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2C – Daily News – Saturday, March 26, 2011 U.S. nuclear waste problem gains new scrutiny LOS ANGELES (MCT) — Japan's nuclear accident has focused attention on the U.S. practice of packing spent-fuel pools at power plants far beyond their capacity, which some sci- entists call a serious compro- mise in safety. When the first U.S. nuclear power plants went online more than half a century ago, utilities built pools next to the reactors to store their radioactive waste, like the ones at Japan's Fukushima plant that overheated and proba- bly leaked radiation into the environment. The utilities thought the pools would be for temporary storage only: The federal government had promised it would find a safe place to bury the used-up fuel rods, which remain radioac- tive for thousands of years. It has yet to make good on that commitment. Technical miscalculations, multibillion-dollar lawsuits and political stalemates over nuclear waste have kept the decaying radioactive material stationary, accumulating across the country ever since the Eisenhower administration. Now the nuclear disaster in Japan, in which at least one spent fuel pool seems to be dam- aged and leaking and may have caught fire, has thrown U.S. decisions about its own waste into focus, exposing what many scientists call a serious safety issue. The risks taken at the Fukushima Daiichi plant were less than those in the U.S., nuclear scientists say, because utilities here have had to pack more fuel rods into pools than they were designed to hold, increasing the chance that they could catch fire if they lost the water that cools them. "The accident could have been a lot worse if they were filled as densely as ours are," said Edwin Lyman, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees commercial reactors in the U.S., has launched a 90-day review of reactor safety and plans a deeper long-term examination of its regulations. The pools, consid- ered by outside experts the most important nuclear energy safety issue, almost certainly will be part of that. The U.S. now has about 65,000 tons of nuclear waste spread from the East Coast to the West Coast and from the north- ern woods to Mexican-border states. With growing anxiety, experts have debated the waste's short-term vulnerability to acci- dent or terrorist attack and its long-term potential to leak into the environment through politi- cal neglect. "U.S. operators are going to have to go back and rethink their decisions because of what hap- pened in Japan," said Kevin Crowley, director of the board on radioactive waste manage- ment at the National Research Council, which advises the fed- eral government. Crowley led a 2005 study that reported that overloading the U.S. pools put them at risk if they were to lose cooling. The study considered a terrorist attack that could puncture a hole in the pools, as well as human errors or natural events. Without cooling, spent fuel can get so hot that zirconium tubing that holds uranium pellets begins to oxidize and potentially melt radioactive isotopes, send- ing them into the atmosphere. The report recommended that the Nuclear Regulatory Com- mission force utilities to partial- ly unload their pools and move their oldest waste into dry casks, which are widely considered much safer. Plants all over the country have already loaded hundreds of dry casks with waste. But they could be loading much more and reducing the amount stored in pools, the study authors said. And though utilities did rearrange fuel rods to checker- board newer and older fuel, nuclear experts said the commis- sion did not require plant opera- tors to reduce the density of the fuel. The industry maintains that there is nothing to worry about. "We believe the pools are safe," said Rod McCullum, director of used-fuel programs at the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's primary trade group. "It is not necessary to move the fuel. You don't gain a consider- able amount of safety by moving to dry casks." McCullum said that the U.S. pools have multiple layers of safety, including redundant cool- ing systems and leakage moni- toring, though he declined to say that U.S. pools are safer than those at Fukushima. He said the industry would review its procedures and plans to ensure that they are adequate. And he said he believed the Japanese were handling their accident well. "The radiation levels, while not acceptable, are manageable," he said. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has essentially accepted the industry's rationale on the safety of dense-packing fuel rods. Over the last two decades, the agency has repeat- edly approved license applica- tions by utilities to pack more rods into the pools. Nuclear safety experts say that plants have packed up to five times more spent fuel rods than the pools were designed to store, though Nuclear Energy Institute officials say the pools contain no more than twice their original capacity. The only advantage to keep- ing the pools so packed is the cost of the dry casks, which would run about $5 billion to $10 billion nationwide, said Frank N. von Hippel, a Prince- ton University physicist who first disclosed the problem in a paper he co-wrote in 2003. He said that fixing the fuel pool problem is a key step toward safer U.S. nuclear plants. "It is such a huge risk that it is worth the cost," he said. "We may not be as lucky as the Japanese were to have the wind blowing the radioactive emis- sions out to sea." Under federal law, the waste was supposed to go to a reposi- tory at Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles north of Las Vegas. President George W. Bush approved the plan in 2002. But