2014/10/16 by R. Rosner, Robert Rosner, Rebecca Lordan +1
Engineering · Materials Science · Social Sciences · #Graphite, nuclear technology, radiation studies #Nuclear Issues and Defense #Nuclear and radioactivity studies
paper · doi:10.1177/0096340214555107
openalex publication_date 2014/10/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Despite the recommendations of the 2012 Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future (2012) Report to the Secretary of Energy. January. Available at: http://energy.gov/ne/downloads/blue-ribbon-commission-americas-nuclear-future-report-secretary-energy. [Google Scholar] Blue Ribbon Commission Report, the US government has made no substantial progress toward the permanent, or even temporary, consolidated storage of used11 While the common term for nuclear material emerging from nuclear reactors is “spent” nuclear fuel, we prefer the term “used” nuclear fuel. The reason is that from the technical point of view used fuel is really not “spent” in the dictionary sense of that word. It is technically possible to process the used fuel in a number of ways to extract yet more energy, either in the existing fleet of light water reactors or in alternate reactor designs aimed specifically at burning the fission products resulting from neutron capture, i.e., plutonium and the minor actinides. About 96 percent by weight of used nuclear fuel is uranium; the rest is composed of plutonium (approximately 1 percent), fission products, and other minor actinides. So, for all practical purposes, the amount of used fuel and the amount of uranium in that used fuel are usually treated as roughly the same. civilian nuclear fuel. To complicate matters, a November 2013 decision by the United States Court of Appeals (2013 United States Court of Appeals (2013) National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners v. United States Department of Energy. No. 11-1066. Decided November 19. Available at: http://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/2708C01ECFE3109F85257C280053406E/file/11-1066-1466796.pdf. [Google Scholar]) in Washington, DC eliminated the very fee designed to finance used-fuel storage—which had accumulated over 30 billion so far—introducing a further obstacle (Nuclear Energy Institute, 2014a Nuclear Energy Institute (2014a) DOE proposes suspending NWF fee but asks court for new hearing. January 9. Available at: http://www.nei.org/News-Media/News/News-Archives/DOE-Requests-Suspending-Nuclear-Waste-Fund-Fee-But. [Google Scholar]).It was not supposed to be this way. The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act bound the federal government by law to take custody of all civilian waste from power companies for final disposal, under the assumption that the waste would be permanently stored in a deep geological repository at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain and overseen by the Energy Department. The Act obligated the US government to begin accepting waste by 1998, but the government was unable to fulfill this promise, forcing it to remunerate the utility companies for continuing to store the waste and assume liability. This situation cannot continue.As a solution, the commission argues that the US government should establish a widely distributed series of regional, government-run sites that would take in the used fuel from the cooling pools of several reactors, thereby consolidating the interim storage of used fuel and putting this nuclear waste into stronger, safer, more secure, more manageable—and ultimately more affordable—dry casks, as a first step toward ultimate disposal. Dry casks have withstood earthquakes and floods, and are designed to withstand the heat of fires and the impact of airplanes; the 100-ton structures are hard to steal or damage, and require no cooling systems or power supplies. These are some of the many reasons why making the transition to dry cask-based interim storage should be made as quickly as possible, regardless of one’s opinion of civilian nuclear power.