[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out. Temperate zones and tropic climbs and thriving seas.
Winds blowing through breathing trees, strong ozone Save sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Hello, K squid listeners. It's every other Sunday again, and you're listening to sustainability Now, a bi weekly K squid radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California, and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. Nuclear power is being touted as a way of providing clean energy, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and paving the way to a zero emission future. There is talk of a nuclear renaissance, with small modular reactors, or SMRs, replacing the gigawatt nuclear behemoths of the past quickly and at much lower cost. But the United States experience with nuclear, now going back 70 years, has turned out to be much more costly than predicted. The country's 100 or so operating reactors have generated prodigious quantities of highly radioactive spent fuel that is being stored in so called swimming pools and caskets adjacent to the plants that produced it. Blame politics if you will, but it remains waste. And only a month ago, a federally subsidized deal to build a cluster of six SMRs in Idaho collapsed due to cost overruns and construction delays. So is that Renaissance real or just hope and hype?
My guest today is Professor Alison McFarlane, director of the School of Public Policy and Global affairs at the University of British Columbia. Dr. McFarlane was chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 2012 to 2014. She holds a PhD in geology from MIT, was a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, which addressed the 70 year old challenge of radioactive waste disposal, about which she continues to write.
Professor Allison McFarlane, welcome to Sustainability Now.
[00:02:28] Speaker C: Thanks, Ronnie. Happy to be here.
[00:02:31] Speaker B: Well, I'd like to focus on three questions today. The first one is, what is the potential role of nuclear power in the transition to a decarbonized energy future? Second, why has it been so difficult over the years to increase the commercial reactor inventory in the United States and the world? And do small modular reactors offer solution to those difficulties? And third, what about nuclear waste? So let's begin with a few basics about nuclear energy and power. How does a nuclear reactor work? And this is for those of our listeners who may not remember, right?
[00:03:09] Speaker C: Or maybe they never learned.
[00:03:11] Speaker B: That's true, too. Yeah.
[00:03:14] Speaker C: So with a lot of electricity production, basically you're boiling water to make steam to turn turbines, which generates electricity. Right. So with nuclear, you're also boiling water. Okay. What differs between nuclear and coal or natural gas? A is the source of the energy to boil the water. And with nuclear, the source is uranium. Okay. It's a much more concentrated source than the fossil fuel sources, so that's a plus. But of course, as we know, it also has some minuses associated with it. Amongst those are cost. And we'll talk more about cost this morning, but the rest are issues of safety and security and that kind of thing.
[00:04:05] Speaker B: What does the safety record of nuclear power look like at this point?
[00:04:10] Speaker C: It's very good for the most part. Right.
There have been some major accidents. Of course. They are very impactful and they've gotten a lot of attention. The most recent one being the Fukushima accident in Japan in 2011. Prior to that, the Chernobyl accident in the Ukraine in 1986. And prior to that, the three Mile island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979.
[00:04:38] Speaker B: Just to be clear that the Fukushima catastrophe was not specifically due to the design of the nuclear plant. Right. It was basically the design of the infrastructure. Right.
[00:04:52] Speaker C: It depends on how you look at was a. There was a massive earthquake, and after the earthquake, there was a huge tsunami which hit the Fukushima daichi plant and on the coast of Japan and basically drowned its backup systems. And the plant had already lost offsite power because of the earthquake, downing power lines. And so it had no source of power to run the pumps to keep the fuel cool.
[00:05:29] Speaker B: Okay, so over the years, there have been many different designs proposed for nuclear power plants. But as far as I know, in most of the world, only light water reactors have been built. There have been a few experimental designs, and I guess the Chernobyl plant was a different design as well. But first of, know, why light water? And what is that?
[00:05:53] Speaker C: Light water is water, the water that comes out of your tap, in contrast with heavy water, which uses the isotope of hydrogen called deuterium, which has one neutron compared to regular hydrogen, which doesn't have any neutrons in the nucleus of the atoms.
