Catastrophic release of radiation possible from terrorist attack.
The method used to store spent nuclear fuel could lead to a catastrophic release of radiation in the event of a terrorist attack, a study initiated at Princeton University says.
Terrorists targeting the high-density storage system used at nuclear power plants can cause contamination problems eight to 70 times worse than the 1986 meltdown of the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, the report said.
The study authors, a team of researchers led by Princeton Professor Frank von Hippel, called on Congress to mandate the construction of new facilities to house spent fuel in safer configurations. They estimated the cost at between $3.5 billion to $7 billion.
The study is scheduled to be published this spring in the journal Science and Global Security.
With a national nuclear waste storage facility under Yucca Mountain in Nevada a decade away, the nation’s 103 nuclear power plants have routinely packed four or five times the number of spent fuel rods into water-cooled tanks than the tanks were designed to hold, the study said.
This high-density configuration is safe when cooled by water, but could cause a fire that would release a plume of radioactivity if the cooling water leaked. The tanks could be ruptured by a hijacked jet or sabotage, the study contends.
The consequences of such a fire would be the release of radiation that would contaminate eight to 70 times more land than the area affected by Chernobyl. The cost of such a disaster would run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, the researchers reported.
The study builds in large part on analyses already done by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, pulling together disparate sources and adding new calculations to put the issues in sharper focus, Professor von Hippel said.
"The NRC has been chewing on this for 20 years," Professor von Hippel said. "That’s one of the reasons why we did this paper because they never seem to do anything about it."
The report’s authors briefed congressional staff members on Jan. 30.
"The Congress really needs to make a political judgment and needs to provide the Nuclear Regulatory Commission some guidance," he said. The report authors briefed congressional staff members on Jan. 30.
Professor von Hippel, co-director of the Program on Science and Global Security in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, said the impetus for the study came from an investigation conducted by Princeton undergraduate students last year. Five students focused on the New Jersey Salem Nuclear Generating Station and issued a report calling for the distribution of protective potassium iodide pills to people within 50 miles of nuclear plants, improvement of mock attack drills and reconfiguration of spent fuel storage.
At issue in the study is how nuclear power plant operators deal with the 12-foot-long rods of uranium which, after three or four years of use, no longer contain enough chain-reacting material to sustain a nuclear reaction. For the first few years after they are taken from the reactor, the fuel rods continue to generate a lot of heat due to their intense radioactivity.
Without cooling, the rods would burst and ignite the zirconium alloy sheaths in which they are encased.
The water-filled cooling tanks were originally designed to keep only about 100 metric tons of the hottest rods, while the cooler ones would be moved to a nuclear fuel recycling plant, which was never built. The United States also has not yet built a long-term storage facility for nuclear waste, so the pools have been packed with 400 tons or more. In its low-density configuration, a cooling tank could be adequately cooled by air in the event of a loss of water, while the high-density system could not.
The study suggests returning the water tanks to their low-density configurations and building onsite storage facilities, which would use air-cooling, for the older fuel. Some of the cost of this work already is budgeted as part of a plan to build a national storage facility at Yucca Mountain, the authors said. That project, however, is not scheduled to be built for another 10 years and would then take another 20 or 30 years to take enough waste to relieve the water tank density.