Llewellyn King: A prize is needed for ideas on dealing with nuclear waste

Places in Continental United States where nuclear waste is stored

A “scram” is the emergency shutdown of a nuclear power plant. Control rods, usually boron, are dropped into the reactor and these absorb the neutron flux and shut it down.

President Trump, a supporter of nuclear power, has in a few words scrammed the whole nuclear industry, or at least dealt its orderly operation a severe blow.

Scientists see nuclear waste as a de minimus problem. Nuclear-power opponents — who really can’t be called environmentalists anymore — see it as a club with which to beat nuclear and stop its development

The feeling that nuclear waste is an insoluble problem has seeped into the public consciousness. People, who otherwise would be nuclear supporters, ask, “Ah, but what about the waste?”

For its part, the nuclear industry has looked to the government to honor its promise to take care of the waste, which it made at the beginning of the nuclear age.

In the early days of civilian nuclear power — with the startup of the Shippingport Atomic Power Station, in Pennsylvania, in 1957 — the presiding theory was that waste wasn’t a problem: It would be put somewhere safe, and that would be that.

Civilian waste would be reprocessed, recovering useful material like uranium and isolating waste products, which would need special storage. The most worrisome nuclear byproducts are gamma, beta and X-ray emitters, which decay in about 300 years.

The long-lived alpha emitters, principally plutonium, must be put somewhere safe for all time. Plutonium has a half-life of 240,000 years. It’s pretty benign except that it’s an important component of nuclear weapons.

If you get it in your lungs, you’ll almost certainly get lung cancer. Otherwise, people have swallowed it and injected it without harm. It can be shielded with a piece of paper. I have handled it in a glovebox with gloves that weren’t so different from household rubber ones.

But it’s plutonium that gives the “eternal” label to nuclear waste.

Enter President Jimmy Carter in 1977. He believed that reprocessing nuclear waste — as they do in France, Russia, Japan and other countries — would lead to nuclear proliferation. Just months in office, Carter banned reprocessing: the logical step to separating the cream from the milk in nuclear waste handling.

Since then, it’s been the policy of succeeding administrations that the whole, massive nuclear core should be buried. The chosen site for that burial was Yucca Mountain, in Nevada. Some $15 billion to $18 billion has been spent readying the site with its tunnels, rail lines, monitors and passive ventilation.

In 2010 Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) — then the majority leader in the Senate — said no to Yucca Mountain. It’s generally believed that Reid was bowing to casino interests in Las Vegas, which thought this was the wrong kind of gamble.

The industry had pinned all its hopes on Yucca Mountain being revived under Trump: He had promised it would be. Then on Feb. 6, and with an eye to the election (he failed to carry Nevada in 2016), Trump tweeted, “Nevada, I hear you and my administration will RESPECT you!

In the Department of Energy, which was promoting Yucca Mountain, gears are crashing, rationales are being torn up and new ones thought up, even as the nuclear waste continues to pile up at operating reactors. No one has any idea what comes next.

Time, I think — after watching nuclear-waste shenanigans since 1969 — to take a very fresh look at nuclear- waste disposal. Most likely, a first step would be to restart reprocessing to reduce the volume.

I’ve been advocating that to leave the past behind, a prize, like the XPRIZE — maybe one awarded by the XPRIZE Foundation — should be established for new ideas on managing nuclear waste. The prize must be substantial: not less than $20 million. It could be financed by companies like Google or Microsoft, which have lots of money, and a declared interest in clean air and decarbonization.

The old concepts have been so tinkered with and politicized that nuclear waste is now a political horror story. Make what you will of Trump being on the same side of nuclear-waste management as presidents Carter and Barack Obama.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.

Containers or low-level nuclear waste

Llewellyn King: Obama's nuclear-waste fiascos

  When the Obama administration came into power, one of its first actions was to end work on the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste repository, in Nevada. In so doing, it delivered a shuddering blow to the U.S. nuclear industry, trashing the project when it was nearly ready to open. The cost to taxpayers was about $15 billion.

Now the administration is going through the motions to suspend another costly nuclear-waste investment when it is about 67 percent complete. Money expended: $4.5 billion. Shutdown cost: $1 billion.

The object of its latest volte face is the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) on the Department of Energy’s Savannah River site in South Carolina. Work started on the facility in 2007, with a 2016 startup envisaged.

But unlike Yucca Mountain, few people outside of the nuclear industry know about the genesis and purpose of the MFFF project.

The project was initiated as a result of a 2000 agreement with the Russians, later amended, in which both countries agreed to dispose of no less than 34 metric tons of excess weapons-grade plutonium — the transuranic element that is the key component of a modern nuclear weapon, and remains radioactive essentially forever.

The DOE’s plan was for the facility to mix the plutonium with uranium to create a fuel for civil nuclear reactors to produce electricity. This recycling technology, developed in the United States originally, has been used in France since 1995.

The DOE has not yet taken a wrecking ball to the MFFF, but it is taking the first steps toward demolition. On June 25, the DOE issued a press release that the industry read as a precursor to a death warrant. The department announced that it was creating a “Red Team,” headed by Thom Mason, director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Oak Ridge, Tenn., to review “plutonium disposition options and make recommendations.”

The DOE statement said the team would “assess the MOX [mixed oxide] fuel approach, the downblending and disposal approach, and any other approaches the team deems feasible and cost effective.”

Industry sources say the choice is between the MOX approach and so-called downblending. In that application, the plutonium is not burned up but is spiked and mixed with a modifier that makes it unusable in weapons.

Then it would be disposed either in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, in Carlsbad, N.M., or in a new repository, if one is commissioned.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has been pushing the downblending option. But it is using numbers that many believe to be extremely speculative. They come from a private consulting firm hired by the DOE, Aerospace Corporation.

The first number is that the life-cycle cost of the MFFF would be $30 billion, while the life-cycle cost for downblending would be only $9 billion. These numbers are contested by the contractor building the facility, a joint venture between the construction firm Chicago Bridge & Iron Co. and the French nuclear technology giant Areva. They point out that plutonium has never been downblended and that the WIPP in New Mexico has had its own problems.

On Feb. 5, 2014, the plant closed after a salt truck caught fire; there was an unrelated radiological release nine days later. The plant is still closed.

It is believed that Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz favors the MFFF approach as a permanent and scientifically attractive solution, rather than burying the plutonium in New Mexico or elsewhere. However, he may be overruled by the White House and the military chiefs, who know that they are going to have to raise money on a huge scale for nuclear weapons modernization, in light of the deteriorated relationship with Russia and China’s continuing military buildup.

If the MFFF is canceled, it will join a long list of nuclear projects that the government has ordered up and canceled later, often with a huge waste of public money. Another negative is the wastage of engineering talent. Families move to sites, buy houses and send their children to local schools. Then come the pink slips and years of demanding engineering effort are nixed by policy, politics and general incoherence.

Llewellyn King (lking@kingpublishing.com), host of White House Chronicle on PBS, is a longtime publisher, editor, columnist and international business consultant.