And Canada, where I am now, has mostly heavy water plants. They have the CANDU designs. The UK has had a number of gas powered nuclear plants, not gas powered, but gas based nuclear plants. So there have been some different designs out there, but most of them are what we call light water reactors, which use water, regular water, to both cool the core of the reactor, but also moderate the nuclear reaction. So slowing down those neutrons so that they are more efficient in creating fissions.
Yeah.
[00:06:58] Speaker B: And that's been, I think, a general design feature of most reactors, except for the things that the Chernobyl type reactors. Right. What is the record of other designs in terms of safety and impacts.
I'm thinking here again of the Chernobyl one, and also of the Super Phoenix, for example, in France, the breeder reactor, right?
[00:07:27] Speaker C: So the Chernobyl design, the main problem with that design is that it did not have what is called a containment building.
So most of these lightwater designs, all of the ones that we have in the US, right, they have the core of the reactor contained within a three foot thick concrete, steel reinforced structure called the containment. And so if something happens to the core, the containment theoretically provides an additional layer of protection. The Chernobyl reactor design did not have that containment. And so when there was a problem with the core and a meltdown initiated immediately, all that radiation was released to the atmosphere and the nearby area.
So that's the difference.
Now, the Super Phoenix and the Phoenix reactors that you refer to in France, those are called sodium cooled fast reactors. They have no moderator, they only have a coolant, which is liquid sodium.
And many countries have tried to build and have built different models of the sodium cooled fast reactors, including the US.
The problem is, with that design, nobody's ever been able to make it operate reliably enough so that it could be economical. And that's over 70 years of trying.
Over eight countries trying to do this and spending over $100 billion trying to.
[00:09:07] Speaker B: Do that, is the main problem. Sodium leakage or something else?
[00:09:15] Speaker C: That's one of the main problems, yes. Sodium is quite difficult to manage because it's on contact with air in water, highly flammable and explosive.
[00:09:27] Speaker B: Are there any other designs that have been tried that have succeeded?
[00:09:35] Speaker C: Succeeded?
[00:09:36] Speaker B: Well, let's say operated. How's that operated?
[00:09:38] Speaker C: Yeah. So there are high temperature gas reactors, and as I said, the UK had a number of gas reactors.
There are a few high temperature gas reactors that have been designed on the test level and operated, and somewhat successfully. So we'll see how that goes. The US is the only country that I know of that made a molten salt reactor design, Oak Ridge reactor experiment, and it operated, but it's left a big waste mess that needs managing.
[00:10:19] Speaker B: Okay.
The nuclear industry and its supporters are now talking about a nuclear renaissance as an element of a transition to non carbon based electricity generation. So what does that mean, nuclear renaissance? And how is that looking?
[00:10:36] Speaker C: Well, that's the term that keeps getting pulled out when there's hope in the industry that there will be a new period of building a lot of reactors and reactor construction and operation.
We have not seen a nuclear renaissance yet since the 1980s ish.
And it's not clear to me that we will in the future. But right now there is a lot of excitement generated in the nuclear community, in many governments, to bring in a new type of reactor called small modular reactors. These are reactors that produce less than 300 electricity generation. And so all the reactors that we have now, pretty much everywhere that produce electricity are large. They're over 600 MW, often on the order of 1000. So we have basically extra large only. And in the past, the reason for that has been an economy of scale, because you need to invest in the supply chains and all of the bits of the reactor. And it makes more sense to do that if you're building a big reactor to generate a lot of electricity, you.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: Only need one containment vessel, right? Yeah. So that's a big deal.
Okay, go on. Sorry to interrupt you.
[00:12:15] Speaker C: So that's the idea about the current excitement about a potential nuclear renaissance is that these small modular reactors could be used, especially in places where maybe they don't need as much electricity, they don't need 1000, they could be used in sequence. So you could have a number of 100 megawatt reactors put together at one site. You could have six or something. So that's another way of getting the electricity supply you need.
[00:12:52] Speaker B: The excitement is driven in this case by the need to decarbonize our electricity supply and the trade off there seems to be, well, between renewables and batteries on the one hand, and centralized, more centralized generation on the other. But there are sort of different logics here, right?
