At this very moment, the vast majority of America‘s highly radioactive nuclear waste – and San Onofre’s as well — is cooling in steel-lined concrete pools filled with water, which “are essentially loaded guns aimed at neighboring communities,” a scientist testified at a Congressional hearing last week.

“Unlike the reactor cores, the spent fuel pools are not protected by redundant emergency makeup and cooling systems and/or housed within robust containment structures having reinforced concrete walls several feet thick,” Dave Lochbaum, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Nuclear Safety Project, told senators.

“Thus, large amounts of radioactive material – which under the (Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982) should be stored within a federal repository designed to safely and securely isolate it from the environment for at least 10,000 years – instead remains at the reactor sites.”

These “spent fuel pools” were initially designed to hold about one reactor core’s worth of fuel, Lochbaum said. But since the feds have failed miserably to fulfill their promise to permanently dispose of this dangerous waste, some pools are holding up to nearly nine times that amount.

DO SOMETHING

Finally, there is a glimmer of hope that – more than 30 years after the Nuclear Waste Policy Act passed, and 15 years after the feds guaranteed they’d start accepting the waste – paralysis and dithering might give way to action.

In June, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and three other senators introduced the Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2013, “a bipartisan, comprehensive plan for safeguarding and permanently disposing of tens of thousands of tons of dangerous radioactive nuclear waste currently accumulating at sites dispersed across the country,” including areas at risk of earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters, they said in a prepared statement.

“This bipartisan bill – years in the making – will finally begin to address the dangerous, expensive absence of a comprehensive nuclear waste policy,” Feinstein said in the statement. “In addition to creating an independent Nuclear Waste Administration to manage nuclear waste, the bill authorizes the construction of interim storage facilities and permanent waste repositories, sited through a consent-based process and funded by fees currently collected from nuclear power ratepayers. The inability of the federal government to collect waste stored across the country at functioning power plants, decommissioned reactors and federal facilities is costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars a year. It’s time to finally put a policy in place to address this problem.”

Across-the-aisle partner Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said, “After 25 years of stalemate, this legislation puts us back on the road to finding safe places to dispose of used nuclear fuel. It does this in the obvious way: by making local, state and federal governments equal partners in the process of finding temporary and permanent storage for nuclear waste.”

It is, of course, far from perfect. Experts, like Lochbaum, lamented its shortfalls at a hearing July 30 before the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. But there is still more hope than there has been in a very long time.

“I think the current time is more likely to end the status quo on interim spent fuel storage than any time in the past twenty years,” Lochbaum said by email. “Various parties all share reasons to end the status quo. Their reasons differ, but they share the common thread of the status quo being untenable.”

The federal government? It wants to stop paying through the nose. About 80 lawsuits have been filed by utility companies over its broken promise to start accepting spent fuel in 1998. The Department of Energy had paid out $2.6 billion in damages to utility companies by the end of 2012 , and it faces another $19.7 billion in liabilities through 2020, according to the General Accounting Office.

Plant owners and their neighbors? They want the stuff safely stored far away. Safety advocates? They want overcrowded spent fuel pools thinned down to reduce the hazard.

“So, while motives vary widely, there’s nearly universal agreement that the status quo is the worst outcome,” Lochbaum said.

WHAT IT WOULD DO

The new bill would:

essentially yank all responsibility from the Department of Energy (which spent about $10 billion on moribund Yucca Mountain) and would create a new organization solely devoted to solving the nuclear waste storage and disposal problem (as was recommended by the president’s Blue Ribbon Commission, and is widely hailed as a solid idea by Republicans and Democrats alike).

develop the aforementioned “consensual process” for figuring out where to actually put nuclear waste by engaging with willing, rather than unwilling, communities, thus hoping to avoid the gridlock that resulted from Nevada‘s rabid opposition to deep, permanent geologic storage at Yucca Mountain.

emphasize getting the ball rolling for short-term storage first, and for permanent disposal second. This means pushing the new agency to start accepting waste as soon as possible at an “interim storage” site or sites, while it wrestles with the more thorny issue of where to put a permanent, deep geologic repository (or repositories).

Environmentalists to scientists to utility commissioners to nuclear industry types support taking the responsibility away from the DOE. But many worry about the emphasis on short-term storage vs. long-term disposal.

FIX THIS

While the National Resources Defense Council sees the bill as a step forward, it can’t support it in its present form, senior attorney Geoffrey H. Fettus told the senators at the hearing.

Radioactive waste must be buried in technically sound deep geologic repositories, permanently isolated from the human and natural environments, he said. As is, the bill “wrongly prioritizes the narrow aim of getting a government-run interim spent fuel storage facility up and running as soon as possible – a priority with potential financial benefits for business interests.”

Placing this emphasis on short-term storage, rather than on deep, long-term geologic disposal, threatens to allow those “temporary” above-ground storage sites to morph into de-facto long-term repositories, he warned.

“This guarantees a repeat of the mistakes we have seen made over the past half century and virtually ensures a moribund repository program,” he testified. If the bill becomes law, “a future Congress will be forced to deal with this issue once again, with no meaningful disposal solution on the horizon. After more than 55 years of failure, the history of U.S. nuclear waste policy offers Congress all the lessons it needs and it can ignore them only at its peril….Adopting a short-term, politically expedient course for interim storage at the expense of durable solutions is the recipe for failure for both storage and disposal facilities. The failed Yucca Mountain project is merely the latest and largest of these debacles.”

In the interim, Lochbaum, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, urged senators to require the nuclear industry to move waste out of those spent fuel pools (where about 78 percent of it now resides) and into “dry cask” storage (where it is entombed in steel and concrete, and where the remaining 22 percent rests) as quickly as possible.

“Dry storage is not absolutely or inherently safe and secure; if so, the federal government’s repository problems would be solved,” Lochbaum testified. “But dry storage provides significantly better management of the onsite spent fuel storage risks.”

The waste will have to go into dry casks before it is moved anywhere anyway, he said – and it’s safer for everyone to do it sooner rather than later.

For its part, the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group, urged the senators not to abandon Yucca Mountain; to accept waste first from the dozen sites that no longer have operating reactors (such as San Onofre); and to make sure the new waste agency is structured more like “a corporation with a clear mission rather than a federal agency” if it is to succeed, said Marvin S. Fertel, NEI’s president and CEO.

FORWARD

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said the Obama administration has not taken a position on the bill, but “I believe it is a promising framework for addressing key issues,” he told the senators.

He stressed the importance of moving spent fuel especially from closed reactor sites to interim storage as soon as possible, and said that the DOE is, indeed, developing a draft plan for permanent geologic disposal. Its “deep borehole project” would evaluate the safety, capacity, and feasibility of such a concept for the long-term isolation of nuclear waste, he testified.

For those who live within spitting distance of San Onofre, it’s hard to get one’s hopes up.

“This topic is frustrating,” San Clemente City Councilwoman Lori Donchak said by email. “Kudos to Senator Feinstein for keeping the issue in the national spotlight where it needs to be. However, even with Feinstein’s good efforts, it’s hard not to be skeptical….

“About $9 billion was put into Yucca Mountain. About 20 years was invested in Yucca Mountain. Process was followed and in the 11th hour, Yucca Mountain was taken off the table. A policy is only as robust as its ability to be acted upon. It is difficult to envision where repositories will be embraced in the U.S.”

Lochbaum, of the UCS, is guardedly optimistic. “This situation does not yield a slam-dunk by any means,” he said. “But the chances of something good coming out of it are better than I’ve sensed in a long time.”

Contact the writer: tsforza@ocregister.com