Oil companies and conservative energy wonks in general tell you they like nuclear energy, in theory, but, according to this Wall Street Journal report, just don’t want nuclear waste stored, even temporarily, in the God forsaken wasteland of West Texas, near their crown jewel oil holdings.
From behind the wheel of his Jeep, Tommy Taylor surveyed the windswept patch of land he is intent on keeping oil country.
Taylor, the assistant general manager at closely held oil producer Fasken Oil and Ranch, has been fighting plans to shuttle radioactive refuse from nuclear power plants around the U.S. and temporarily park it here in the Permian Basin, the nation’s busiest oil field.
Holtec International, a Florida-based energy technology company, aims to rail thousands of canisters of spent nuclear fuel to Lea County and store the containers below ground. The site has a 40-year license and could ultimately hold around 170,000 metric tons of used fuel—about twice as much as the U.S. currently holds. It would be the largest such facility in the world, and Holtec says it would further the development of U.S. nuclear energy.
Taylor said a nuclear incident in the Permian, which cranks out more oil than Iraq and Libya combined, would have devastating consequences for U.S. energy and the local economy.
“I’m not antinuclear,” Taylor said. “We just don’t feel like siting all the nuclear waste in the middle of our biggest oil and gas resource is a good idea.”
The years long fight has entangled large oil companies, the country’s top nuclear regulator, the states of Texas and New Mexico, as well as local communities that want to host the nuclear waste.
Fasken has initiated legal challenges to the federal approval of the project and another one in West Texas. It has lobbied big-oil chief executives and high-ranking Republicans. The centenarian company even hired a high-school student to help manage a social-media campaign.
Ed Mayer, program director at Holtec, said its proposed site poses no danger to communities or the oil-and-gas industry. “We don’t affect oil-and-gas operations, and under no situation would we affect them.”
Supporters of the nuclear-waste projects say they could help break a decades-old nuclear waste logjam that has led to radioactive refuse piling up at reactors. President Biden and billionaire investors are endorsing new nuclear projects to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, but the U.S. has yet to figure out where to permanently unload some of the most hazardous material in the world.
“The U.S. has to gird its loins and actually deal with the problem of what they’re going to do with this material in the long run,” said Allison Macfarlane, a former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Meanwhile, some Permian communities gearing up for a future where fossil-fuel extraction peters out are pushing to host the radioactive dregs.
The Permian is home to two sites that handle some types of nuclear waste and to the only commercial uranium-enrichment facility in the country.
Holtec’s storage would be temporary, and some nuclear experts say interim facilities can be a stopgap until the federal government builds a permanent, deep geologic repository. A plan to house nuclear waste at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain fizzled under former President Barack Obama, and the search for an alternative site has stalled. As a result, the federal government is paying utilities billions of dollars to keep used fuel rods in steel-lined concrete pools and dry casks at dozens of sites.
Consolidating used nuclear fuel at one or two facilities would lessen that financial burden and make monitoring the waste easier, the experts say.
Fasken said the sites threaten its operations near the proposed facilities. Since its 1913 founding by Canadian lawyer-turned-rancher David Fasken, the Midland-based company has amassed more than 160,000 acres of land in the Permian. It grazes cattle and produces about 40,000 barrels of oil a day.
–
Fasken has allied with local ranchers such as Daniel Berry, who owns property near the proposed Holtec site. Berry said he is concerned radioactive contamination could devastate his cattle business.
“If it’s so safe, leave it where it is,” he said of nuclear waste.
Addendum:
Above mentioned Holtec is the recipient of 150, and potentially 300 million dollars of taxpayer funding in Michigan to restart the Palisades Nuclear plant, shut down in recent years by the previous operator.
In addition, Holtec will receive a 1.5 billion dollar federal loan for the project.
On their own dime, Holtec is also talking about building two “Small” Modular Nuclear Reactors at the site, as well.
I’m wishing them all the luck in the world, and I feel their pain that local oil barons in West Texas are holding up their plans for a temporary nuclear waste storage site. Understand Oil Baron’s concerns that oil resources could be contaminated, but asking if perhaps this might be some insight into the concerns of many Americans about that same nuclear waste sitting on the beaches of the Great Lakes, which represent 20 percent of the world’s unfrozen fresh water.
60,000 tons of it, at last count.
At Palisades, that looks like this..
But the likely more than 700 metric tons of forever deadly irradiated (euphemistically called spent or used) nuclear fuel, containing more than 1,800 pressurized water reactor assemblies, and comprising more than 150 million curies of hazardous radioactivity, still represent a very significant risk.
The vast majority is still stored in the indoor wet storage pool, at risk of a loss of cooling water leading to a catastrophic radioactivity release to the environment.
