July 18, 2024

A few days ago Terri Sforza of the Orange County Register published a pathetic, poorly researched and highly biased article about the progress (or lack thereof) in getting the toxic nuclear waste, currently left in canisters on the beach after decades of operation at the former San Onofre Nuclear (Waste) Generating Station, moved away to “CIS” (Consolidated Interim Storage) somewhere. Somewhere they don’t know.

I’ll start with Sforza’s apparent crush on the DOE’s Paul Murray. She describes him as a “rock star” as he dares us to “judge [him] on it.”

Fair enough: I judge him to be an ignorant and/or dishonest blowhard, shifty, and dangerous to our country.

But he’s not ignorant: After being involved in making nuclear waste for 40 years (put another way, not nearly as long as I’ve been opposing its production) — after making waste in the nuclear industry — he moved into government and he’s now “Deputy Assistant Secretary for Spent Fuel and High Level Waste Disposition.” Mr. Murray came from Washington DC to SoCal to bamboozle the locals, and it worked on Sforza especially well.

The man with the “mischievous twinkle in his eye” (according to Sforza) lays out a “simple vision” that is nothing more than an impossible timeline built on hoodwinking some poor community…somewhere, into taking the nuclear waste. His “plan” has no substance, but Sforza says Murray brought “fresh energy and clear-eyed analysis” to what is, in fact, an impossible task at any price.

There are no countries, anywhere, that are making significant progress on storing the radioactive waste. The closest, in Finland, is an iffy project opposed by many, years behind schedule and still not open and many decades from being filled and ready for “permanent” closure. And then what? A million years from now it will still be extremely hazardous. Who will tell them not to dig there?

It’s not easy to find a place to store something that should never have existed on earth in the first place. The reason no progress has been made on a permanent repository is NOT because of politics or lack of funds…it’s because Yucca Mountain was the only, the last, the best place they could come up with, and it was technically, structurally and physically no good. It leaks. It shifts. It crumbles. And nobody in Nevada wants it.

There is no temporary site available because NOBODY wants this waste. Absolutely nobody. Bribery (or propaganda) might work, but nothing else will. And telling the whole truth about the dangers won’t help hoodwink anybody into taking the waste. So that’s the last thing the DOE’s Murray will ever do.

SMRs — if they ever exist — are sure to be neither truly small nor truly modular, and for those and many other reasons, they will come mostly in clusters, if they come at all.

Which begs the question: Why do SanO’s owners want to RUSH the destruction of the twin domes? Why not let the residual radiation decrease for, say, 1000 years or so? Knocking the domes down now instead of waiting a millennia (or two) WILL release a lot more radioactivity into the environment. (My guess is MUCH more than the ongoing batch releases, probably by several orders of magnitude, especially for the workers, but it’s just a guess. It’s very hard to get data to go on. The industry lies about everything, and the government backs them up!)

Instead of destroying the reactor domes, why not put anything that’s radioactive that’s outside the domes (and that’s not in the dry casks) inside the domes? Parts of the turbines, for instance, are highly radioactive, and an enormous amount of piping, valves, condensers, etc. also are (none as “hot” as the reactor vessels themselves, of course!). What unlucky community will get all that stuff? Or will it be “recycled” into children’s braces, car engines and whatnot?

Let SCE destroy the control rooms to prove these aren’t “zombie” reactors to be restarted some day, like several other reactors around the country are trying to do (it would be much more expensive to restart SanO, but hardly impossible if you don’t mind the risk — or the waste. And especially if you can get state or federal subsidies to restart!).

The answer to why the rush to knock down the domes is, of course, that they want to put SMRs there while they have a favorable government and an ignorant populace. Solar and wind prices already make the whole idea of SMRs utterly absurd from a financial point of view (secret fact: SMRs will always be financially utterly absurd, let alone have many other problems).

And everyone knows those domes are eyesores and constant reminders of the nearly catastrophic failure that caused them to be shut them down permanently. (That might be the BIGGEST advantage of the too-expensive SMRs: They supposedly are small enough to be discretely placed anywhere.)

Maybe they want SMRs in California because they want the spent fuel for future nuclear weapons, and SMR nuclear fuel (both before AND after use in the SMR) is much more highly enriched with the things they want for nuclear weapons than the “junk” in SanO’s dry casks.

There has been NO progress regarding moving San Onofre’s nuclear waste because that’s virtually impossible to do if one criteria is that somebody, somewhere, actually wants the waste. Someone fairly warned, not bamboozled. Not bribed.

No state wants it. No community. No honest politician. Nobody.

And there’s been no progress because moving all that waste is no small task, especially with nowhere to put it. Surely if anyone who already has nuclear waste wanted it (Humboldt or Rancho Seco, for instance), a lot of it could have already been shifted from hither to yon, and probably we’d be hither and someone else would be yon.

But that’s no solution. That’s just pushing the waste around. The ONLY solution is to stop making more waste — nationally. At Diablo Canyon. And not allow SMRs anywhere. Then at least we can face the problem of handling the toxic left-overs honestly. Right now, moving the waste away from SanO will accomplish only two things: First, it will invite SMRs. And second, it will make the entire nuclear industry pretend there IS a “solution” to the waste problem, even if it’s supposedly “only a temporary solution until a permanent repository is found.” And they’ll keep on making more waste.

