Nuclear Waste

Abstract

High level radioactive waste is produced by nuclear power plants that must be stored and protected for centuries or millennia until it decays to acceptable levels. To date few repositories have been approved and none have received waste yet. The ability of these underground storage facilities to last the required times is impossible to fully know.

Doug Brugge is the primary author of this chapter.

You only have a brief production of energy, but future generations are going to be grappling with waste forever.

– Gordon Edwards, President, Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility

Finland is a rare country that has embraced reliance on nuclear power and may be the first to complete a high level, long term nuclear waste disposal site (El-Showk, 2022). The repository, slated to open, if all goes as planned, in 2024 or 2025, is on the island of Olkiluoto, near Finland’s west coast, facing the Gulf of Bothnia. Sedeer El-Showk, writing in Science (El-Showk, 2022), suggests that Finland’s success at siting and building rests primarily on the socio-political context of the country. Finland is a country that rarely produces dissidents. Plus, there were considerable economic benefits offered to the host community. Fig. 3.1 shows a schematic of the design.

Fig. 3.1

A schematic of the high level nuclear waste depository in Finland. GRAPHIC: V. ALTOUNIAN/SCIENCE

What is most striking from a global perspective, is how late and unusual is the possible success in Finland. The world’s first commercial nuclear power plant began operation long ago—in December 1957—in Shippingport, Pennsylvania. Thus, we have been waiting more than 60 years for solutions to the disposal of high-level waste.

During that time, nuclear waste has been accumulating in dry cask storage at nuclear power plants around the US and the world. Let’s make no mistake about how hazardous this waste is and how long it will take for it to decay to levels of radiation that are acceptable. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, far from the most alarmist about nuclear power risks, reports that, “10 years after removal from a reactor, the surface dose rate for a typical spent fuel assembly exceeds 10,000 rem/hour – far greater than the fatal whole-body dose for humans of about 500 rem received all at once.” (El-Showk, 2022).

Ultimately there will have to be effective approaches to storing this waste for centuries. The waste is not going away and takes that long to decay to levels that are not immediately hazardous to health. It is important to recognize that science does not have a way to stop a radioactive substance from continuing to be radioactive. In other words, we cannot shut off radioactivity once we make radioactive elements in a reactor.

It might be helpful to explain why nuclear power produces this dangerous waste. The source of most of the radioactive byproducts originates from a subatomic particle called a neutron hitting an atom of uranium-235. U-235 is the rare isotope of uranium that is needed for nuclear fission. When U-235 absorbs a slow-moving neutron, it splits into two pieces. The pieces are called fission products. There are hundreds of different kinds of fission products produced within a nuclear reactor as the uranium atom splits in different ways. Fission also produces more neutrons which, in turn, split more uranium atoms leading to the escalating nuclear chain reaction.

In addition to heavy radioactive atoms, nuclear reactors also produce tritium. Tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen with a half life of 12 years. Disposal of tritium is its own problem, since it is very difficult and expensive to separate tritium from the water in which it forms. Because of this, proposals have been floated to release it into the ocean or evaporate it into the atmosphere. A better approach would be to store it for 100 years in glass containers until its radioactivity is reduced by 99%.

Almost certainly the most important radioisotope in nuclear waste is plutonium. Plutonium is not a fission product as it is heavier than uranium and formed by a different process. Plutonium forms when an atom of U-238 (the more common isotope of uranium than U-235) absorbs a neutron, rather than splitting. When it does this, it turns into Pu-239. Plutonium is a critical byproduct because it can be used to make nuclear weapons. It was the ingredient in the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki and has been used extensively in nuclear weapons since then.

Gordon Edwards, quoted at the start of this chapter and whose work substantially informed this chapter, is President of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility (Gordon 2023). He has translated many of the issues surrounding nuclear waste into clear and understandable terms notably saying, “in exchange for, let’s say, three generations of electricity, we have 300,000 generations of nuclear waste.” From that perspective, he notes that nuclear waste is the main product of nuclear power and electricity is just a small blip early on (Gordon 2023).