On the one hand, even 300 MW is a pretty big plant when you get right down to it. I mean, compared to two big nuclear reactors, yes, it's small. How many are we talking about? I mean, I looked on Google to see what the world's nuclear reactor fleet looks like, and this is what I found. As of September 2023, there were 412 operable power reactors in the world. There are 60 under construction and 110 planned and 321 more are proposed.
I'm wondering, even if we think of only a fraction, some large fraction of necessary capacity, how many reactors are we talking about? Small nuclear reactors now? Modular reactors? Have any idea?
[00:14:09] Speaker C: Well, the small modular reactors that are being talked about really vary in size. So some have actually pushed above the 300 megawatt number and some are smaller than that. And so I can't tell you that there's a specific number that's being talked about. But there's a lot of excitement about this in general, the question is whether it could actually come to pass and contribute to the needs that we have in terms of climate change.
[00:14:41] Speaker B: Well, in looking at these numbers, there's something like less than 1000 built under construction or proposed large nuclear reactors, gigawatt size.
So even if we imagine a doubling of that, that's quite a lot of small modular reactors, right? That would end up being several thousand at least.
I don't know exactly what the projected capacity might be, but it'll be a lot of these plants. So I remember that back in the early 70s, engineers and so on were predicting 1000 nuclear plants in the United States by 2000. We're now around 110. What have been the reasons for this, basically failure of growth?
[00:15:30] Speaker C: Well, there are a number of reasons. Like any question, there's not a simple answer. Right. So the multiple reasons are this, we actually didn't need as much electricity as we had thought, as people thought back then. A B nuclear turns out to be pretty expensive, and it takes a long time to build.
So it wasn't something where you can put it up in a year or two. And as I said, it's expensive. And I think the three Mile island accident in 1979 also put sort of a pall on the industry. So those are some of the main reasons. But really, I think overall, the big challenge for nuclear has been, and will be in the future, the cost.
[00:16:25] Speaker B: A lot of people claim that it was regulations, safety regulations in particular, as well as groups filing suits, lawsuits and the like, in terms of slowing down construction times. To what degree is that the case, in your view?
[00:16:44] Speaker C: No degree whatsoever.
Regulatory piece of this is a very minor fraction of the cost, less than 10% of the overall cost. So when you're building a new technology, when you're engineering a new technology, whether it's a bridge or a building or a nuclear reactor, you go through a number of standard steps. You design the thing on paper, or mostly these days, on a computer, and then you build a scale model.
And when you build the scale model, you realize that you had some things wrong in your computer model, so you fix them. And then when you scale up, then you have to go scale up to full size. When you do that, you also realize you made mistakes. Those have to be fixed, corrected. Right now with these small modular reactors, the vast majority of them, we are only at the paper model version. Okay, so you haven't built the demonstration models and then the full scale models and those, it turns out for reactors that's expensive to even get to the part point of building the demonstration model. And it's not expensive because of the regulator. It's just expensive to do. And as we all know, the costs of materials have gone up greatly since the pandemic with inflation. So the costs of materials are higher. You need supply chains for nuclear, and nuclear is different from natural gas, et cetera, requires a much higher level of quality in construction.
And so you need people trained to actually build the quality that you need. And that can be a problem. And has been certainly with the new builds that have gone on in Georgia.
The factory that was set to build the modules that would be shipped to the Georgia plant, plugged in like Lego pieces, that factory consistently miswelded those modules. They would be shipped to the Georgia site, and they would have to be rewelded. And it went on for years. Three different owners, resulting in the bankruptcy of Westinghouse.
Clearly not so straightforward to do. This idea of factory production, and beyond the fact that you have to get the construction piece right and that that's not cheap to do. You need the supply chains, you need the fuel supplies. A lot of these new reactor designs that are being talked about use different exotic fuels that aren't being used right now. And so you'd need a whole new set of factories and supply chains established for that. So this is a heavy lift.
[00:19:46] Speaker B: You're listening to sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronie Lipschitz. My guest today is Professor Allison McFarlane from the University of British Columbia, who, amongst other things, has written about nuclear waste and served several years on the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And we've just been talking about, I guess, the logistics of reactor development and construction. And you referenced the plant in Georgia.
