|
|
|
|
A lot of people worry about being in the proximity of a nuclear power plant. But no accidents have occurred in the industry since Three Mile Island in 1979. That’s an excellent record for a manufacturer – 28 years with no major incidents.
No industry wants to make a mistake, and the nuclear power companies are at the top of the list for safety standards, especially since 1979.
Aside from meltdowns, the biggest worry in the nuclear power industry is the waste that nuclear power produces. Most in the industry call it spent fuel.
First, though, a meltdown, which is the overheating of a reactor when the cooling process fails, is unlikely with new design features these days. The types of reactors proposed for a nuclear plant in our area would have passively-activated safety systems. This means if a mishap occurred, these systems would automatically go through a process to minimize any danger.
Spent fuel and what to do about it? Most nuclear power plants store spent fuel at the plants’sites. Most are waiting on the designation of Yucca Mountain in South Nevada as the national repository for the nuclear waste. Yucca Mountain is a huge granite mountain, where spent fuel can be stored deep in the mountain.
An application for a license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission will be filed by June 2008, but the process could take longer than 2017 to begin transporting spent fuel there.
There are alternatives: Now, round canisters made of 3 1/2 feet thick concrete and steel weighing 40,000 tons apiece are used to store the spent fuel at the nuclear power plant’s site near the reactor’s building. These canisters are built on site, and are first placed in a pool inside the plant to sit for a minimum of five years to cool down.
The life of a nuclear power plant is 60 years. The spent fuel canisters can remain at the site during the life of the power plant if necessary.
Not done here in the United States is a process called reprocessing, or recycling of spent fuel. Reprocessing takes the spent fuel, of which only 5 percent was used initially, and recycles the remaining 95 percent, and so on. The rest of the world’s nuclear power plants use reprocessing, which, for all practical purposes, does away with the accumulation of spent fuel problem.
The used fuel has to be enriched again, and this further exposes plutonium (the dangerous ingredient). That’s part of the reason why during the Carter administration, reprocessing was outlawed.
“However there is technology out there that can render plutonium useless,” said Craig Nesbit, director of communication at Exelon, the company studying a nuclear power plant in our area. Nesbit said it was a chemical process. So reprocessing could well be the answer to deal with spent fuel.
Because a proposed nuclear plant in the area would take 10 years to build, Nesbit and his company aren’t too worried about what to do with spent fuel because by that time alternatives such as reprocessing and others would be available.