opinion

View: No Yucca Mountain, and more Indian Point concerns

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is sending mixed signals about nuclear waste from power plants. It recently issued new rules encouraging continued long-term storage of waste on site at the plants and denied environmentalists' contention that waste buildup at Indian Point nuclear facility in Buchanan was a problem. On the other hand, NRC recently resumed safety evaluations of a proposed national nuclear waste repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain.

Whether that means the idea of transporting the waste to Yucca Mountain is alive again is unclear, though it's quite clear that the NRC doesn't consider spent fuel buildup any obstacle to continued operation of aging nuclear plants. Meanwhile, for New Yorkers and tri-state area residents, the spent fuel building up at Indian Point is a growing threat.

"Spent" nuclear fuel is a misnomer. It's much more dangerous than "unspent" fuel, since it's many times "hotter" in terms of radioactivity and thermal heat when it comes out of a reactor than when it goes in. Spent fuel rods have high concentrations of lethal isotopes like strontium 90, iodine 131 and cesium 137. They emit 1 million rems of radiation an hour a foot away, enough to kill in seconds, and release part of their energy as heat. They can't be handled or moved until they've cooled in special storage pools for at least five years (spent "High Burnup Fuel" has twice the radioactivity of other spent fuel, and can't be moved from the pools for 20 years).

Lessons of Fukushima

Aerial photos of the Fukushima disaster illustrated the dangers of storing spent fuel at nuclear plants. Explosions tore the roofs off fuel pools, exposing shoddy construction and more spent fuel than the pools were ever designed to hold, leaving nothing but leaking water between concentrated, lethal radioactivity and the environment.

Our spent fuel situation isn't like Japan's. It's worse. The U.S. has 30 million spent fuel rods, more than any other nation. They're stored in pools housed in unfortified shed buildings one expert called "the kind you would find in big box stores and car dealerships." Without a geologic repository like Yucca Mountain, the waste accumulated at nuclear plants, and these vulnerable buildings are now the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet.

As of 2011, Indian Point's spent fuel pools, 25 miles north of Manhattan with 20 million people in a 50-mile radius, contained an estimated 234 million curies and counting. That's three times the radioactivity of all the fuel pools in the Fukushima complex combined. The 40-year-old pools are deteriorating, leaking tritium- and strontium-laced water into groundwater and the Hudson.

To keep the reactors running until Yucca Mountain was supposed to open in 2010, Indian Point repeatedly "reracked" its pools, putting more spent fuel rods into them than they were designed to hold, packing them more closely together. That increases the risk of "criticality" – accidental nuclear reaction between the rods – that could boil the water, ignite the rods and release their radiation. Boron absorbers built into the racks to shield radiation are degrading, aggravating the risk.

Stop buildup, close plant

When Yucca Mountain failed to materialize, Indian Point began removing some of the fuel rods that had been in the pools the longest and cooled the most, and putting them into dry cask storage. But that only makes room for newer, "hotter" spent fuel, increasing net radioactivity in the pools, while yet more spent fuel accumulates in casks on the ground.

The faster we reverse this buildup and secure the waste, the better. Whether or not a geologic repository ever gets built, we can mitigate spent fuel danger now by shutting down Indian Point's reactors. Every day they continue to run, they make more "hot" waste, concentrating yet more radioactivity on site. With Indian Point's 40-year operating licenses expiring, its owner, Entergy, is seeking a 20-year extension, which would only compound the spent fuel problem.

As an engineer who built a business near Indian Point, I'm not especially skeptical of nuclear technology or the idea of a geologic repository. But as a lifelong local resident who developed thyroid cancer, which correlates with radiation exposure, I am highly skeptical of the way that keeping the plant's reactors running and Entergy's profits flowing seems to trump confronting safety problems at the plant. Indian Point's spent fuel is a serious threat to the health, safety and economy of our region. To defuse it, we first need to stop making more waste, by closing the reactors as their licenses expire.

The writer, a Montebello resident, is a mechanical engineer who lives and owns a manufacturing business in Rockland County, within 10 miles from the Indian Point nuclear power plant.