Any debate over nuclear power will have one side insisting that it’s a “cheap and environmentally responsible” source of energy, with the other side countering that it isn’t cheap unless heavily subsidized in the construction phase, and that its “responsible” credential has recently come very much into doubt.

But proponents have, so far,  successfully kept the mainstream media from linking to the elephant in the room: the issue of what to do with the waste.

That question was never even raised in a recent high-profile PBS Frontline story that has been questioned for its apparent industry bias.  

The program looked at the prospects of nuclear energy, post-Fukushima, and seemed to be arguing that any country that chooses, as Germany has, to withdraw from the nuclear school is behaving irrationally and will live to regret the decision, since they can not possibly function off the nuclear grid.  Of course, even as the program was aired, Japan was demonstrating rather well how to do just that in the face of an economic crisis that was generated by a natural disaster but compounded by the mismanagement of its nuclear industry.

The good people of Japan have another dilemma on their hands, though. As an industrialized island nation that, for forty years, was heavily invested in nuclear energy to supply its power needs, the waste issue now rears its ugly head.

Spent fuel from Japanese power generation is currently finding temporary storage in on-site pools at reactor sites, but TEPCO has plans to move these materials to the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant in Mutsu City, Aomori Prefecture. The facility was still in the construction phase when the disaster occurred at Fukushima, causing the work to be suspended.  As planned, reprocessing at the plant could not, in any case, have handled all the waste being produced, and there is currently no alternative in sight.

TEPCO wants to resume construction of the plant, but locals are concerned that, if reprocessing and reuse never actually occurs, (which grows more and more likely as nuclear power falls from favor in Japan), the Rokkasho facility could become the final dumping ground for massive amounts of nuclear waste; a use for which it was never designed.

Long before the Fukushima accidents shone a bright light on TEPCO’s practices, their spent fuel management was out of control:

Last November, TEPCO released a report detailing how they have managed to store more than 10,000 fuel assemblies at the cooling ponds at Fukushima Daiichi as part of a program to consolidate spent fuel elements before putting them in a prospective interim storage facility in Mutsu, Japan. The Mutsu facility is designed to store spent nuclear fuel in above-ground storage for up to 50 years before it is reprocessed.

The Japanese program for waste management is unsustainable, as it is dependent on a fully functioning energy use of plutonium from reprocessed nuclear waste.  The isolation of plutonium has inherent issues itself, including the fact that, since it is nuclear weapon capable, stockpiling is strictly prohibited.

Then there is this little downside:

Reprocessing increases the volume of nuclear waste which must be stored. The increase occurs because the chemicals process for separating the plutonium, uranium, and HLW from spent nuclear fuel generates much greater volumes of waste than the original volume of the spent nuclear fuel. Although most of the radioactivity is concentrated in the high level waste, reprocessing is responsible for a substantial increase in the total volume of low and intermediate level waste which must then be dealt with.

So, are we in the U.S. doing any better than Japan in addressing the long-time storage of nuclear waste?  The short answer is no.

A long-term storage facility was planned and partially constructed at Yucca Mountain  in the State of Nevada, but questions about the site’s suitability and strong resistance from Nevada residents have led to suspension of the project.  The prospects for finding another site are looking dim.  

In the U.S. spent fuel is dealt with more or less as it is in Japan: onsite storage at individual facilities in “dry casks”  following time in spent fuel pools where discarded fuel assemblies must be kept cool until transfer to dry cask storage is possible.

Spent fuel pools are reaching capacity in many locations and alternatives are not presenting themselves.  Dry casks await pick-up that, lacking a destination, never comes to pass.

The spent fuel pools themselves represent risk in a prolonged power-outage, do not have the same level of protection as the active reactors; and those like the ones at Fukushima and Vermont Yankee are potentially more vulnerable to attack simply because they are located above grade rather than below.

It’s not just our children and our grandchildren who will have to deal with the consequences of our appetite for nuclear energy, but our grand-children’s descendants… into the vanishing point of distant time.