More than 60,000 tons of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel is stored on the shores of four of the five Great Lakes — in some cases, mere yards from the waterline — in still-growing stockpiles.
“It’s actually the most dangerous waste produced by any industry in the history of the Earth,” said Gordon Edwards, president of the nonprofit Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility.
The spent nuclear fuel is partly from 15 current or former U.S. nuclear power plants, including four in Michigan, that have generated it over the past 50 years or more. But most of the volume stored along the Great Lakes, more than 50,000 tons, comes from Canadian nuclear facilities, where nuclear power is far more prevalent.
It remains on the shorelines because there's still nowhere else to put it. The U.S. government broke a promise to provide the nuclear power industry with a central, underground repository for the material by 1998. Canada, while farther along than the U.S. in the process of trying to find a place for the waste, also doesn't have one yet.
More than 60,000 tons of highly radioactive, spent nuclear fuel is stored on the shores of the Great Lakes, on both the U.S> and Canadian sides.Keith Matheny/Detroit Free Press
The nuclear power industry and its federal regulator, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, point to spent nuclear fuel's safe on-site storage over decades. But the remote possibility of a worst-case scenario release — from a natural disaster, a major accident, or an act of terrorism — could cause unthinkable consequences for the Great Lakes region.
The nuclear power industry and its federal regulator, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, point to spent nuclear fuel's safe on-site storage over decades. But the remote possibility of a worst-case scenario release — from a natural disaster, a major accident, or an act of terrorism — could cause unthinkable consequences for the Great Lakes region.
Scientific research has shown a radioactive cloud from a spent fuel pool fire would span hundreds of miles, and force the evacuation of millions of residents in Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Toronto or other population centers, depending on where the accident occurred and wind patterns.
It would release multiple times the radiation that emanated from the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011 — a disaster that led to mass evacuations, no-go zones that exist to this day, and a government ban on fishing in a large, offshore area of the Pacific Ocean because of high levels of radioactive cesium in the water and in fish. The fishing industry there has yet to recover, more than seven years later.
“The Mississippi and the Great Lakes — that would be really bad,” said Frank von Hippel, senior research physicist and professor of public and international affairs emeritus at Princeton University.
Added Jim Olson, environmental attorney and founder of the Traverse City-based nonprofit For Love of Water, or FLOW: “The fact that it’s on the shorelines of the Great Lakes takes that high consequence that would be anywhere and paints it red and puts exclamation marks around it.”
Spent nuclear fuel is so dangerous that, a decade removed from a nuclear reactor, its radioactivity would still be 20 times the level that would kill a person exposed to it. Some radioactive byproducts of nuclear power generation remain a health or environmental hazard for tens of thousands of years. And even typically harmless radioactive isotopes that are easily blocked by skin or clothing can become extremely toxic if even small amounts are breathed in, eaten or drank, making their potential contamination of the Great Lakes — the drinking water supply to 40 million people — the connected Mississippi River and the prime agricultural areas of the U.S. a potentially frightening prospect.
Nuclear power is generated from the heat and energy given off when an atom is split.Keith Matheny/Detroit Free Press
Click on map locations for nuclear site details:
All numbers approximate. U.S. site wet pool storage data from 2011; dry cask storage data from 2014, and may include some quantity of spent fuel listed as wet pool-stored in the 2011 survey. Sources: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, U.S. Energy Information Administration, U.S. Department of Energy, Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission
Estral Beach, an out-of-the-way neighborhood along western Lake Erie in Monroe County's Berlin Township, is literally in the shadow of the cooling towers of the Fermi 2 nuclear power plant, where more than 600 tons of spent nuclear fuel remains stored.
"I think it's a disgrace," said Ken Evanoff, who lives less than a mile from the reactor.
"All of us can complain about it, but there ain't nothing that's going to be done about it, in the long run. When is it going to change?"
A block closer to the plant in Estral Beach, Craig Borowski has lived with Fermi 2 out his window for three decades.
"It's always in the back of your mind," he said. "It's like a war zone, and that waste is the collateral damage of our existence. It's the easiest path to take versus doing the right thing."