The Nuclear Waste Management Association, which has a more optimistic view of nuclear power, characterizes the state of progress for disposal of high-level nuclear waste in some notable countries on its web site (NMWO, 2023). They note that Sweden appears close to having a site that can be developed for disposal of nuclear power waste. Indeed, in January 2022, Sweden announced that it had approved plans for a facility in Forsmark, 80 miles north of Stockholm. The Swedish plan is very similar to that of its neighbor, Finland. Approval may have benefited from similar levels of trust between the government and its population.

Other countries have struggled with gaining approval of host communities. France, a heavily nuclear country, has proposed using a site outside a village called Bure in the Champagne-Ardenne region in the eastern part of the country. If approved, and it is still faces political opposition, construction might begin in 2027, although that date is later than had previously been estimated (Mallet Benjamin, 2023).

In 2021, the United Kingdom, another country with substantial energy production from nuclear power, formed partnerships with two communities in Copeland, Cumbria that will involve discussions about possible disposal of highly radioactive, long-lived nuclear waste. This appears to be at an early stage, with the outcome not possible to predict yet.

Japan, a country that has also depended heavily on nuclear power prior to the Fukushima meltdown that led to closure of most of the country’s nuclear reactors, also faces challenges with disposing of its nuclear waste. The risk of earthquakes and tsunamis are high on the Japanese islands. Selection of a site continues in Japan, with a desire to select one by 2025 and begin operation by 2035. This seems optimistic given experience in other countries to date.

The United States has perhaps the most dismal record of any nuclear country in terms of identifying a site for disposal of high-level nuclear waste. The US does have a low-level underground waste disposal site in southern New Mexico. But that site had a fire and emergency evacuation in 2014 (Gordon 2023). The cause of the fire was a chemical reaction of low level radioactive waste with kitty litter that resulted in a drum exploding and plutonium dust traveling more than 700 meters to the surface, contaminating 22 workers.

The process in the US for choosing and beginning construction on a repository for high level waste has cost billions of dollars over decades. Despite the investment, the effort to find a viable option failed and none is likely for many more years.

Yucca Mountain in Nevada was the location of choice in the US. It was close to the nuclear test sites at which dozens of nuclear explosions had been detonated, first above ground, then below. But the goal of a repository at Yucca Mountain ran headlong into opposition by the State of Nevada and its powerful congressman, Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader from 2007 to 2015. It may also have floundered by affecting the nearby lands of the Western Shoshone and Paiute Indians, once again (see Chap. 2) trying to impose nuclear risks on Native Americans.

Thus, today the process of identifying a site in the US and developing it is essentially at a standstill. It is rather amazing and disturbing that a country with 92 nuclear reactors harboring 88 metric tons of high-level waste has come full circle and is back to square one. The most recent siting process was canceled during the administration of President Trump. Apparently, the US Government is, as of 2023, “reviewing options and developing a new plan” (NMWO, 2023).

Reports about decay of high-level nuclear waste are often framed as time to reach a “safe” level of radiation. But “safe” is either an absolute elimination of risk, which is rarely, if ever, possible, or a relative metric based on one’s values, essentially a low risk that we consider acceptable. In practice many assessments use the natural radiation of uranium ore as the benchmark for the level at which nuclear waste would no longer require stringent containment measures.

By this standard, it would take about 100,000 years for the waste to be comparable to natural uranium (Fig. 3.2), because natural uranium releases a low level of radiation, resulting from its long half-life (Corkhill & Hyatt, 2018). This time scale should be worrisome to the reader as it exceeds by an order of magnitude human civilization and by almost two orders of magnitude our modern technological progress with machines, industry, motor vehicles and rockets. We have often failed to predict dramatic problems with our technology, including impact on climate, that only became apparent in recent decades.

Fig. 3.2

A graph that shows the time until spent nuclear fuel radioactively decays to acceptable levels

To provide context, consider that one hundred thousand years ago humans had recently migrated out of Africa and Neandertals still roamed what is now Europe. Travel was by foot and tools were simple and made of stone. Our ancestors lived in caves and other simple dwellings. And change was slow, very slow, compared to the sometimes-bewildering developments in technology we see today. Modest innovations took thousands of years.

