This post originally appeared at https://www.badgerinstitute.org/federal-government-inaction-leaves-uranium-along-lake-michigan/

There are free-market solutions to storing or using spent nuclear fuel

All the uranium used in the past half-century at Wisconsin’s Point Beach Nuclear Plant, a bit over 1,000 metric tons, is still at the plant north of Two Rivers.

Four miles farther north, all the fuel used at the smaller, now-closed Kewaunee Power Station in its four decades of producing reliable, exhaust-free electricity is still along the Lake Michigan shore.

One can be grateful for all the power — the two plants alone produced one-sixth of all electricity made in Wisconsin since 1990 — while wondering why the radioactive spent fuel sits by the lake. Why won’t the plants’ owners properly dispose of it?

Simple: Because the federal government won’t let them. Spent uranium isn’t the plant owners’ responsibility because Uncle Sam bigfooted his way into the matter in 1982, then accomplished nothing.

“The only thing in the way of moving it off those sites is politics,” said Jack Spencer, a nuclear expert for the Heritage Foundation.

That means it’s fixable.

Every plant has signed a contract to temporarily hold spent fuel until the feds build a permanent repository to hold it until it’s no longer radioactive. That repository, under Yucca Mountain in Nevada, by law will be ready by 1998.

Oops. Better make that never: The Obama administration killed the project in 2010 and never came up with something else.

So uranium, little ceramic pellets inside sealed steel-and-concrete casks with walls about three feet thick, sits — at Point Beach, at Kewaunee, at a long-demolished plant’s site south of La Crosse, at the empty site of a former power plant just over the Illinois line south of Kenosha, and at every current or past commercial plant.

Nuclear power, which has produced a fifth of the nation’s electricity since the 1980s, is getting new attention. Utilities are closing coal-fired plants, long the workhorse in Wisconsin, due to a regulatory assault begun under Obama. Natural gas has substituted, but it, too, is under attack. Windmills and solar panels provide a fraction of America’s needs: 15.8% in the most recent 12 months, growing slowly — and they’re unreliable.

So nuclear’s having a moment, including in Wisconsin, where the regional grid operator warns the Midwest could be short of power next summer by the equal of four Point Beaches, even as demand seems set to rise. Rep. David Steffen and Sen. Julian Bradley seek to put the Wisconsin Legislature on record in favor of nuclear power, a big step in a state with a nuclear moratorium until 2016.

The issue is bipartisan: Republican lawmakers want regulators to research possible sites for nuclear plants; Democrat Gov. Tony Evers made a similar demand.

Yet there’s that spent fuel. It’s safe, notes the Nuclear Regulatory Commission: Standing next to the cask for a year gives you less radiation that a round-trip flight to Hong Kong, and the cylinders can endure jetliner impacts. But the contents are radioactive for 10 millennia.

The problem, says Spencer, is a “misalignment of incentives.” Utilities’ costs are covered, by taxpayers because the feds reneged on their contract to take it away. Politicians see no upside in siting a new repository. Antinuclear activists use the standstill to make spent fuel seem an insuperable problem.

It’s not insuperable. Finland is finishing its hole for spent fuel and Sweden is now building another. France recycles its fuel, since most useful uranium remains once fuel is “spent.” Recycling produces new fuel and reduces the volume of waste.

Recycling fuel was our thing until the Carter administration banned it. Since then, “we’ve made no progress on it because there’s no one incentivized to do something,” said Spencer. 

Better, suggests Spencer, who details this in a new book, to turn to the private sector, which safely built the industry in the first place.

He suggests a new entity, federally chartered perhaps, with one job: take existing spent fuel and, using the billions already set aside for disposal, find a place willing to host a repository.

For new plants, their permits would depend on owners having a disposal plan that satisfies the NRC. Maybe it’s with the new entity, maybe someone else.

Free the market, says Spencer, to invent better solutions, better reprocessing, better new reactors that use waste. Inducing people to profit by solving someone’s problem is what free markets excel at.

To be sure, he warns against subsidizing new nuclear power, wanting simply more rational regulations and an end to all subsidies, such as the $31.4 billion the feds dumped into wind and solar in 2024. He’s confident about nuclear’s chances in open competition.

This matters because abundant, affordable electricity is a prerequisite for prosperity. If utilities shut down coal and gas, intermittent sources won’t do it unless we regress to a state-sized version of Old World Wisconsin.

But more nuclear requires removing the political problem that’s blocking technical solutions to spent fuel along Lake Michigan. Time to let the market find an answer. The government-centered approach simply has failed to do so.

Patrick McIlheran is the Director of Policy at the Badger Institute.

Any use or reproduction of Badger Institute articles or photographs requires prior written permission. To request permission to post articles on a website or print copies for distribution, contact Badger Institute President Mike Nichols at mike@badgerinstitute.org or 262-389-8239.

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