My Backyard, Your Backyard:
Taking responsibility for nuclear waste

The nuclear fuel at Dairyland Power Cooperative’s La Crosse Boiling Water Reactor generated its last megawatt of electricity in 1987. Fifteen years later, 42 tons of spent fuel assemblies lie submerged in a 40-foot deep, 11-by-11-foot pool inside the power plant containment building, just downstream from the Mississippi River village of Genoa, Wisconsin.
No one expected the fuel would be there a decade and a half after the plant it once powered went idle. Its presence at Genoa, and the costs that arise from keeping it there, are among the results of a prolonged failure of political will. Congresses and administrations of both parties have postponed controversial duties. That may be ending, but not quietly.

A Present From Washington

The La Crosse Boiling Water Reactor, or LACBWR (pronounced LACK-bar), was one of the nation’s earliest and smallest nuclear generating facilities. Built by Milwaukee’s Allis-Chalmers Corporation under contract with the old Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the reactor was to be federally owned but operated by Dairyland. The plant began commercial operation as Wisconsin’s first nuclear-powered electric generating facility in 1971. For 16 years, it reliably turned out 50 megawatts of emissions-free electricity.
The LACBWR was one of four small reactors built under an AEC program dating to the 1950s. When the other three were shut down the AEC took responsibility for removing and storing their fuel, but the LACBWR was treated differently. In 1973, the commission sold the reactor to Dairyland with assurances that even if it had to cease operations, the cooperative would realize several million dollars by selling the reprocessed fuel.
That prospect evaporated in 1977 when the Carter administration ended the U.S. nuclear fuel reprocessing program. Utilities became long-term custodians of a growing quantity of spent but still highly radioactive fuel, useless to their plants but destined to stay there.
Two years later, a malfunction caused the release of a small quantity of radioactive gas from the Three Mile Island plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. No one was injured or sickened, but despite its shortcomings as a catastrophe, the Three Mile Island episode had an earth-shaking effect on energy policy. People who had lived as long as three decades with the far more realistic threat of annihilation by nuclear weapons lost all further interest in using fission to run their refrigerators. Power plant construction plans were cancelled. That no more nuclear plants would ever be built in the United States was simply understood. In 1983, defiantly firing a symbolic bullet into the inert remains, the state Legislature effectively made it illegal to build a nuclear power plant in Wisconsin.
The lawmakers knew better, however, than to close the ones that were operating. Even now, Wisconsin obtains almost one-fifth of its electricity from nuclear plants. The LACBWR isn't one of them because it was too small to run economically. Four years after Wisconsin ruled out new nuclear plants, its original one shut down.

Native Americans to the Rescue

Even if future development of nuclear power was a dead letter, the residue of its brief heyday had to be provided for. The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act mandated federal development of a permanent repository for high-level radioactive waste, to be accepting shipments in January 1998.
By the early 1990s, it didn’t take a cynic to see the government wouldn't come close to complying with its own law. Private interests offered to fill the gap.
In 1994, the Mescalero Apaches approached a Native American member of the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission who also had federal responsibilities for nuclear waste policy, and broached their interest in providing a storage site on reservation land.
That same year, nuclear utilities began exploring alternatives to federal action. More tribes, various counties, and even private landowners came forward with offers. Dairyland Power eventually joined seven active nuclear operators in a consortium called Private Fuel Storage (PFS), and some 40 potential sites were examined.
By the spring of 1996, PFS failed to reach agreement with the Mescaleros, and a tiny Utah group called the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians offered a site on tribal land.
John Parkyn knows the story well. Dairyland’s manager for nuclear and special projects and board chairman of PFS, Parkyn also managed the LACBWR while it was in active service.
The Goshutes number only about 125 men, women, and children residing on a western Utah reservation that has always been tribal land. During the early 1990s, Parkyn relates, tribal government visited nuclear facilities in the United States and other countries, videotaped what they saw, and came home to present their findings. The band decided to pursue economic opportunities deriving from a temporary waste-storage facility.
What's planned is a 125-acre concrete pad on very dry, nearly unpopulated Goshute land near Tooele, Utah. The finances are confidential, but Parkyn says PFS would lease the land, not take title. The Goshutes would receive annual payments and share in PFS profits. Utilities would insure the site as long as they use it, and when the material goes to a permanent site, PFS will re-contour the land and remove the buildings and purpose-built rail line, unless the Goshutes want to keep them.
Most necessary federal permits have been obtained. In January, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, and Surface Transportation Board concluded the project would have minimal environmental impact. It could be fully licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in September.
If that happens, Parkyn says, construction could be completed in 18 months and the facility could begin accepting shipments in 2004.
That has to sound good to Dairyland and the nuclear utilities, because 1998 mandate notwithstanding, the operational date for a permanent federal facility is now pegged at 2010. Insiders say 2018 is more realistic.