These were big plants, right? These were not the modular ones.
Getting back to that factory issue, I guess the idea all along has been to standardize reactor construction so that every site would more or less be the same, and you would just bring in all the parts and put it together, as you said, like Legos. But I also recall that what happened was that every different site usually put up sort of different kinds of obstacles, and some of them had to do with the quality of the site, some of them had to do with other factors. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's this idea that you can standardize, and yet when you get there, you find out the place is different in some way or another, and that ends up confounding the whole process. Am I incorrect about that?
[00:21:06] Speaker C: Yeah. The site analysis is done fairly early on in the process, and that hasn't really, I don't think, come into play as a showstopper for many of the more recent proposals.
[00:21:20] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:21:21] Speaker C: It may have played a role in the past, and I mean, many decades ago, but it's not been a recent issue. And many of the proposals or the recent reactors have been built on already existing reactor sites, right? Sure, it's already been established, but they.
[00:21:39] Speaker B: Still come in extraordinarily expensive. I mean, can you sort of give us an idea of. Yeah, the final cost?
[00:21:47] Speaker C: They're much more expensive than regular reactors. So the Vogel reactors in Georgia, they're two. The original cost estimate for two 1000 megawatt reactors was $14 billion.
The current estimate for these two reactors, because the second one hasn't come online yet, so they're not completely done, is over $35 billion.
So that's a lot of money for two reactors. Now, this is the first of a kind, and we always expect the first of a kind of these reactors to be more expensive and to take longer to build.
But it's still way out there in terms of an outlier. And it's not competitive right now with wind or solar natural gas.
[00:22:45] Speaker B: Somewhere. I missed something. Why are these first of a kind?
[00:22:48] Speaker C: These are the first of this particular design, the AP 1000 that have been built in the US.
[00:22:58] Speaker B: But those are lightwater reactors as. Yes. So fundamentally it's the design of the system and not necessarily not the energy source.
So you mentioned that some of these reactors are using exotic fuels. The small modular reactors are based on exotic fuels. What did you mean by that?
[00:23:22] Speaker C: So there are a few of the small modular reactors that are proposed that use lightwater fuel, very similar to the fuel that's being used in the existing reactors. And that's like new scale is one of those designs that people might have heard of. But the other ones, high temperature gas reactor, the sodium cooled fast reactors, the molten salt reactors, they're all planning on using very different kinds of fuels for which there are no fuel fabrication facilities. And not only that, but the uranium that most of them, not all of them, but most of them are planning to use is enriched much more in the isotope uranium 235 than the regular lightwater reactor fuel that's using, that we're using now. And so that means we need a facility to enrich the uranium that much more in uranium 235, and we don't have that yet. Many of these designers had initially been planning on using Russia as a source because Russia does do this. But of course, with the war with Ukraine, everybody had to back off planning to use Russia. So now the US is trying to establish its own fabrication supply, but it becomes a chicken and egg problem. To really invest in this facility, you need to be assured that you will have customers, and the customers need to be assured that they will have uranium supply. And so it's this problem where nobody's sure about whether this is really going to happen or not.
[00:25:10] Speaker B: Just for our listeners edification, what is the enrichment level for standard conventional lightwater reactors compared to these small modular ones?
[00:25:21] Speaker C: 4% uranium 235.
[00:25:24] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:25:25] Speaker C: I should also add for additional context that the uranium that you dig out of the ground has only 0.7% uranium 235.
[00:25:36] Speaker B: Okay. And then the small modular reactors will require what?
[00:25:41] Speaker C: Some of them are up to 20% uranium, and they can't exceed 20% because 20% is the defining limit for highly enriched uranium, which is bomb usable.
[00:25:53] Speaker B: Well, that's interesting.
And have any of these small modular designs sort of gotten beyond the conceptual stage in terms of building, operating a pilot or an experiment? No. So these are all still except for.
[00:26:13] Speaker C: One Russian one and one Chinese one.
