Lindsay Krall decides to study nuclear waste for the love of mystery. Figuring out how to bury radioactive atoms isn’t easy – it takes a combination of particle physics, geology and careful engineering, and a high tolerance for regulations. But the hardest ingredient is time. Nuclear waste from today’s reactors would take thousands of years to become something safer to dispose of. So any solution cannot require too much management. It must work and continue to work for generations. By then, the utility of separating those atoms would not exist, and neither would the company that designed the reactor. Who knows? Maybe the US won’t even exist.
Currently, the US has no such plan. That has been the case since 2011, when regulators facing fierce local opposition pulled the plug in a decades-long effort to store waste beneath Mount Yucca in Nevada, caused $44 billion in federal funding for this work. Since then, the nuclear industry has done a great job of storing its waste on a temporary basis, which is part of the reason Congress has shown little interest in finding solutions for generations to come. future. Long-term thinking is not their strong point. “It was a complete institutional failure in America,” Krall said.
But there is a new kernel type in the block: small modular reactor (SMR). For a long time, the US nuclear industry has stagnated, in large part due to the enormous costs of building new plants. In contrast, SMRs are small enough to be built in a factory and then transported elsewhere to produce electricity. Advocates hope this will make them more cost-effective than today’s large reactors, providing an affordable, ready-made addition to less predictable renewables. like wind and solar energy. According to some, they will also produce less radioactive waste than their predecessors. Report sponsored by the Department of Energy estimated in 2014 that the U.S. nuclear industry would generate 94% less fuel waste if old, large reactors were replaced by new, smaller reactors.
Krall was skeptical about that last part. “SMRs are often marketed as a solution — you probably don’t need a geological archive for them,” she says. So, as a postdoc at Stanford, she and two prominent nuclear experts began poring over the patents, research papers, and licensing applications of two dozen proposed reactor designs. , no design has been built to date. Thousands of pages of recompiled documents, several public records requests, and a massive addendum, later on, Krall, now a scientist for the Swedish nuclear waste company, had answer: By many measures, SMR designs generate not less, but potentially more than waste: more than five times the amount of fuel used per unit of electricity and 35 times more for other forms of waste. Research published on Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences early this week.
Startups seeking permits to build SMR designs have countered the findings and say they are prepared for any waste generated while the US segregates its waste permanently. “Five times as small as that is still a really small number,” said John Kotek, head of public affairs and policy at the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry trade association.
But the authors say that the “last part” of the fuel cycle, including waste and decommissioning, should be a larger factor in what they see as the precarious economics of new reactors. “The purpose of this paper is to foster a discussion,” said Allison Macfarlane, former chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and a co-author of the paper. “We don’t know what the costs will be until we understand what we’re dealing with.”
