Even were the Energy Department to resume this year licensing efforts for Yucca Mountain as a permanent nuclear power waste disposal facility, it would still be 15 years before the site could start accepting spent fuel, says the Government Accountability Office.
By then, about 50,000 metric tons of spent fuel stored roughly equally in wet and dry storage will have accumulated, assuming that no new nuclear power plants open in the interim, according to Nuclear Energy Institute estimates cited by the GAO in an Aug. 15 report (.pdf) not posted online until Sept. 14.
The Yucca Mountain facility in Nevada was to have accepted its first delivery of spent fuel in 1998, but the Energy Department instead announced in 2009 it planned to terminate licensing work. Last year, Nuclear Regulatory Commission commissioners directed the licensing board to suspend work by Sept. 30, 2011.
"Currently, it remains uncertain whether NRC will have to resume its license review efforts and whether a repository at Yucca Mountain will be built," auditors say. Licensing an alternate disposal facility would likely take about 40 years, the GAO estimates--by when close to 140,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel will have accumulated.
Nuclear power plant operators have increasingly turned to dry cask storage to store spent fuel rods as pools for the wet storage of spent fuel rods have become more crowded. Spent fuel rods must stay inside pools of water for at least 5 years in order to cool down sufficiently to be stored in a dry cask, where passive air flow is sufficient to keep the spent fuel from heating to dangerous level.
Delays in a centralized nuclear waste disposal facility mean that reactor operators face uncertainty in selecting the type of metal canister spent fuel rods should be placed in for dry cask storage, auditors say. The Energy Department did publish canister specifications for waste destined for Yucca Mountain, but the canister never went into production.
They also warn that in the decades it will take to open a disposal facility--or even an interim centralized storage facility where spent fuel could be consolidated--spent fuel will pile up onsite at nuclear power plants. Most American reactors will reach the final end of their license by about 2030 and will siphon off the pools by about 2040.
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