[00:26:17] Speaker B: Okay, well, so that raises the issue. The question of new scale. Right. Which can you tell us about that?
[00:26:24] Speaker C: So new scale is a lightwater reactor design.
It's much smaller than existing lightwater reactors. It's supposed to be 77 MW. That's what the company wants to build.
They actually already licensed a 50 megawatt design, but they don't want to build that one. So they're in the process of trying to get a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the 77 megawatt design. And Newscale had an agreement with a consortium of municipal utility companies in Utah and Idaho called UAMPs to build, I think it was six of these modules on a facility in Idaho, in the state of Idaho. And this deal fell apart a few weeks ago, in part because the price kept increasing even before anything had been built at all. And in part, the price kept increasing through no fault of new scales because of the commodity prices increasing, in general, anyway, after the pandemic. Right.
But in any case, eventually the municipal utilities that were part of this consortium started to pull out, and it just wasn't going to.
So again, the question comes, can this technology be cost competitive with other existing technologies?
[00:28:00] Speaker B: And I know the United States, the government, the feds, have been providing various kinds of subsidies to various sorts of projects.
For instance, were subsidies being provided to new scale?
[00:28:15] Speaker C: Yes, they were. And they've gotten tens, hundreds of millions of dollars. I don't have the exact number, but in my view, to bring any of these new designs to the level of commercialization. So that means building the demonstration models, getting through a few first of a kind facilities, et cetera, establishing the supply chains, the fuel supplies, et cetera, you're looking at tens to hundreds of billions of dollars and a large part of that money because private investors have been funding some of this, but they don't have tens of to hundreds of billions of dollars.
[00:28:59] Speaker B: Right.
[00:29:00] Speaker C: So the only folks that do have those kinds of sums of money are governments. And so governments would really have to decide that they are really going to spend a lot of their treasure on this one technology in particular. And there's a lot of risk associated with that. Right. Because you don't know that it's really going to work in any kind of timely fashion.
[00:29:23] Speaker B: Yeah. And I guess the time frame for something like that is at least 15 years, right. To actually get stuff going at that level. Right. So it's a bit like Fusion at this point, right. It's always 50 years in the future. I wanted to mention that there's a certain irony in all of this, in that the first commercial lightwater reactor at Chippingport was, I believe, 60, was a submarine reactor. And so seems like in reinventing the wheel, I wanted to bring up another article that I read that Westinghouse, which you said has gone bankrupt, went bankrupt.
[00:29:58] Speaker C: It did go bankrupt in 2017, I think.
[00:30:05] Speaker B: But, of course, according to this article, it signed up its first customer for what it calls an Evinci microreactor, which is a five megawatt electric, 13 megawatt thermal nuclear battery. That's what it's being called. Right. It can provide process heat, electricity, process heat and hydrogen and run continuously for eight years without refueling, which certainly sounds, there's nothing about the cost in there, of course, but it certainly sounds both intriguing and a little bit alarming. And I mentioned that to you, that I remember nuclear powered cars from the 1960s, although I think those were supposed to be based on plutonium and not on actual plutonium heat. That's just for our listeners. So there are people and companies out there thinking up all kinds of interesting ideas. I would not want to be living anywhere nearby ancient microreactor in any event, because it's designed, I didn't understand its design either. You're listening to sustainability now. I'm Ronnie Lipschitz, and my guest today is Professor Allison McFarlane from the University of British Columbia. And we've been talking about nuclear power, nuclear reactor designs, costs and things like that. Dr. McFarlane has also written about nuclear waste. And so let's get onto that particular topic. What is it? Let's start again with definitions. What is it? What categories are there and where are we keeping it?
[00:31:37] Speaker C: So there are three general categories of waste. There's low level waste, intermediate level waste, and high level waste. And the high level waste is material that you want to really keep far away from for a long, long time. And so the idea with that waste is it's got to be buried deep underground. Intermediate level waste is very long. Half life, maybe not quite as dangerous, shall we say, as the high level waste also should be disposed of underground, deep underground. And then low level waste can be disposed of at the surface. It's shorter lived. It's not as radioactive. And nuclear power plants produce all three types spent fuel. The used fuel is considered high level waste. Okay, so where is the high level waste? In the commercial nuclear power plants, it's at the reactor sites still. Because we do not, in the United States, have a solution to the problem of what to do with the high level waste. No country is yet operating a solution.
