On Sunday, I watched the Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol(2011) movies starring Tom Cruise and began to wonder how dangerous a nuclear weapon could be in the hand of the wrong person. The recent nuclear threats from Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korean republic sends fright into my spine on how devastating a nuclear disaster will be. I posted a blog on 24th of February 2013 about the leaking nuclear tank in Hanford, Washington. This tragedy and the Fukushima nuclear disaster should remind us that we are sitting on a large capacity of nuclear waste from power generation and we still have not figured out what to do with it.
According to a report from world nuclear organization, USA has 103 nuclear power reactors in 31 states, operated by 30 different power companies. Since 2001 these plants have achieved an average capacity factor of over 90%, generating up to 807 billion kWh per year and accounting for 20% of total electricity generated. Capacity factor has risen from 50% in the early 1970s, to 70% in 1991, and it passed 90% in 2002, remaining at around this level since.”
The USA today stated that The Commercial power reactors have about 64,000 tons of used reactor fuel at power plants in 33 states with the amount growing at the rate of 2,000 tons a year.The issue is; the nation has no place to permanently store the material, which stays dangerous for tens of thousands of years. Most of these wastes are buried under the 103 nuclear plants in the nation with most of them in the densely populated eastern states of America. Some are even sited close to the waters of the US because they need a lot of water for cooling the reactors.
I read an article about the French’s means of nuclear waste disposal and feels the US need to think along this line too. Just like the Yucca Mountain, NV repository site that was abandoned due to some political reasons, France is building a large subterranean storage plant that will be used to store high- and medium-level wastes. The process will include vitrification (process that would turn the liquid nuclear waste into glass). After which they will pour the molten glass into stainless steel casks placed within steel barrels and inject them into the rock for storage. They will also compress mid-level waste, which often includes exposed equipment, into steel canisters and then entomb them within concrete inside the tunnels. The specially designed canisters would prevent being heated by the radioactive decay occurring within them so that their outside surface temperature wouldn’t exceed 194 degrees Fahrenheit.
I am not a nuclear waste expert so I cannot provide an evidence- based approach to solving this problem, but experts in the industries choose the Yucca Mountain as the best location for siting this storage plant after a detailed consideration of its geographical terrain and its far distance to a densely populated city. I think the Yucca mountain project should be revisited and professional unbiased recommendations should be made in order to determine the way forward on this subject matter. This ‘not in my back yard’ mentality should be checked because any disaster to any of the over 100 nuclear plants will be a catastrophe to the whole nation. At the end, I think the host state (may be Nevada) will then have to negotiate a huge tax break from the government in other to make the process meaningful. Kindly remember to leave a comment on your thoughts on this issue.
Thanks
Daniel Adesina 