There’s a general consensus that nuclear power will be an inevitable part of US attempts to wean itself off fossil fuels. There are two obvious limits to the expansion of nuclear power, however: we can’t possibly build plants fast enough to meet our expected needs, and we still haven’t decided how to handle spent fuel. The latter issue became more acute when the proposed long-term waste repository at Yucca Mountain was finally taken off the table, leaving the US back at square one when it comes to handling spent fuel and high-level radioactive waste. Today’s issue of Science contains a policy forum suggesting that several regional repositories will ultimately be better than one.
The authors of the forum argue that long-term storage is probably the best solution. Nobody seems to be happy with continued storage at individual reactor sites, especially given that several of these reactors have already been decommissioned, and more are nearing the end of their planned lifespans. On-site storage threatens to create a situation where there’s essentially an indefinite proliferation of long-term radioactive waste storage.
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