For five years, Michigan residents, lawmakers, environmental groups and others around the Midwest have, loudly and nearly unanimously, opposed a planned Canadian underground repository for low-to-medium radioactive waste at Kincardine, Ontario, near the shores of Lake Huron.
Meanwhile, spent nuclear fuel, vastly more radioactive, sits not far from the shores of four Great Lakes — Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario — at 15 currently operating or former nuclear power plant sites on the U.S. side. In Michigan, that includes Fermi 2; the Donald C. Cook nuclear plant in Berrien County; the Palisades nuclear plant in Van Buren County, and the former Big Rock Point nuclear plant in Charlevoix County, which ceased operation in 1997 and where now only casks of spent nuclear fuel remain.
Neither the U.S. nor the Canadian government has constructed a central collection site for the spent nuclear fuel. It’s not just a problem in the Great Lakes region — more than 88,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel, an amount that is rising, is stored at 121 U.S. locations across 39 states.
Stephen Tait is a spokesman for DTE Energy's Fermi 2 nuclear plant, where the stores of spent nuclear fuel near the shores of Lake Erie date to when the plant started commercial operation in 1988.
“Our canisters and buildings are able to withstand the impacts of natural disasters, man-made objects, terrorist attacks, wide-bodied commercial aircraft impacts,” he said.
“All of our used fuel is stored, maintained and protected with safety as our top priority.”
Wet and dry
Spent nuclear fuel isn’t only radioactive, it continues to generate heat. It requires storage in pools with circulating water for typically five years before it can be moved into so-called dry-cask storage — concrete-and-steel obelisks where spent fuel rods receive continued cooling by circulating air.
In practice, however, because of the high costs associated with transferring waste from wet pools to dry casks, nuclear plants have kept decades worth of spent fuel in wet storage. Plant officials instead “re-rack” the pools, reconfiguring them to add more and more spent fuel, well beyond the capacities for which the pools were originally designed.
“The prevailing practice in the United States is you re-rack the pools until they are just about as dense-packed as the nuclear core,” von Hippel said.
Only in recent years have nuclear plants stepped up the transition to dry cask storage because there’s no room left in the wet pools. Still, about two-thirds of on-site spent nuclear fuel remains in wet pools in the U.S.
Spent nuclear fuel is stored in a pool at the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station in Pickering, Ontario in this July 24, 2018 photo. (Photo: Ontario Power Generation - Brian Pieters Corporate Visuals)
That’s a safety concern, critics contend. A catastrophe or act of terrorism that drains a spent fuel pool could cause rising temperatures that could eventually cause zirconium cladding — special brackets that hold the spent fuel rods in bundles — to catch fire.
Such a disaster could be worse than a meltdown in a nuclear reactor, as spent nuclear fuel is typically stored with nowhere near the fortified containment of a reactor core.
“The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl,” a 2003 research paper by von Hippel and seven other nuclear experts stated.
The reference is to the worst nuclear power disaster in world history, the April 1986 reactor explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the former Soviet Union, now a part of the Ukraine, where 4,000 to 90,000 are estimated to have died as a result of the radiation released. A study by the University of Exeter in Great Britain, released this June, found that cow’s milk from farms about 125 miles from the Chernobyl accident site still — more than 30 years later —- contains the radioactive element cesium at levels considered unsafe for adults and at more than seven times the limit unsafe for children.
Allison Macfarlane, a professor of public policy and international affairs at George Washington University, served as chairman of the NRC during the Obama administration from July 2012 until December 2014.
“What I think needs more examination is the practice of densely packing the fuel in the pool,” she said.
The NRC does not regulate how much fuel can be in a pool, in what configuration it’s placed, and how old the fuel is, Macfarlane said.
“We did consider doing more study of this situation, what potential hazards may exist from densely packing spent nuclear fuel pools, and my colleagues declined to support me on that," she said.
“What you worry about are the kinds of situations you can’t yet imagine — which is what happened at Fukushima.”
Fukushima and 'The Devil's Scenario'
On March 11, 2011, following a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and an ensuing, 50-foot tsunami, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan lost cooling capabilities for four of its six reactors. The cores became damaged and radiation was released into the atmosphere, making it the world’s second-worst nuclear power industry accident after Chernobyl.
