No Dumping Permitted

Compared with coal burners, nuclear power plants generate little waste. A 1,000-MW coal-fired facility produces 30 lbs. of ash per sec., which comes to 423,040 tons a year, or enough to fill 2,568 trailer trucks. The waste from a nuclear plant of the same size would fit into a refrigerator.

But the contents of that refrigerator would be much more difficult to dispose of than all those ash-laden trucks. Coal ash is essentially inert and harmless. Used nuclear fuel rods, which are 12 ft. long and 1/2 in. in diameter and are fastened together in bundles reminiscent of the fasces carried by magisterial aides of ancient Rome, remain very dangerous. Contaminated by such fission products as strontium 90, cesium 137 and plutonium 239, they are not only physically hot (at several hundred degrees), but will remain radioactive for thousands of years.

How then can any nuclear nation get rid of the rods? U.S. nuclear plants have temporarily been storing their freshly removed fuel rods in on-site "swimming pools." But 27 years after the first commercial reactor went on line in Shippingport, Pa., no permanent disposal system has been adopted. The pools at America's older reactors are getting crowded, and plant owners as well as the public are becoming worried. Concedes Carl Walske, president of the Atomic Industrial Forum: "The public's chief concern about nuclear energy revolves around the waste problem."

That problem is not insoluble, at least in theory. Scientists agree that the nuclear waste at U.S. reactor sites could be vitrified, or sealed in 11-in.-thick glass and permanently buried in underground caverns or salt formations. The volume of such wastes could be even further reduced if the U.S. began recycling fuel; 97% of some fissionable materials can be reclaimed.

But the theory has yet to be put into practice. Although the U.S. has three sites--Hanford, Wash., Beatty, Nev., and Barnwell, S.C. --for the disposal of such low-level wastes as contaminated clothing and the radioactive materials used by hospitals, it does not have a permanent repository capable of handling spent fuel rods. Attempts to create such a facility at Hanford were halted when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the U.S. Geological Survey, the State of Washington and the Yakima Indians all joined together to object because of uncertainties about underground water movement.

Nonetheless, the search for a site is proceeding. In 1982 Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which charged the Department of Energy with setting up not one but two nuclear waste dumps. DOE must recommend three sites to the President by the beginning of 1985, and by law he must select one of those by early 1987. Government geologists have narrowed their choices to nine locations in six states: Washington, Nevada, Utah, Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana. Waste-producing nuclear power companies, which pay a levy of 1 mill per kilowatt-hour of generated electricity, contribute some $40 million a month to support the program.

Like just about everything else in the nuclear power industry, however, the waste program is behind schedule. DOE says it will be at least three years late in meeting the congressional deadline for recommendations to the President, which means it could be 1990 before the White House can decide. Moreover, presidential action is unlikely to end America's search for a place to put its atomic waste. The Nuclear Waste Power Act gives states the right to veto any federal site selection, and some will undoubtedly exercise that option, though both houses of Congress may overturn a veto. While everyone believes that the U.S. must have a nuclear waste repository, no one wants it in his backyard.