While transfer of irradiated nuclear fuel into dry cask storage represents an increase in safety, it involves the movement of very heavy loads over the pool, and must be done very carefully.
In October 2005, a 107-ton transfer cask containing irradiated nuclear fuel dangerously dangled over the pool for two days, and was nearly dropped from its crane by operator error. Had that happened, the ensuing pool fire could have dwarfed even CRAC-II’s casualties and property damage figures cited above, as Palisades’ pool is not even located in a radiological containment structure.
Way I see it –
It would have been a lot better if the then-Atomic Energy Commission had held out, 60 years ago, on a big buildout of nuclear reactors pending a solution for the waste problem – but that was an era of techno-optimism, some might say arrogance.
Now we have this band aid solution of “Dry Cask Storage” where every nuclear plant is a de-facto waste storage dump. The casks are reasonably safe, but obviously not ideal, especially for something that will be quite toxic for a long time. Certainly not as bad, for the moment, as gigantic coal waste piles that also exist on the lakes, and waterways around the world.
A lot of good, smart, well intentioned folks, who see climate change, as I do, an existential threat – are behind the restart, and the new modular units.
I wish them nothing but success. I sure as hell wish them success in handling nuclear waste.
We are too far along to be fighting about this with other folks who are also trying, in good faith, to solve the decarbonizing problem.
That said, history suggests that nuclear projects frequently run into problems with delays and cost overruns.
Here’s my proposal. We know how to build wind, solar, and energy storage, very quickly and economically, right now. Let’s do that, and accelerate it.
If the nuclear projects proceed successfully, great. Find a place for the waste, and let’s go.
If the nukes run into problems, we’ll still be on our way to decarbonizing, and I suspect that in very short order, there will be additional options for providing additional dispatch able power, notably deep rock advanced geothermal tech, which has had some huge advances recently.
Pissing and moaning. Debating this and that, Excuses, excuses, excuses while the world burns.
And your solution is…what?
This is unmapped territory historically, politically, economically and socially.
We are living in the Mother of All Collective Action Problems where informed, responsible people not only have to reduce their own emissions, but do it in an environment where others are actively promoting high-emission activity.
Take an ERoI math lesson from James Hansen, hardly an AGW-denier, who sees nuclear power as not optional.
Quoting from https://www.adirondackexplorer.org/stories/climate-scientist-to-state-wheres-the-nuclear-power:
“I am shocked by this document,” James Hansen said this month at an Albany press conference. “It looks like it’s a prescription for making New York the Germany of the U.S. It’s almost a carbon copy of the disastrous German energy plan.” [rural New Yorkers and Germans alike are protesting giant pinwheels on their horizons]
Hewitt (Cubic Mile of Oil) Crane has also presented the stark reality of oil’s energy density vs. “clean” sources that sprawl everywhere. And actuary Gail Tverberg has postulated that once oil peaks, wind turbines will start failing for lack of maintenance, and get prohibitively costly to build, since oil is embedded in their life cycle.
Nuclear power will eventually suffer the same fate after Peak Oil, but its far higher energy density will keep it going longer with fewer inputs. Wherever nuclear waste is stored, its footprint will be nearly invisible to the public, unlike other forms of oil-dependent energy promoted on this blog.
I attended, in the front row, a seminar given by James Hansen! He bluntly stated that nukes were not only desirable but necessary, The audience was SHOCKED, only one other person applauded. Probably another Physicist.
Or in few words, you are talking bullshit.
Ugly pinwheels … energy density … oil needed for wind …
Bingo! I’ve got nuclear power Bingo!!
Wait a second … where is the incredible safety of nuclear – it wasn’t mentioned ?!?
We’re also missing how quickly China can build nuclear reactors (with no idea of safety or shortcuts, of course).
Has Hansen produced a cost-benefit analysis of building nuclear power plants in the US and Europe in a timely fashion? Germany may have shot itself in the foot by closing down still-functional (and presumably safe) reactors, but that has little to do with the fact that the investment, expertise, labor and scheduling environment for new thermal nuclear power plants in the US is shit.
‘“If it’s so safe, leave it where it is,” he said of nuclear waste. ‘
Exactly. Congress has determined that cask storage is safe for a hundred years, and it’s pretty hard to find a plausible scenario where it wouldn’t be. As is, it has over twice the fissile percentage of natural uranium, which Canadian and Indian heavy water reactors have been running on for decades. South Korea has experimented with DUPIC- ‘Direct Use of PWR fuel in Candu’, ie reformulating used fuel rods from pressurised water reactors, with no other processing, into the shorter fuel bundles used in Canadian Deuterium Uranium heavy water reactors. That would give nearly 40% more energy on top of that from the first time round, and still leave about the same 0.7% fissile as in natural ore.
