The disaster at a Japanese nuclear power plant is a chilling reminder that the US nuclear energy industry has failed to solve a big problem — where and how to store millions of highly reactive spent fuel rods. For decades, power companies and regulators have put the issue in the “too hard” basket while the rods, which stay radioactive for many years, pile up around the nation's 104 nuclear reactors. The danger is that even the crisis at the Fukushima plant won't be enough to spur any major change. “There's a lot of whistling past the graveyard on this,” said Stephen Maloney, a risk consultant in Massachusetts who works with nuclear power companies. Some executives are afraid to say publicly that the waste is too risky to keep in so many places and must be moved, he said. In Japan, apparent water losses from a spent fuel pool helped to trigger fears of a large-scale catastrophe and likely led to a rise in radiation that permeated water and air near the plant. It has led to a push from experts for a complete reevaluation of the risks taken in storing the rods. “You can already see the progression of questions forming from the realization that in Japan the spent-fuel rods pose as great, if not a larger problem, as the fuel in the reactors,” said Rod Ewing, a University of Michigan professor. Any improvement in the storage system is likely to be more expensive, a potential deterrent if it makes nuclear power less competitive compared with electricity generated by burning natural gas or coal. Meanwhile a more ambitious solution — a plan to transport US waste to Nevada for storage deep inside Yucca Mountain, a site about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas — could create additional new risks and has drawn stiff opposition from local residents, leading to it being shelved. The US nuclear industry, still the world's largest, has struggled with the storage problem ever since the first nuclear power plant was built in the 1950s. New nuclear development in the United States ground to a halt after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 but that hasn't stopped the existing plants from burning through many thousands of fuel rods since. At the end of 2009 there were 218,853 spent fuel rod assemblies in storage in the United States, according to the Congressional Research Service. Assemblies like those used at the Fukushima plant typically contain between 80 to 100 fuel rods, which means that there are now millions of rods being stored around plants. Of the total, only 49,121 assemblies were in dry casks or otherwise stored remotely, leaving the vast majority to lie in cooling pools like at the Fukushima facility. Rods can stand about 20 feet high and even a decade after use can emit enough radiation to kill a person standing nearby.