One problem with WIPP is that it was never designed to take “high level nuclear waste” but of course, what it will take seems to have drifted up and up and up over the decades: At first it was only going to get the lowest classifications of waste, and — at least this is what we were led to believe — no plutonium, at least not in “significant” or “high” or whatever they called it — quantities.

And the opposition to WIPP remains strong in New Mexico, let alone New Mexico’s strong opposition to becoming the nation’s “temporary” repository. The proposed Texas site nearby also faces stiff opposition and will probably be dropped from the list. (It’s currently blocked by a federal court decision that’s been upheld on appeal.)

No one wants the waste.

Dan Stetson has no business being on SCE’s Community Engagement Panel, let alone leading it, while claiming ANY progress has been made — but I’ll admit the last guy was even worse (or at least seemed that way). In any case, SCE’s hand-picked CEP has never had more than one half-way reasonable person on the panel at a time, and usually less than that.

So what can be done? The real problem is that no solution is WORTH THE MONEY. If it’s going to bankrupt the nuclear industry, they don’t want it. And the entire industry wants to pretend it’s a solvable problem, when it simply isn’t. Not safely, quickly, and permanently. And certainly not cheaply, either.

So anything even slightly approaching an adequate solution is NOT available. And never will be, unless we shut down the entire industry, as we must. As the whole planet must, because we can’t afford to do anything else. The future health care costs alone, after one more accident after another…and another…and another.

Renewables are cheaper in every way.

In the meantime, the nuclear industry wants America to spend the money that was set aside for a permanent repository on THEIR problem storing the nuclear waste THEY MADE — much of it long after they KNEW Yucca Mountain was never going to open. Why are WE paying THEM? Who let that happen? The same politicians who now claim a real solution is just a matter of finding a community that wants to take the waste “temporarily” which means for their lifetime, and probably several more lifetimes.

But it won’t be a safe place, that’s why it’s “temporary.”

Why are we still making more nuclear waste if “temporary” storage is still the best we can do to get rid of the waste we continue to make?

Yet Sforza’s star-glazed eyes see Murray say: “the only thing stopping us is public trust” and believes it. Believes the simulations such as crashing an empty cask into a (non-reinforced) concrete wall, or shaking a NEW “real” dry cask with “simulated” nuclear waste as if in a simulated earthquake — not a cask that’s decades old and highly embrittled (which can happen in less than two decades, so some of ours might have hidden cracks already).

Sforza believes the tests that indicate how far the casks can fall and what they might land on are adequate. But the criteria were utterly insufficient! And the DOE knows that! Murray undoubtedly knows it too. They know far worse accidents can happen that they will not be able to handle. They know terrorists can overwhelm their security — with airplanes, with drones, and with missiles launched from nearby buildings. They know a dry cask fire in a tunnel could be impossible to reach.

They’re just willing to make you, me and everyone else take the risks they see as minimal, despite the fact that thousands of casks all over the country must travel thousands of miles over our pot-holed old highway system. They completely ignore that a bridge can fall ONTO a traveling dry cask, or the fact that a lot of bridge’s roadways are far higher than the DOE’s test drop height test.

In the 1980s, for a while I traveled every day over the Mianus River Bridge in Connecticut, but fortunately mine was not one of the vehicles — two tractor trailer trucks and two cars — that suddenly fell ~80 feet along with a large section of the bridge (three people were killed and three injured). But it wasn’t really so sudden: I heard the bridge screeching at least once a few days before it fell, as a poorly anchored pin holding the girders underneath was being sheared whenever a heavy truck passed over it. I followed the truck for several miles to prove to myself it wasn’t the truck I had heard screech (so it had to be the bridge!). Local residents had already tried to get the state highway department to investigate for weeks by then. And then suddenly the bridge section fell.

We’ll already have to crisscross the country thousands of times, covering millions of miles, to put all the nuclear waste we already have somewhere — if we ever decide where, and how.

And yet we’re still making MORE of this stuff? Are we crazy or something?

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

This essay is available online here:
https://acehoffman.blogspot.com/2024/07/millions-of-miles-thousands-of-trips.html

Addendum: There is another potential option, full of its own pitfalls and not a reason to keep making more waste. That is NEUTRALIZING the waste. It’s hardly a perfect solution, but the worst of the waste — the plutonium and some of the uranium — can be converted to shorter-lived isotopes, to some extent, so that most of what remains is “hot” for tens of centuries rather than thousands of millennia. But of course, it’s sure to be expensive (at least to set up, but it does generate heat as a “waste” product). And worst of all it would make MORE of the short-lived, most dangerous (in some ways) isotopes. And an industrial process has not been established (although the neutralization idea has been patented already). Perhaps the best advantage of neutralization is that it destroys the ability to use the nuclear waste to make weapons or to reprocess it for reuse in nuclear reactors.

Additional information about the nuclear waste neutralization process, its advantages and disadvantages, is available in an essay I wrote in 2017:
https://acehoffman.blogspot.com/2017/11/what-is-spent-nuclear-fuel.html

Editor’s Note:  We have republished the Editorial Opinion with “Twinkle-Eyed Fun and Games” here.