Legislature to consider spent nuclear fuel
The Wyoming Legislature will consider allowing spent nuclear fuel from out of state to be stored here.
“I think just saying that we absolutely don’t want used fuel storage in Wyoming — to just say that is very close-minded,” State Sen. Ed Cooper, R-Thermopolis, said. “I’m not sure that we do want it in Wyoming, and that’s not what this bill is doing. It’s simply allowing the discussion to move forward with the definitions meeting the NRC and the [Department of Energy] language,” according to a Wyofile article printed nearby.
The opposition is in spite of the fact that Wyoming broke ground this summer on a natrium reactor near Kemmerer. So, fuel will be handled, transported and stored in Wyoming anyway.
State Sen Chris Rothfuss, D-Laramie, told Cowboy State Daily that he thinks “it puts Wyoming in an awkward position of accepting everyone’s nuclear garbage.”
NIMBY is a political acronym for “Not In My Back Yard.” It is used to describe, somewhat pejoratively, someone who, for instance, might consume gasoline but does not want a refinery near their dwelling place.
One of the great controversies of our time involves global warming, whether it is anthropogenic (human-caused), and whether we can do anything about it. It is a subject for a book, not an editorial. But one of the few points of agreement is that we all want and need consistent, reliable electric power.
The anthropogenic crowd champions wind and solar energy, to the detriment of burning fossil fuels. But the sun sets daily, and sometimes, even in Wyoming, the wind does not blow. In those instances, whence comes the power?
If we don’t burn fossil fuels and the wind isn’t blowing and the sun has set, and we haven’t built gargantuan batteries out of environmentally unfriendly materials, one’s choices are between nuclear power or sitting in the dark.
The proliferation of electric vehicles, artificial intelligence and bitcoin mining and the resultant increase in per capita electricity usage due to these activities makes this choice even more stark.
If you are committed to reducing CO2 emissions by power production, logically, you don’t get to be opposed to all nuclear energy. Nuclear and hydroelectric power are the only sources of non-carbon emitting power production that generate 24/7. And as an outdoorsman, your editor hopes we have dammed all the rivers in the West that we are going to.
An engineer friend likes to say that “nothing is free.” Thus, nuclear reactors produce spent fuel that is no longer useful in a thermal reactor. The fuel can be reprocessed in a special reactor and recycled; this is done routinely by European nuclear power generators.
Concerned about nuclear proliferation, President Jimmy Carter banned the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel in the U.S. by executive order on April 7, 1977. This means that the 2500 tons of nuclear fuel produced each year remain in “temporary” storage at the reactor site where they were used.
If 1977 until now seems more like “permanent” to you, you are not alone.
Reportedly, the federal government has spent over $9 billion on the Yucca Mountain permanent disposal site, and then, for political reasons, decided not to use it. The Senate Majority Leader at the time was Harry Reid, from Nevada – where Yucca Mountain was located. (See NIMBY, above)
So, America has several choices: use fossil fuels to meet our growing power needs, use nuclear power to meet those needs and reopen Yucca Mountain (or a site like it), or use nuclear power and store spent fuel at the sites where it was used.
Perhaps a fourth option would be to produce a lot of candles so that we would not sit in the dark when the wind did not blow at night. Charging an electric car overnight will be tough, though.
Wyoming’s proposal, to be heard in the 2025 legislative session, is to store fuel and to fill our coffers from NIMBY states that do not wish to store their own.
Whether you love the idea of storing fuel in Wyoming or hate it, tough decisions need to be made in energy policy.