Now, try to extrapolate forward in time and envision what our nuclear depositories might look like, how they would hold up, and whether they would remain tracked and marked. Would we develop better ways to manage them with future technology? Technological change is accelerating. The task of predicting how this will go, many centuries out, is impossible. We just do not know and therein lies the core problem.

An important question is, can the waste ever come back up from a deep geological repository? Edwards makes a good point that you can’t put waste into an undisturbed geological location because opening it up to put the waste in disturbs the geology! Once the repository is created, there is now a pathway to the surface that did not previously exist.

Further, he notes that nuclear waste is active. It generates increasing heat over time, with maximum heat at 4000 years and does not return to normal for 50,000 years. The radiation also generates ions that are chemically active (they led to the fire in the low-level depository in New Mexico mentioned above). Theoretically, even worse outcomes might be possible, including an accidental criticality (Gordon 2023).

Present considerations for preventing adverse outcomes revolve around the best way to encase high-level nuclear waste so as to contain it for very long time periods. A longstanding, approach is called vitrification, in which the waste is embedded in glass. This approach has appeal because glass is resistant to deterioration for timeframes comparable to the time it takes nuclear waste to reach levels of radiation similar to uranium ore. Ceramics are another option that have comparable persistence. As an example, ceramic artifacts, such as pieces of bowls, which were made thousands of years ago, can be recovered at archeological sites today.

A final, very worrisome, concern is that the waste contains, as noted above, plutonium. Plutonium can and is frequently used to make atomic bombs. It also has a half-life of 24,000 years so it will be present in the waste in substantial concentrations for tens of thousands of years. A present-day barrier to using this plutonium is that its extraction from the rest of the waste is extremely dangerous.

The other highly radioactive elements from which the plutonium must be separated are the source of radiation that could kill a person quickly (plutonium itself gives off only small amounts of radiation). With today’s technology, one needs a robotically controlled facility called a reprocessing plant to isolate plutonium from nuclear waste. This is how Pakistan obtained plutonium for their first atomic bomb, isolating it from waste produced by a reactor given to them by Canada. Will it be easier or safer to extract plutonium in a thousand years? That seems possible, but no one knows.

If Finland, with which we started this chapter, is an example of success in terms of negotiating with the population adjacent to their nuclear waste repository, Taiwan’s approach decades ago is a cautionary tale of the pitfalls of using deceit. In the 1970s, Taiwan’s Atomic Energy Commission chose Orchid Island for their “temporary” storage facility for mid- and low-level nuclear waste.

As with other undesirable and potentially hazardous nuclear facilities, it appears the site was chosen because of the low population density and the low literacy level of the indigenous Yami people who inhabit the island. Although a recent New York Times story frames this as, “No one bothered to inform the residents”, earlier documents suggest that the Taiwanese government was being deliberately deceptive (Qin et al., 2023). The Yami district commissioner was told at the time that the facility would be a fish cannery.

Eventually, the Yami realized what was happening and, “[a]round the Chinese New Year season in 1991, the Yami people rose up in protests which caught the attention of the media and public in all of Taiwan. Led by Kuo JIan-ping, a Yami Presbyterian missionary, and with the support of anti-nuclear groups in Taiwan like the Taiwan Environmental Protection Union and the Green Association, the Yami anti-nuclear group held demonstrations on Orchid Island and in Taipei (Fig. 3.3), where they carried a protest letter straight to the Taiwan Power Company.” (Marsh et al., 1993).

Fig. 3.3

Biking Projection against nuclear power plant (NPP)’s Construction in Taiwan (Greenpeace, 2021)

The experience of the Yami, who continue to live with tens of thousands of containers of nuclear waste, despite new deliveries being halted by their protests, is reminiscent of the many cases of deceit and imposition of risk on indigenous communities in the United States and elsewhere around the world. Whatever the solution to disposal of waste from nuclear power plants, let’s agree that further exploitation of indigenous lands should be off limits.

Summary Points

• 1. Radioactive waste must be contained and managed for a duration longer than the age of civilization.

• 2. In the U.S., there is currently no plan for long-term storage of waste generated by civilian nuclear power generation.

• 3. As with mining and processing of uranium, the disposal of high-level nuclear waste has also affected indigenous communities.