Never Say Never

Yucca Mountain is a ridge 90 miles from Las Vegas, Nevada, with an appearance more suggestive of distances measured in light years. The federal government has spent almost $8 billion studying potential homes for high-level nuclear waste, and in February, the Department of Energy called Yucca its final answer.
Arguments over Yucca Mountain have simmered since 1987, when Congress made it the only site to continue being studied. Its advantages include seismic stability, an exceptionally arid climate, and the fact that waste-containing casks can be buried deep under solid volcanic rock while remaining at least 800 feet above the local water table.
According to Roger Christians, it's a much better site than “here on the banks of the Mississippi where we never intended to be storing spent fuel for 16 years.”
Christians is Dairyland's Genoa plant manager. In addition to overseeing an active coal-fired unit, he’s in charge of making sure nothing goes wrong with the fuel assemblies on the bottom of Genoa's indoor pool.
To accomplish that mission, crews still monitor certain plant systems. “We have to keep the water pure and crystal clear so we can see the fuel assemblies,” Christians says. That means around the clock and the same in terms of security in and around the plant site—a job that’s intensified since last September.
Dairyland and its affiliated distribution cooperatives in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois spend about $4.5 million annually keeping the old fuel safe. They've been trying to cut that cost, but sending the stuff to Yucca Mountain, even after a stopover in Utah, isn’t everybody's favorite choice. The State of Nevada has filed half a dozen lawsuits since the Bush administration decided this year to move the project ahead.
The fight isn't confined to the courtroom. Federal law lets governors veto storage facilities in their states. The House of Representatives has overridden Governor Kenny Guinn's April veto, and Nevada officials have launched newspaper and television ads pushing targeted Senators to sustain.
Already facing a huge budget deficit, Nevada lawmakers in April appropriated up to $3 million to match local government and private contributions to the ad campaign.
They may or may not be effective, but there's no doubt the ads employ creative license. One says states through which shipments pass could face "catastrophic nuclear disaster."
That is "extreme exaggeration," according to Paul Farron, manager for state regulatory affairs at Milwaukee-based WE Energies, the former Wisconsin Electric. During the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, Wisconsin Electric moved nearly 500 shipments of highly radioactive material in and out of Wisconsin on heavy-haul trucks without a single incident, Farron said.
During roughly the same period, he noted, Minneapolis-based Northern States Power (now Xcel Energy,) passed 40 to 50 incident-free rail shipments through Wisconsin.
"I wouldn't say we'd never have a vehicle accident," Farron said, "but the canisters are designed for every imaginable scenario."
"They can throw this [disaster claim] out there and get people excited," but as to routes and modes of transportation, "It's all extreme speculation," he said.
One readily deflated fear is the idea of terrorists attacking a shipment and causing a radioactive release. The War on Terror would need to be very ineffective for a very long time for that to happen, as Farron notes that nobody will be shipping anything to Yucca Mountain before 2010 at the earliest.
In other words, people who embrace the argument about a nuclear threat to their communities should probably be less apprehensive about shipping spent fuel to Nevada than about leaving it where it is for the rest of this decade. It's now in 131 sites scattered across 39 states, often in less than ideal facilities.
Those 131 sites may in some cases present an energy problem of their own.
The issue is electric reliability. Some nuclear plants are short of storage space. Without safe storage, they'd be forced to shut down. In the 1990s it was feared those limitations might mean closing plants prior to scheduled license expirations, before replacement generating facilities could be built.
Not everyone found the prospect troubling. Some environmental groups adopted the posture that the waste was too dangerous to move, hoping to force plant closures. With expanded storage capacity, Wisconsin plants no longer face such a threat, but Farron notes that others, like the Indian Point facility that supplies much of New York City's electricity, have little room to expand and could be in a squeeze.
According to Roger Christians, Xcel's Prairie Island plant is another potential example: It doesn't lack space, but Minnesota law limits the spent fuel it can store. On the Mississippi at Red Wing, Prairie Island is crucial to the Twin Cities area power supply.
In a May interview, Christians envisioned lawmakers easing the limits in favor of reliability, but last October, proponents gave up on a bill to accomplish that in the 2002 session. Prairie Island is expected to reach its allotted storage capacity in 2007, six and seven years before the licenses for its two generating units expire.
One way to reduce the problem of high-level waste is to make less of it, and in Christians' view, that's where U.S. policymakers committed a major error.
Ending the federal reprocessing program "changed everything about the way we deal with spent fuel," Christians said. France, he noted, has obtained enviable results by going the opposite way and reprocessing. "They get a lot of good uranium out and re-use it and it leaves a very minimal amount of hot waste that has to be buried," he said.
In fact, Christians says the French have the right answer on multiple energy and environmental fronts. "They set the standard, in my opinion, for how this should be done. They have the cleanest air and the lowest-priced energy in Europe because they've got greater than 70 percent nuclear," he said, adding, "That's the bottom line."—Dave Hoopman