UCS: NUKE WASTE BILL IGNORES CURRENT SNF STORAGE PROBLEM

A draft bill rolled out by a bipartisan group of four senators last week to address future spent fuel management “suffers from a glaring omission” by not addressing how waste is currently stored at reactor sites, the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote in an op-ed in The Hill yesterday. Though spent nuclear fuel will continue to be stored at sites across the country in the years, possibly even decades, it will take until storage or permanent disposal facilities are operational, the proposed legislation “fails to improve waste management practices at nuclear power plants across the country,” Dave Lochbaum and Robert Cowin with UCS wrote, and that’s a problem because ‘Plant owners—who never expected to have to deal with large amounts of radioactive waste on site—are not storing it as safely as they should or could.” The op-ed urges Congress to consider requiring that plants move their spent fuel rods to cement and steel casks and use dry cask storage. “while we’re waiting for an interim storage facility — the federal government has to insist that plant owners thin out their overstuffed cooling pools to better protect the 120 million Americans who live within 50 miles of a nuclear reactor.”