A deep geologic repository. Everybody agrees that a deep geologic repository is the right answer.
Nobody's operating one.
The Finns are closest. They have approved a site, and they have been actively constructing a deep geologic repository. The Swedes have approved a site, and they will begin constructing soon. The French have approved a site, and they are in the process of licensing that site. The Canadians are down to selecting between two sites, and they have said that they will make that decision next year, in 2024. Japan is also within a few years, they claim, of their sighting decision.
So the US, which used to be very far ahead in this process, is now very far behind. Just a few more words about the waste on site. It's safe right now, right. It's in two different storage modes. All the lightwater reactors have basically deep swimming pools on site. So the spent fuel is moved out of the reactor core when it's no longer used, and put in one of these 40 foot deep swimming pools, where it can be kept both thermally and radioactively cool with the circulation of water. Okay. And then after five years, this spent fuel can be moved from the pool. It's cooled down enough so that it can be moved from a pool into what's called a dry cask, which is basically a concrete around the outside, and steel insert, usually where the spent fuel is just passively cooled on reactor sites. And so most reactors in the US have the dry cask storage as well as the spent fuel pools. There are very few that don't yet.
[00:34:51] Speaker B: Well, I think I mentioned. I wrote a book about this that was published in 1980. Right.
Just to repeat, it seemed as though deep geologic burial was the best option.
But I expressed concern that until that was done, the spent fuel would be stored in. I can't remember what they were called, but surface facilities and caskets. Right.
And that a concern was that because it would take so long, eventually everyone would more or less forget about this and decide, it's okay, as is on the surface.
Do you think these repositories are going to actually get built and operate successfully?
[00:35:39] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:35:41] Speaker B: And over what time frame at this point?
[00:35:44] Speaker C: Well, so the Finns are supposed to be operating their repository before 2030. In the next few years.
The Swedes have a bit of a longer timescale there, but they should be doing it fairly soon ish, too. Now, one thing I want to point out is that the United States is currently one of the only countries. We're not the only one, but one of the only countries operating a deep geologic repository for nuclear waste. Okay. We operate the Waste isolation pilot project in southeastern New Mexico for intermediate level waste produced by the nuclear weapons complex. So not for intermediate level waste from nuclear reactors, from commercial nuclear reactors, but from the nuclear weapons complex. And that has been in operation since 1998.
[00:36:39] Speaker B: And how are things going there?
[00:36:41] Speaker C: They're going fine. Now, they did have some problems in 2014, but they have fixed them, and things are going smoothly.
[00:36:55] Speaker B: I'm curious.
One of the big challenges, as I recall, was keeping water out of these repositories, because has whip had any water problems? No.
[00:37:10] Speaker C: And water. This is not correct.
[00:37:12] Speaker B: No.
[00:37:13] Speaker C: Let me correct everybody.
[00:37:15] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:37:17] Speaker C: The idea of water came out because of the selection of the Yucca Mountain site, Nevada, right. Where it is above the water table. And so it is the only deep geologic repository site in the world that was designed to be above the water table. Every other site is designed to be below the water table. And from a technical point of view, you want it below the water table.
Why?
Maybe it sounds counterintuitive, but below the water table, it is an environment without free oxygen. So you won't have basically what I'll translate as rusting of your spent fuel.
Okay. So the spent fuel will be much more stable and will not chemically degrade in an environment without oxygen. So that's why everybody else is looking at an environment below the water table. And so this poses. The Yucca Mountain site posed an additional technical challenge by being above the water table.
[00:38:36] Speaker B: Okay, well, obviously, I'm not up to date on this, because what I remember is that everyone was trying to keep their repositories dry, like their gunpowder. Right? And mostly, I think it was because salt domes and the like were know used for these.