But it’s what happened — or almost happened — at the plant's Unit 4 spent-fuel pool that gives nuclear watchdogs nightmares.
A hydrogen explosion four days into the disaster left the building housing the Unit 4 spent-fuel pool in ruins. The pool was seven stories up in a crumbling, inaccessible building.
It "was so radioactive, you couldn’t put people up there,” von Hippel said. “For about a month after Fukushima, people didn’t know how much water was in the pool. They were shooting water up there haphazardly with a hose, trying to drop it by helicopter."
Two weeks after the earthquake and tsunami, the Japanese Atomic Energy Commission secretly conducted a worst-case scenario study of the ongoing disaster. The biggest fear that emerged: that a self-sustaining fire would start in the Unit 4 spent fuel pool, spreading to the nearby, damaged reactors. That, they found, would release radiation requiring evacuations as far away as 150 miles, to the outskirts of Tokyo and its more than 13.4 million residents.
“That was the devil’s scenario that was on my mind,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said during a special commission’s 2014 investigation of the accident.
“Common sense dictated that, if that came to pass, then it was the end of Tokyo.”
The No. 1 reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, is seen at left, with its upper part of the walls blown off after an explosion in Okumamachi, Fukushima Prefecture (state), northeastern Japan, Saturday, March 12, 2011. (Photo: Taichi Kaizuka, AP)
The worst-case-scenario report was not released for nearly a year. “The content was so shocking that we decided to treat it as if it didn’t exist,” the Japan Times quoted a senior Japanese government official as saying in January 2012.
What kept the spent fuel rods covered with water in Unit 4 was a miraculous twist of fate: The explosion had jarred open a gate that typically separated the Unit 4 spent fuel pool from an adjacent reactor pool.
“Leakage through the gate seals was essential for keeping the fuel in the Unit 4 pool covered with water,” a 2016 report on the Fukushima accident by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine concluded.
“Had there been no water in the reactor well, there could well have been severe damage to the stored fuel and substantial releases of radioactive material to the environment."
It’s a startling “very near-miss,” said Gordon Thompson, executive director of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“Given wind directions that are common in Japan, they could have been looking at removing the population of Tokyo for decades, or centuries,” he said. “You’re talking tens of millions of people that would have to relocate. That’s the bullet that Japan dodged.”
Following Fukushima, the NRC required U.S. nuclear power plants to install instrumentation showing real-time water levels in spent-fuel pools even in the event of a power outage. Consideration was also given to speeding up transfer of spent-fuel from wet pools to dry casks, but NRC officials rejected that.
"In 2013, the staff evaluated whether there would be a significant enhancement to safety by expediting the transfer of fuel from pool to cask," NRC officials told the Free Press in an email. "The conclusion was that the increase in safety would not be significant enough to warrant requiring expedited transfer. The timing of transfer to cask is therefore a business decision for the licensee rather than a safety issue."
The nuclear power industry and regulators “try to maintain that everything is safe and secure, and it’s really not,” said Kevin Kamps, a nuclear waste watchdog for the nonprofit Beyond Nuclear, an anti-nuclear power and weapon organization based in Maryland.
“It’s incredibly irresponsible to keep these pools as jammed full as possible because of the risk it adds and because they’re going to have empty these pools eventually, anyway.”
Added Thompson, “Even that realization about Japan has not budged the U.S. nuclear industry or the NRC’s willingness to tolerate the risk at nuclear plants.”
The U.S. nuclear industry sees Fukushima differently — in some ways as a success story.
“At Fukushima, you not only had a tsunami, you blew up the buildings … and you still did not drain the pool,” said Rod McCullum, senior director for fuel and decommissioning at the Nuclear Energy Institute, the trade association for nuclear utilities in the U.S.
“Those pools and those casks withstood explosions and earthquakes and tsunamis, all on the same day.”
A scenario where a fire can occur by the draining of water from a spent-fuel pool “has never been demonstrated,” McCullum said. He noted safety measures added in the U.S. since Fukushima include the ability to provide extra pumps and water supplies, in minutes or hours, should a spent fuel pool become breached and lose water — even if the disaster required that the resources be brought in by air from farther away.
