Illinois Biggest Atomic Dump as U.S. Fails to Pick Site
By Brian Wingfield - Oct 24, 2013 11:00 PM CT
U.S. lawmakers have debated for decades where to put all the spent fuel generated by the nation’s nuclear power plants. The dithering means that an unintended site has emerged: Illinois.
About 13 percent of America’s 70,000 metric tons of the radioactive waste is stashed in pools of water or in special casks at the atomic plants in Illinois that produced it, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute, a Washington-based industry group. That’s the most held in any state.
Across the country, atomic power plants “have become de facto major radioactive waste-management operations,” Robert Alvarez, a former adviser to Energy Department secretaries during President Bill Clinton’s administration, said in a phone interview.
With no place to send their waste, power plants in 30 states -- which generate about 20 percent of the nation’s electricity -- are doubling as dumps for spent fuel that remains dangerous for thousands of years. Another four states without operating reactors store spent fuel at closed plants. It is an expensive and, according to some critics, unsafe practice for which the plants weren’t designed and that may end up costing taxpayers billions of dollars.
“That’s not a long-term solution,” Everett Redmond, senior director of non-proliferation and fuel cycle policy at NEI, whose members include reactor owners Exelon Corp. (EXC) of Chicago and Southern Co. (SO) of Atlanta. There’s a “general obligation to society to dispose of the material,” Redmond said in a phone interview.
Yucca Mountain
After Illinois, which also has more reactors than any other state, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and New York have the most waste temporarily stored at power plants.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-25/illinois-biggest-atomic-dump-as-u-s-fails-to-pick-site.html
Near us are: CP1, CP3 (In Argonne, IL, from the old first reactors at the University of Chicago, dating back to 1943, buried at Argonne Natl. Lab.)(about 25 miles from us), Dresden 2 & 3 (~55 miles from us), Zion 1 & 2 (~50 miles from us), Morris (~ 25 miles from us), Braidwood 1 & 2 (~30 miles from us), LaSalle 1 & 2 (~60 miles from us).