[00:39:02] Speaker C: You don't want water to enter your salt. And then in southeastern New Mexico, at the whip site, it's not a salt dome, it's bedded salt, so there's no rising of the salt. But they have been keeping that dry.
[00:39:19] Speaker B: They have been keeping it dry. Why don't we talk about Yucca Mountain? Because I know, again, I know that the first repository was supposed to be in Kansas, of course, insult. And then I remember Whip was proposed around 1980, 1979. I mean, I remember going to meetings, I think, where it came up, and then there was a search for recite. And of course, politics intervene in many of these situations. So what happened with Yucca Mountain? I mean, it was supposedly quite promising.
And I just want to mention, right, that one of the continuing issues with these kinds of technologies is that technologically they're not that difficult.
It's politics that usually sends things awry. Although, as you mentioned in the case of supply chains, commodity chains. Right. The cost of materials can go up, but politics always plays a big role. So maybe you can tell us the story of Yucca Mountain.
[00:40:27] Speaker C: Yeah. So you're absolutely right about the politics piece of things, and that technically this is not rocket science. Okay.
And that's where things do go awry.
So with Yuka Mountain, the US passed in 1982 the Nuclear Waste Policy act, actually in 1983, but it's called the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act. And they there spelled out a very fair process to find a site. They were going to actually do detailed characterizations of three sites and then pick between them. And it became clear in the 1980s that characterizing three sites was going to be expensive.
And the Department of Energy had selected a number of sites. They downselected two of the three. They were in the panhandle of Texas, the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada, and in Idaho, associated with near Hanford in Washington State. And so then there was a political fight, as you point out, between the congressional teams from each of these three states.
The team from the Senate team from Nevada was the most junior.
And there was a renegotiation and an amending of the Nuclear Waste Policy act in 1987, where Congress basically selected the Yucca Mountain site. And the state of Nevada has ever since then referred to this as the Screw Nevada Act. And they have vigorously opposed this facility since 1987. And so that as Harry Reed, Senator Reid, became more and more powerful in the Senate, it ended up with a political stalemate. And Congress has not. Even though Harry Reid is long gone from the Senate, Congress has not provided funding for any work at Yucca Mountain since 2010.
So there's really no political will to make this happen, unfortunately or fortunately or whatever. So we're really at an impasse in the US and there isn't anybody except the communities that House shutdown reactors and don't really want the spent fuel there forever.
Nobody else with large incentives to move things forward. Right. The Department of Energy doesn't get any money for this from Congress, so they can't do anything. The nuclear industry is quite happy with the status quo, so they're fine with things. I mean, it has not prevented them building new reactors. Right. As we've seen, the reactors in Georgia and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission unfortunately abandoned any ability it would have to push this forward by passing what they call a new rule, the continued storage rule, which basically says that spent fuel will be safe indefinitely at reactors, assuming that the institutions are there forever to ensure that they will be safe. No mention of who is going to pay 100 years from now to store the spent fuel safely at these reactors. But anyway, so there's nobody with an incentive to move forward.
[00:44:20] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, ironically, right. If there were 1000 reactors across the country, the incentive would be much greater. And because these tend to be cited in areas with low population, the sort of political mobilization is a problem. Did the Nevada delegation oppose the repository on technical grounds or just because they felt they were being screwed?
[00:44:47] Speaker C: I think they felt that they had done enough of a lift for the country weapons test site. And so they didn't want the, they got no benefit from the electricity. There are no nuclear power plants in Nevada.
[00:45:04] Speaker B: Right.
[00:45:05] Speaker C: And so they were just asking to do the sacrifice, not for the benefit, in their view. Now, I will credit Department of Energy with going out there and trying to redo the sighting because really, in part the problem with the US approach was that it was a decide, announce, defend approach. So big Brother made this decision and will impose it on you. And if you look at the sighting of these other repositories in other countries, what we've learned is that that approach is a complete fail.
And so it's better to have a consent based process where the affected communities, states are part of the discussion. It's a participatory process to find a site that they have an option to opt out and that kind of thing. So the Department of Energy is doing some research on consent based siding, but there's no teeth in that. They can't restart the process. We need to amend the legislation to move forward.