But McCullum also acknowledged the shock waves through the global nuclear power industry caused by the Japanese disaster.
“After Fukushima, we never say anything is impossible,” he said.
A promise broken
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
After the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945, ushering the end of World War II, the U.S. military continued to experiment with bigger, more lethal nuclear bomb capabilities. But a simultaneous push also began to harness the “pollution-free” potential of nuclear power.
“In the United States, when the nuclear industry was established in the 1950s and 1960s, the assumption was that the spent nuclear fuel would be reprocessed,” Thompson said.
A plutonium reprocessing facility was opened in New York state in the early 1960s, operated for six years, and then folded amid skyrocketing costs and various mishaps. President Jimmy Carter banned reprocessing in 1977 because of the costs and concern about the proliferation of plutonium.
Carter’s decision was the correct one, said Edwin Lyman, senior scientist in the Global Security Program at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But “it did leave the utilities in a lurch,” eliminating a method they’d planned to use for dealing with their growing nuclear waste stockpiles.
By 1980, 77 nuclear power plants were storing increasing amounts of spent nuclear fuel on-site. Two years later, Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in January 1983. It created a timetable and a procedure to create a permanent, underground, central disposal site for high-level radioactive waste. It also declared that the federal government would “take title” to all high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel at plant sites nationwide, and, in return for payment of fees by the industry, would dispose of the waste at a new, central repository site “beginning not later than Jan. 31, 1998.”
After a few years of site evaluation, in December 1987, Congress amended the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to designate one site, Yucca Mountain, Nevada, as the permanent, national nuclear waste repository location. Some called it the “Screw Nevada Bill,” Thompson said.
Highly toxic, highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel has piled up at plants throughout both the U.S. and Canada-- and along the Great Lakes' shores.Keith Matheny/Detroit Free Press
“Very quickly, the political difficulties of developing a repository started becoming apparent,” he said. “The thinking was, ‘Nevada has a relatively small congressional contingent. There’s already a radioactive nuclear weapons test site there, anyway. Let’s just shove it there.’ All other options were then off the table.”
Not surprisingly, Nevada fought back. The legal and political battle went on for more than a decade. The 1998 deadline for a repository came and went. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Energy under President Barack Obama ended its pursuit of a Yucca Mountain repository, amid pressure from powerful Nevada Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, who became Senate majority leader in 2007.
By 2014, having paid more than $39.8 billion in fees to the U.S. Nuclear Waste Fund, with no promised central repository taking away their still-rising stockpiles of spent fuel, nuclear utilities sued the federal government, and won a series of settlements.
“Every day, the taxpayers of America are paying $2.2 million for keeping this spent nuclear fuel on nuclear power plant sites — over $800 million a year," McCullum said.
President Donald Trump’s administration has signaled a willingness to revive the Yucca Mountain plan, but it remains more wish than near-reality.
“The lesson we’ve learned is these projects take so long, you really can’t impose them on local populations,” von Hippel said. “You have to get consent.”
The original 9/11 idea
In August 2002, al-Jazeera reporter Yosri Fouda got an anonymous call offering him an incredible interview with two of the biggest fugitives from justice on the globe: al-Qaida leaders Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the so-called mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh.
Wrote London’s The Guardian about Fouda’s account at the time: “After two days in a run-down hotel (in Karachi, Pakistan), he was passed through a chain of people before being blindfolded, put in a car (trunk) and driven to an apartment building. He was taken to a flat strewn with laptop computers and mobile phones and occupied by two men whom he recognized as Bin al-Shibh and Mohammed.
Among the things Fouda said he learned in his interview: That the initial targets for what became the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks included two, unspecified U.S. nuclear power plants.
"It was decided to abandon nuclear targets for the moment," Fouda said Mohammed explained to him. "I mean for the moment," Mohammed added.
Al-Qaida leaders feared an attack on U.S. nuclear facilities “might get out of hand,” Fouda said he was told.
Noted Kamps of the nonprofit Beyond Nuclear, “We’re relying on the moral restraint of a terrorist organization not to attack nuclear plants.”
