report on Hidden Costs of Energy Production

The National Research Council has a new report that tries to estimate the cost in dollars of energy production and consumption in the U.S. Mostly their focus is on hydrocarbons, air pollution, and global warming, but they do spend some time looking at nuclear energy, mostly in the chapter called Energy for Electricity. Here’s a paragraph from their summary:

The life-cycle damages of wind power, which produces just over 1 percent of U.S. electricity but has large growth potential, are small compared with those from coal and natural gas. So are the damages associated with normal operation of the nation's 104 nuclear reactors, which provide almost 20 percent of the country’s electricity. But the life cycle of nuclear power does pose some risks; if uranium mining activities contaminate ground or surface water, for example, people could potentially be exposed to radon or other radionuclides; this risk is borne mostly by other nations, the report says, because the U.S. mines only 5 percent of the world’s uranium. The potential risks from a proposed long-term facility for storing high-level radioactive waste need further evaluation before they can be quantified. Life-cycle CO2 emissions from nuclear, wind, biomass, and solar power appear to be negligible when compared with fossil fuels. [italics mine]

That’s seems fair. One would like to know, for instance, if, when, and where we’re going to bury the nasties before we go estimating the immediate cost, much less the “hidden” one. I was struck by the implied assumption that there would be a long-term facility and that’s all they would need to worry about. What are the risks and hidden costs of storing the waste indefinitely on-site? Of reprocessing, if we want to consider it more? Of transporting the waste to the long-term storage? This topic could use its own report.

Disposal sites run by American Ecology

Here’s another company specializing in radioactive waste: American Ecology. They have four disposal facilities – Beatty, NV; Grand View, ID; Robstown, TX; and Richland, WA. The NV location is right near Yucca Mountain but doesn’t appear to actually do much with radioactive waste, unless that includes PCB “mixed waste”. The Richland, WA site is listed by the NRC as one of the country’s three low-level waste disposal facilities, and the Idaho and Texas locations only accept naturally occurring radioactive material (NORM) and “NRC-exempt waste”. I’m curious to know how many facilities there are accepting NORM, their geology, and methods. According to a webpage associated with Argonne national lab, “The majority of U.S. NORM waste is going to the commercial injection facility charging $150/bbl [/barrel].”

Disposal Facilities and Repositories

Is there a difference between a "geologic repository" and a "disposal facility" for nuclear waste?

Merriam-Webster defines repository as "a place, room, or container where something is deposited or stored". (Also: a side altar in a Roman Catholic church - who knew?). The free dictionary's top picks are "a place where things may be kept for safekeeping" and "a warehouse". "Repository" does not clearly denote permanence, unlike "disposal".

There are now three low-level waste disposal facilities in the U.S. (Barnwell, SC; Richland, WA; Clive, UT). The facility in Utah, by the way, is run by a company that was in the news recently for wanting to import waste from Italy.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) is a facility in a bedded salt deposit outside of Carlsbad, New Mexico that has been accepting both low level waste and transuranics (this usually means elements heavier than U) since 1999.

Are all of four of these facilities repositories? There are certainly references around the internet for each facility being described as either or both of these terms. Still, there is a tendency to only use the term “repository” for big projects that can accept highly radioactive waste. I have also heard WIPP described as the only operational repository for nuclear waste in the world. (Perhaps it is the only operational deep repository in the world?)

I am sometimes dismayed by the conflation of the terms “repository” and “disposal site” because it reflects a certain level of confusion and potentially conflicting goals in handling nuclear waste: We want to put our extra U and Pu in a safe place – so safe that everything will be fine if we call the stuff waste and leave it there for thousands of years – but we also on some level want the option of retrieving those energy sources from our nuclear warehouse if we decide we need them 200 years from now. On second thought, maybe the dual term is exactly right.