Topline: The federal government is so prone to excessive spending that it is even wasting money on waste itself.
The Department of Energy could save up to $229.2 billion over the next several years by changing the way it disposes of nuclear waste, according to the Government Accountability Office. A vague and poorly understood law from the 1980s makes the process overly burdensome and expensive.
Key facts: The Department of Energy is in charge of treating water, soil, equipment and more that were contaminated from nuclear weapons production during World War II and the Cold War.
Disposing of “high-level” radioactive waste is time-consuming and expensive. It must be stored for years to let some of its radioactivity decay, and then it is buried deep underground. “Low-level” waste, which has less radiation, is easier to get rid of. It gets placed in a steel or concrete drum and is buried just a few feet below ground.
Waste of the Day 5.22.26
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But, according to the GAO, the definitions for each kind of waste are ambiguous and have not been updated since 1983. There is no standard way to measure what federal law considers “highly radioactive.”
To be safe, the Department of Energy errs on the side of classifying nuclear waste as high-level. It spends billions every year on the expensive storage and burial of waste that would likely be classified as low-level if the 1983 law were updated. The department told the GAO that otherwise, it might be sued by environmental advocacy groups for not following a strict interpretation of the law.
Nuclear waste treatment plants are located in New York, South Carolina, Idaho and Washington. The Washington site alone could save up to $210 billion in 14 years by classifying 80% of its high-level waste as low-level without sacrificing safety, according to the GAO. The other three sites could save a combined $19.2 billion.
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Summary: Congress should consider updating the legal definition of high-level radioactive waste if cost savings can be realized without compromising safety.
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This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.
The real DoE nuclear waste wasted expense is that spent nuclear fuel is not recycled as it is in Japan using the MOX process at Rokkasho. That way, the high level radioactive nucleotides are much reduced in volume, can be glassified, and safely buried at low cost.
See my comment here. The GAO report isn’t about proposals to reprocess the nation’s stock of civilian spent nuclear fuel. It’s about the liquid and semi-solid wastes generated over some number of years of defense plutonium production at the Hanford Site, roughly 56 million gallons of radioactive chemical wastes stored in below-ground tanks which have no further economic or defense value.
Ford and Carter screwed up by banning recycling spent fuel.
Big time. And their rationale—avoiding proliferation—made no sense even at that time! US spent nuclear fuel was always under US control. And Carter was a Navy nuclear engineer, so ignorance was not an excuse.
Carter was trying to “set a good example”.
The road to perdition is paved with good intentions.
Government bureaucrats and those who feed them are also “low-level waste.”
radiating contempt towards regular Joe and extremely toxic…we would be better off having them buried as deep as possible (sarc)
Of course, there’s that site in Nevada that we spent billions to build, and then didn’t. Because we were scammed.
My day, too, will come.
The GAO report isn’t about proposals to reprocess the nation’s stock of civilian spent nuclear fuel.
It’s about the liquid and semi-solid wastes generated over some number of years of defense plutonium production at the Hanford Site, roughly 56 million gallons of radioactive chemical wastes stored in below-ground tanks which have no further economic or defense value.
Hanford Cleanup: DOE’s Plans to Grout and Dispose of Millions of Gallons of Tank Waste
The Hanford site is roughly fifty miles northwest of where I live out here in the Middle of Nowhere, Washington state. Over the last thirty-five years, I’ve been employed here and there at various times by consulting firms who were supporting project planning activities for Hanford projects.
The GAO report exposes only the tip of the iceberg concerning the interactions of environmental law with DOE’s waste classification criteria vis-a-vis the actual levels of radioactivity in these chemical and semi-solid wastes.
Most of the Hanford tank waste is targeted to be loaded into glass logs through a very expensive and somewhat complicated vitrification process. Much of that waste — half maybe even three quarters of it — could be grouted instead of being vitrified and then be disposed of as low level waste assuming some kind of compromise could be reached among the stakeholders concerning what its true environmental dangers actually are.
The State of Washington and the other regional stakeholders want the Hanford tank waste to be vitrified. These stakeholders want it loaded into the most stable form of waste media technically possible, and that is solid glass. The reason they want it that way is because they are suspicious, with good reason, that the waste will never leave the Hanford site.
But there is this big problem. Only two percent of the volume of a glass log is the radioactive waste. Which means that by using vitrification as the primary disposal method, the total volume of material which must be subsequently managed as high-level nuclear waste increases fifty times.
The dollar savings from grouting some good portion of the tank waste versus vitrification are huge. That said, vitrification is now successfully underway. However, the current facilities can’t handle all the waste that is now targeted for eventual vitrification.
Some good fraction could be handled through grouting. If the waste is grouted according to technical criteria acceptable to low-level nuclear waste management sites in Texas and New Mexico, then it could leave the Hanford site for parts elsewhere and the State of Washington (at least) would be happy that it’s gone.
Only if they can define woman and man.
Beaumont, California, early 1980’s. Westinghouse wanted to build a storage facility for low-level waste. The city council meeting was ‘interesting’. Lack of knowledge was rampant. “Disaster”, “We’re all exposed.” If they had checked the upper limit of radiation that the site was licensed for they would have found that it was lower than the limit for the local hospital.
(I was working for a tax preparation service, had the summers off. Spent one summer doing plant maintenance at that facility. Only time I’ve worked with liquid nitrogen, for cooling sensors.)