That startling revelation was later amplified in the 9/11 Commission’s report, which not only noted Mohammed’s account, but that 9/11 ringleader and hijacker Mohammed Atta, in July 2001 meetings with Bin al-Shibh in Spain, “mentioned he had considered targeting a nuclear facility he had seen during familiarization flights near New York.”
The plan was ultimately scuttled because Atta “thought a nuclear target would be difficult because the airspace around it was restricted, making reconnaissance flights impossible and increasing the likelihood that any plane would be shot down before impact," the 9/11 Commission report states.
Two men, identified by authorities as suspected hijackers Mohamed Atta, right, and Abdulaziz Alomari, center, pass through airport security, Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001 at Portland International Jetport in this photo from the airport surveillance tape released Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2001. Authorities say the two men took a commuter flight to Boston before boarding American Airlines Flight 11 which was one of four jetliners hijacked Sept. 11, 2001, and one of two which were crashed into the World Trade Center.
(Photo: Portland Police Department, AP)
Edwin Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists said the nuclear facility in question was probably Indian Point in New York, about 25 miles north of New York City. In an ironic twist, the supposed heightened security measures that discouraged Atta from a nuclear plant strike don’t exist, Lyman said.
“In fact, there was no such protection,” he said. “There is no no-fly-zone around nuclear plants.”
It's still not an outright prohibition. After 9/11, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a "notice-to-airmen" stating: “In the interest of national security and to the extent practicable, pilots are strongly advised to avoid the airspace above, or in proximity to such sites as power plants (nuclear, hydro-electric, or coal), dams, refineries, industrial complexes, military facilities and other similar facilities. Pilots should not circle as to loiter in the vicinity over these types of facilities.”
Personnel at nuclear plants "voluntarily report to us and to local law enforcement whenever they see a plane loitering in the vicinity," NRC spokesman David McIntyre told the Free Press. "Such pilots may be greeted by local law enforcement upon landing and further advised not to fly over or loiter over a plant."
The policy also applies for remote-controlled drones, McIntyre said.
In a Great Lakes region where magnitude-9.0 earthquakes and tsunamis aren’t a potential threat to stockpiles of spent nuclear fuel, terrorism remains possible.
The NRC is understandably vague in its discussion of the nuclear power industry’s preparedness to thwart or withstand acts of terrorism — but asserts that facilities are, indeed, prepared. The agency has implemented security requirements for spent-fuel storage in accordance with a “design basis threat,” an outlined list of potential threats codified in U.S. law, including “a single group attacking through one entry point, multiple groups attacking through multiple entry points … well-trained (including military training and skills) and dedicated individuals, willing to kill or be killed.” The scenarios include land- or water-borne vehicles with bombs. Notably, they do not include attacks from the air.
“We have highly trained and highly armed security forces at U.S. nuclear plants,” said McCullum of the Nuclear Energy Institute.
“They actually drill this. Force on force. 'Mission Impossible'-type attacks on nuclear facilities and they have to defend them, again and again and again.
“We don’t believe in magic. We believe in concrete and steel and gates and guns.”
But von Hippel, the senior research physicist and professor emeritus from Princeton University, has reviewed security preparedness at nuclear facilities — including the classified reports not available to the public — and has remaining concerns.
“A previous National Academies study I reviewed (in 2006) pointed out a variety of different scenarios their security arrangements don’t cover,” he told the Free Press. “There were two versions of the report, one unclassified version, but specifics about the scenarios that were of concern were classified. We reviewed the issue again in 2016 and concluded they had not resolved the issues.”
It’s an economic issue, von Hippel said. Threats beyond those specifically listed "would be up to the military, up to the federal government," he said.
“How exactly is the government supposed to do that? I guess it’s really by intelligence. Because government isn’t there at the plant. Like we should have been able to do with 9/11, we should be able to see the threat coming. That’s the thinking.”
As spent nuclear fuel moves to dry casks, the threat of terrorism, while not heightened over wet pools, becomes a more particular focus, von Hippel said.
“You worry more about terrorism and less about an accident with dry casks,” he said. “They’re air-cooled, passive, so there’s no machinery that can malfunction, no loss of coolant potential. You’re really worried about somebody blowing a hole into a dry cask and making sure the maximum amount of radioactivity comes out.”
