Blog Post: MIT Nuclear Fuel Cycle Study Recommends Regional 100-Year Waste Sites
“The Future of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle,” a set of recommendations from scientists and nuclear experts two years in the making, points out that spent-fuel tanks at U.S. reactors are even more full than those in Japan. While a permanent repository for the waste at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain is decades behind schedule and mothballed by the Obama administration, the study makes the case for regional storage facilities with shorter design lives.
While the report notes the potential of breeder reactors and other technologies to reprocess fuel rods and create a “closed loop” for nuclear fuel, it acknowledges that today’s plant designs and the current availability of uranium mean the U.S. nuclear industry is likely to continue to use a once-through fuel cycle for some time. In the future, though, spent fuel from the intermediate repositories could be recovered if fuel reprocessing becomes widespread.
Even if the fuel is permanently stored after 100 years instead of reprocessed, the report notes, the fuel’s radioactive decay and its most dangerous isotopes lose much of their potency during the first 50 years, making longer-term storage easier to manage. In the meantime, the report says, engineers would face no scientific hurdles to designing the intermediate storage facilities proposed.
(Download the Executive Summary of “The Future of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle”)
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