[00:46:18] Speaker B: You're listening to sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronie Lipschitz. My guest today is Professor Allison McFarlane from the University of British Columbia. We're talking now about spent fuel, high level nuclear waste management and disposal, about which she has written, about which I once wrote. And we've just been talking about politics.
I seem to recall back in the late seventy s that there was discussion of public involvement and consensus in trying to select a site, although I don't think it ever went anywhere. And I find it difficult to imagine that one could do that in the United States and get any kind of public consensus or support for citing a high level repository anywhere.
[00:47:06] Speaker C: I don't agree, frankly.
[00:47:08] Speaker B: Tell me why.
[00:47:11] Speaker C: If you look at the know, as I said, it's an operating repository. It was proposed by the local people.
There was opposition in the state of New Mexico, but they worked hard for years, over a decade know find what would work for the state, and they did find solutions. So our own country, we have an example of how this works, and it means that both sides have to give, and it means that the government has to trust the people, and the people have to trust the government. It has to go two ways.
In the United States, we actually often only operate on requesting the people to trust the government. But the government doesn't trust the people. But you have to go both ways for things to move forward.
[00:48:13] Speaker B: Well, I guess, as they say, we shall see. Right.
Let's go in our last few minutes a slightly different direction. So you served on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for several years, and I'm wondering if you tell us the story of how that happened, how you got appointed.
[00:48:32] Speaker C: I was asked and I said yes, because when you are asked to serve.
[00:48:37] Speaker B: Your country, you say mean, you must have had particular expertise in something.
And so I'm curious about that.
[00:48:47] Speaker C: Nuclear waste disposal. So prior to my appointment as chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, I was on President Obama's Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, where we developed a policy for managing the material from the operation of nuclear power plants.
[00:49:13] Speaker B: What was your conclusion or recommendation at.
[00:49:16] Speaker C: The time was that we need a geologic repository as possible. We need a consent based sighting process.
And we talked a lot about that. We need consolidated, centralized interim storage for reactors that have shut down.
We need to evaluate the site based on a safety case and not just a single computer model.
So there were a number of important recommendations, which I think the report has really stood the test of time 2012, and it's still a great, strong report. It really is a good guideline for how to proceed.
We just need the political will to make it succeed.
[00:50:09] Speaker B: Can I ask how you found Serbs on the.
So people have a sense of what.
[00:50:19] Speaker C: The NRC might right the nuclear regulator, and it not only regulates nuclear facilities like nuclear power plants, but also research reactors, all nuclear materials. So when nuclear materials are used in medicine, they're used in industry, they're used in agriculture.
And so there are over 20,000 nuclear materials licensees that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulates. And, of course, they have a say in transportation of nuclear materials and in waste disposal, although not the website. They do not regulate the website. That was set aside differently. So they have a big mandate, and their mandate is a really good one. It's a good mission. Their mission is to ensure safety and security of nuclear facilities and nuclear materials.
They're an independent commission. They don't report to anybody else.
They're overseen by Congress, but they're an independent agency.
[00:51:29] Speaker B: I assume that there's a staff that develops all kinds of reports and studies and recommendations. Do the commissioners then basically review this stuff and discuss it and then decide whether to approve those or not? Is that how it works?
[00:51:45] Speaker C: Yes, that's in part how it works. Commissioners can propose regulations or new guidelines, et cetera. The staff can propose it. The industry proposes things, and we listen.
Or they listen. It's been a while.
[00:52:04] Speaker B: Yeah, it has.
Well, okay. I pray we are out of time, but I want to thank you so much for being my guest on sustainability now.
[00:52:14] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:52:16] Speaker B: If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] slash SustainabilityNow, as well as Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Pocketcasts, among other podcast sites. Thanks for listening, and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make K Squid your community radio station and keep it going. And so, until next, every other Sunday. Sustainability now.
[00:52:47] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out. Different zones of tropic climbs, current and thriving seas, winds blowing through breathing trees strong goes on and saves sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah, good plan.