Thompson, the executive director of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies at Cambridge, sees “a big void in national security planning” when it comes to terror threats at nuclear facilities.
“The NRC’s position on beyond design basis threats is essentially that this is a matter for the national security apparatus — it’s not our job, so somebody else will take care of it,” he said. “But if you look at the Pentagon, Homeland Security, I think you will look in vain to find any part of that apparatus that is addressing that area that the NRC says is not its job.”
Welcome to Zion, nuclear waste dump
Ask Zion, Illinois, Mayor Al Hill what the federal government’s broken promise on taking spent nuclear fuel away means in his community, and you’ll get an earful.
At the city of about 25,000 on the shores of Lake Michigan, 45 miles north of Chicago, just south of the Wisconsin border, twin reactors operated from 1968 to 1998. The facility shut down one year after Illinois deregulated electric utilities.
This August 1986 file photo shows Commonwealth Edison's nuclear power plant, closed by parent company Exelon Corp. in 1998, in Zion, Ill. (Photo: Charles Bennett, AP)
The community knew it had “unwritten understandings” with the nuclear facility, Hill said. Some were positive, some negative.
“We knew we’d have an unsightly nuclear power plant sitting there for years and years,” he said. “It limited the recreation opportunities on the lakefront for residents and nonresidents.”
In return, the plant owner, ComEd, paid more than $19 million a year in taxes to the city, local schools, the park and library district, Hill said. The plant provided 800 jobs and a payroll of about $40 million.
Now, with the plant gone and demolished, what remains is a field of concrete and steel obelisks, 65 in all, containing 2,226 spent nuclear fuel assemblies.
Now there are no positives, only negatives, Hill said.
“There was never an understanding, it was never part of the equation, that these spent-fuel rods were going to be here, and we were going to serve as a de facto interim nuclear storage facility,” he said.
It has “severely inhibited” economic development opportunities on the lakefront, Hill said.
“I’ve been told on more than one occasion, when we’ve been trying to get somebody to develop here, that there’s no way they will come while that nuclear waste is still next door,” he said. “(They’ve said), ‘The perception is you guys all glow in the dark.’ ”
Chris Daisy owns Zion Cyclery, a bicycle shop on Sheridan Road in Zion a few blocks away from the dry casks of spent nuclear fuel. He says his business is an anomaly, doing well and bringing in customers from other, nearby cities.
"Our downtown, compared to other downtowns in the county, we're doing terribly," he said.
"There's zero foot traffic in Zion. There's absolutely no one walking downtown here during the day.
"We're basically turned into a de facto nuclear waste dump because what was promised to be taken out of here has never been taken out."
While the federal government is paying nuclear utilities for its failure to develop a central repository for spent fuel, that money isn’t coming to communities like Zion, left holding the nuclear waste bag, Hill said.
“This is where the spent fuel rods are going to be for the foreseeable future,” he said. “I understand there’s a movement afoot to get Yucca Mountain moving again. But that’s going to be a battle, and that’s going to take a lot of years.
“Our position is, if we’re going to serve as a spent-fuel rod storage facility, we should be compensated. The federal government should be compensating us for that.”
The negative economic impact is only part of the concern, Daisy said. Always looming in the background, however remote the possibility might be, is the potential of the unimaginable.
"These days, in an age of terror attacks, you don't want a bunch of spent uranium sitting on the shore of Lake Michigan," he said. "It doesn't make sense."
Canada's Yucca Mountain
Because nuclear power is much more widely used in Canada — the province of Ontario alone has 20 nuclear reactors at three plants — it also generates much more nuclear waste.
In Ontario, nearly 52,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel is stored on-site at nuclear plants along Lakes Huron and Ontario.
“There’s a huge amount of high-level, radioactive waste stored right along the water,” said Edwards, the president of the nonprofit Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility.
Dry storage containers of spent nuclear fuel are stored at Ontario Power Generation's Western Waste Management Facility, on the shores of Lake Huron in Kincardine, Ontario, in this May 2017 photo.
