Lindsay Krall decided to study nuclear waste out of love for the arcane. Finding out how to bury radioactive atoms is not exactly straightforward: it requires a combination of careful particle physics, geology, and engineering, and a high tolerance for a large number of regulations. But the most complicated ingredient of all is time. The nuclear waste from today’s reactors will take thousands of years to become safer to handle. Therefore, any solution may not require too much management. It just has to work and keep working for generations. Then the utility that divides these atoms will not exist, nor will the company that designed the reactor. Who knows? Maybe the United States won’t exist either.
Right now, the US doesn’t have that plan. This has been the case since 2011, when regulators facing fierce local opposition disconnected from a decades-long effort to store waste on Yucca Mountain in Nevada, leaving $ 44 billion in federal funds. intended for work. Since then, the nuclear industry has done a good job of temporarily storing its waste, which is part of the reason why Congress has shown little interest in finding a solution for future generations. Long-term thinking is not your forte. “It’s been a complete institutional failure in the United States,” says Krall.
But there is a new type of nuclear in the block: the small modular reactor (SMR). For a long time, the US nuclear industry has stagnated, largely due to the huge costs of building new massive power plants. SMRs, on the other hand, are small enough to be built in a factory and then transported to another location to produce energy. Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online. According to some, they should also produce less radioactive waste than their predecessors. A report sponsored by the Department of Energy estimated in 2014 that the U.S. nuclear industry would produce 94 percent less fuel waste if large and old reactors were replaced with smaller ones.
Krall was skeptical about the latter. “In general, SMRs are marketed as a solution, you may not need a geological repository for them,” he says. As a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, she and two leading nuclear experts began researching the patents, research papers, and license applications for two dozen proposed reactor designs, none of which have been built to date. . Thousands of pages of drafted documents, a few requests for public records, and a large appendix full of later calculations, Krall, now a scientist at the Swedish nuclear waste company, got an answer: by many measures , SMR designs do not produce less, but potentially a lot month waste: more than five times the fuel spent per unit of power, and up to 35 times for other types of waste. The research was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this week.
Startups looking for licenses to build SMR designs have questioned the findings and say they are ready for any waste to be generated while the U.S. resolves permanent disposal. “Five times a small number is still a very small number,” says John Kotek, who heads politics and public affairs at the Institute for Nuclear Energy, the industry’s trade association.
But the authors say the “back-end” of the fuel cycle, which includes waste and decommissioning, should be a more important factor in what they consider to be the precarious economy of the new reactors. “The purpose of this paper is to provoke discussion,” said Allison Macfarlane, former chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and co-author of the paper. “We can’t figure out how much it will cost until we understand what we’re dealing with.”