President Obama has taken steps to kill the plan, saying he wants to find a different site. Energy Secretary Steven Chu warned last week that it could be decades before any permanent solution for the waste is devel- oped. "The utilities say that even if an accident happens here, they can deal with it," said Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scien- tists. But, he said, the Fukushi- ma accident shows that some events are hard to foresee. "The Japanese have run out of pages of their operating manual, and they are just making things up," he said. Earthquake science advances, does nuclear safety keep up? WASHINGTON (MCT) — The 104 nuclear reactors providing 20 percent of America's electric power were designed and built in the 1960s and '70s, an era when seismologists knew much less about earth- quakes than they do today. Now that Japan's 9.0- magnitude earthquake has focused world attention on desperate efforts to halt the release of deadly radiation and on warnings to parents not to give their young chil- dren radiation-tainted tap water in Tokyo, U.S. regula- tors and nuclear industry advocates are scrambling to convince the public that America's reactors are safe. To be sure, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been attentive to earth- quake risk and has done regular assessments and upgrades as warranted over the 40 to 50 years since the reactors were first designed. In sum, the NRC says it's satisfied that all U.S. plants, including those in Califor- nia in the highest quake-risk zones, are built to withstand the biggest quake that can reasonably be expected, plus an extra margin of safe- ty. But the increased seis- mic activity in Japan, New Zealand, Chile, Haiti and elsewhere is raising new questions. "As we learned in Japan, we believe the strongest we have seen in the past is probably not the strongest we can see in the future," said John E. Ebel, a seis- mologist and professor at Boston College. "So that's the easy call. The hard call for the seismologist is how much stronger." One nuclear safety expert, Najmedin Meshkati of the University of South- ern California, described the crisis at the four side-by- side reactors in Japan as "a rude awakening" to regula- tors and the nuclear industry that it isn't enough to offer a pat expression of confi- dence that "it couldn't hap- pen here." Therein lies the conun- drum for regulators and the industry. If the estimate of poten- tial earthquake magnitude goes up too much _ espe- cially with no concrete evi- dence of large quakes in an area — engineers will warn about spending too much money to design nuclear plants. So earlier this week, the NRC announced immediate and long-term reviews of the nation's atomic plants. The agency wants to gauge the plants' ability to survive power blackouts, as occurred after the earth- quake and tsunami hit Japan's northeast coast, or equipment failures and other problems that would hamper the ability to keep the radioactive fuel cool. The Japan temblor was stronger than anything seen off its eastern coast for a century or more. Nicholas Sitar, a profes- sor in the civil and environ- mental engineering depart- ment at the University of California, Berkeley, said that seismologists and earthquake engineers have learned an enormous amount in the past 40-plus years about ground motions generated by different types of faults and how the energy from an earthquake is trans- mitted into structures. "So it would not be accu- rate to assume that the older-generation nuclear power plants have not been reanalyzed since they were built," Sitar said. Scientists today know more about what triggers earthquakes and how the combination of an earth- quake's source and site con- ditions determine damage. New faults have been dis- covered. In addition, the earth's geology reveals information about big quakes that took place before recorded history. The only part of the United States where a 9.0- scale earthquake is expected again (geologists discov- ered that one occurred there on Jan. 26, 1700) is the 750- mile-long Cascadia subduc- tion zone off the coasts of Washington, Oregon and Northern California. A sub- duction zone — a place where faults in the Earth's crust are wide enough for plates of rock to "slip" past each other — also produced the March 11 Tohoku earth- quake in Japan. Robert Yeats, a geology professor at Oregon State University, was one of the first to suggest in the 1980s that the Pacific Northwest might be vulnerable to a 9.0 subduction zone earth- quake. Today, there are tsuna- mi-warning signs on the coast and a better under- standing of earthquake risks in the region affected by the zone, but there are no nuclear power plants there. The only commercial nuclear plant in the North- west, the Columbia Gener- ating Station near Richland, Wash., is 225 miles from the affected area. The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station north of San Diego was built to with- stand a 7.0 earthquake cen- tered within five miles of the plant. Southern Califor- nia Edison, the plant owner, says there hasn't been "sig- nificant seismic activities" in the area in 120,000 years. The San Onofre plant is located within five miles of two faults. Southern Cali- fornia Edison has a seismic program that evaluated the site when the plant's two reactors were built in the 1980s, updated the work in 1995, and re-evaluated it recently, said spokesman Charles Coleman. Tehama Family Fitness Center wants to inspire you to get Healthy • Fit • Strong • and Happy! Compete, support or just attend NEW LOCATION 5K Run March 26th 8:30am at Vista School Tehama Family Fitness Center 2498 South Main St • Red Bluff 528-8656 www.tehamafamilyfitness.com