Alternatively, another Canadian solution is being developed in New Brunswick. Moltex Energy, with private funding as well as Canadian and US government grants, is working on running spent fuel through an elecrorefining process similar to smelting aluminum from bauxite. The result is a molten chloride salt, with a high enough fissile concentration to run a fast neutron cycle, with no water or graphite moderator. This can be put in stainless steel fuel rods similar to those of existing reactors, and used the same way, except with molten fluoride salts as a coolant instead of water. Bill Gates’ Natrium reactor, slated to be built in Wyoming, could also run on spent fuel, though the requirements for the solid fuel it’s designed for are much more exacting.
Incidentally, the spectre of a spent fuel pool fire, which greatly exercised the imaginations of nuclear alarmists during the Fukushima crisis, is physically implausible. The fuel itself is about 95% uranium oxide, a hard, inert, ceramic, no more likely to burn than a china plate. The cladding is zirconium, which can burn readily as a powder, but is extremely resistant to it as a solid metal, even when subjected to a 2,000 C blowtorch flame. It can react with water to form hydrogen, in an exothermic reaction, at temperatures over 1,200 C, but this can only happen in a reactor, where the pressure vessel holds the water vapour in. If the contents of an unpressurised spent pool ever got that hot, there woudn’t be any water left.
Right.
Just so so so very impressed with the safety of nuclear power, especially considering it is 5 to 19 times more expensive than wind/solar and that doesn’t include the costs of of accident clean up and decommissioning:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents
Safest conventional power source by a mile, also safer than wind, look it up. Start with NASA site and New scientist magazine. Have seen no figures for solar, but who cares, believe in what works, not a ‘Hollywood’ spawned agenda. Even with your cherry picked costs, saving the ecosphere is worth it. LOOK IT UP FFS!
Right. How many people have died from radiation poisoning from solar again? How many wind injuries involved mass relocations?
Perhaps you might actually read the wiki I included?
Or is wiki a “‘Hollywood’ spawned agenda”?
And wtf is up with your schizophrenic replies? First pro-nuclear is “bullshit”, and now its essential for the ecosphere ?!?
Did read it.
Now you can look up comprehensive safety.
example
ourworldindata.org > safest-sources-of-energy.
Congress? We’re depending upon the expertise of the Legislative Branch for this? Have you seen the Trump-worshiping clowns that are the majority party in the House? And what about the Senators that argue on the floor that winter weather is proof that AGW isn’t happening?
Feel free to cite nuclear engineers who are familiar with the real-world labor and processes associated with handling nuclear plant waste, but opening with a reference to Congress really undermines your credibility.
Democratic State governments in sixteen States put a moratorium on building new reactors until a ‘safe’ storage regime was in place. (They also fought long and hard to close a dozen existing reactors, with marked rises in gas use every time they succeeded.) It’s the politicians who set the rules, the engineers just have to follow them. Since stored waste from light water reactors has never harmed anyone in sixty years of nuclear power, while making up to 14% of the world’s electricity, I hardly think it’s the most urgent problem around. As xkcd pointed out, the radiation for swimmers in a spent fuel pool would be lower than for somebody walking the streets of the average city – the main risk would be being shot by security.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
Unfortunately nuclear fusion seems as far away as ever, if ever.
“Recent White House and Energy Department pronouncements on speeding up the “commercialization” of fusion energy are so over the top as to make you wonder about the scientific competence in the upper reaches of the government.”
https://thebulletin.org/2024/02/whats-fueling-the-commercial-fusion-hype/
and little progress has been made in disposal of fission waste, did someone actually say cask storage is safe for 100 years ??
“Yes, 1 million years – in other words, a far longer stretch of time than the period since Neanderthals cropped up. This is an estimate of the length of time needed to ensure radioactive decay.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-staggering-timescales-of-nuclear-waste-disposal/?sh=6d4a404029cf
So don’t throw away the alternates just yet.
“nuclear projects frequently run into problems” My cousin was visiting. Very smart and capable, he exudes Midwestern pragmatism. I have learned to stay away from the climate issue, so we broached it only once, to which he opined: “Nuclear Fusion”. I didn’t know how to respond, but if this is how someone with his educational qualifications thinks on the subject of climate change, we are totally screwed.
Right Now, we are setting the climate and sea level future for hundreds of years. A future in which I doubt one-tenth of Earths species will survive. Coral reefs, tropical jungles, forests everywhere, the East Coast of the United States: all on the chopping block. Throwing ‘Nuclear Fusion’ at that present reality is the unkindest cut of all. Like my cousin, I also think Nuclear Fusion is coming, and will be an energy cornucopia when it does. Emphasis on the ‘WHEN’.
Because that Calvary is NOT going to show up in time to save THIS damsel in distress. Its not even close.