(Photo: Ontario Power Generation)
Like the U.S., Canada is seeking a long-term storage solution that will involve a central underground repository. Unlike the U.S., the Canadian government is seeking willing hosts, promising jobs and economic activity. The Canadian Nuclear Waste Management Organization has trimmed a list of 22 interested communities down to five. Two of those finalists are on the shores of the Great Lakes: Huron-Kinloss and South Bruce, Ontario, near the Bruce nuclear reactor on Lake Huron, where a proposed underground storage facility for low-to-intermediate radioactive waste is already drawing controversy.
Final site selection is planned by 2023, with the underground spent nuclear fuel repository in operation by the 2040s, Ontario Power Generation officials said.
“The current way to store (spent nuclear fuel) is safe, but it requires greater controls, such as a nuclear response force to ensure the safety of the facility, the safeguarding,” said Karine Glenn, director of the waste and decommissioning division of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.
“Internationally, the consensus has been that the best way to manage the fuel on a long-term basis — we’re talking thousands of years — is to put it in a repository and seal it off from human intrusion.”
Where do we go from here?
Despite a half-century of evidence to the contrary, the continued position of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is that highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel will not stay on-site at locations around the Great Lakes and elsewhere — it will be moved to that still-aspirational central repository, somewhere.
Interim storage facilities have been recently proposed for west Texas and near Carlsbad, New Mexico. The proposed facility in Andrews, Texas, would hold about 44,000 tons of the waste, stored above ground and accepted in 5,000-ton phases. Officials predicted it could begin accepting waste by 2021.
The proposed southeast New Mexico facility would store up to 110,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel in underground storage casks meant to hold the waste for about 40 years, per the license application.
But many hurdles remain, and some question whether yet another temporary solution helps much.
The nuclear power industry and its regulator in the U.S., the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, assures that the spent nuclear fuel is stored safely. But critics worry an unforeseen calamity could breach the storage containers and cause a radioactivity release.Keith Matheny/Detroit Free Press
Even if a central repository is one day approved, another complication arises — how to get two generations of the most dangerous industrial waste man has ever created from sites all over the country to one point.
“You can’t just wave a magic wand and teleport the wastes out to New Mexico — that’s going to take 50 years,” said Kamps, the radioactive waste analyst with the nonprofit Beyond Nuclear.
Critics, with gallows humor, have dubbed the years of required trips down highways and railways “Mobile Chernobyl.”
“We would be transporting this stuff for decades over road and railways,” Edwards said. “It would make the potential for problems and accidental release even worse.”
Edwards' proposed solution: Pulling the waste away from shorelines, and encasing it in much more hardened, protective enclosures, and monitoring it appropriately.
No nuclear power-using country, anywhere in the world, has yet successfully built and used a long-term, underground repository for spent nuclear fuel.
“It’s true that we have to do something with the waste of some sort,” Edwards said. “But it’s not true that we have a solution. We have ideas of how we might possibly handle it. But we don’t know if that’s really going to be effective.”
Germany, in the 1980s, tried using an abandoned salt and potash mine to store barrels of nuclear waste over 30 years, the Asse II mine. It’s now prompting a cleanup that may take 30 years and cost nearly $12 billion U.S. dollars. The government has disputed the contention of workers at the mine that they were exposed to excessive levels of radiation, causing an unusual number of cancers.
Meanwhile, many U.S. nuclear plants are reaching their designed lifespans, and with wind and solar increasingly competitive as energy sources, utilities are taking hard looks at whether to stay in the nuclear business.
Nuclear power is projected to drop as a percentage of the world’s power generation mix from 10 percent in 2017 to just 5.6 percent by 2050, a report issued by the International Atomic Energy Agency this summer found.
That could mean more communities hosting casks of dry-stored spent nuclear fuel, and nothing else. If central repository solutions aren’t found, within years, the re-licensing of some early dry-cask storage facilities will come into play, as they meet a lifespan they were never expected to reach.
“The age of nuclear power is winding down, but the age of nuclear waste is just beginning,” Edwards said.
Contact Keith Matheny: 313-222-5021 or kmatheny@freepress.com. Follow on Twitter @keithmatheny.
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