The U.S. has a huge and growing nuclear-waste problem, and after years of study, multiple proposals and large expenditures, there’s still no workable solution, says a report issued by the General Accounting Office [GAO] on June 1, 2011.

In “Nuclear Waste: Disposal Challenges and Lessons Learned from Yucca Mountain,” the GAO reports that since the 1940s, the United States has generated over 75,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and high-level nuclear waste at 80 sites in 35 states. That’s enough to fill a football field about 15 feet deep. And nuclear waste is expected to increase by about 2,000 metric tons per year, more than doubling to 153,000 metric tons by 2055.

And exactly where is that extremely hazardous stuff, anyway? Most of it is stored on-site at commercial power plants, immersed in pools of water designed to cool it and isolate it from the environment, says GAO, whose report includes the map displayed here. There’s currently no alternative method for storing spent nuclear fuel, so some sites are rearranging their cooling pools to allow for more dense storage of the waste, and many are reaching their capacities. Viewed in light of the ongoing nuclear disaster in Japan, the map is not very reassuring—unless you live in Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota , New Mexico or Oregon, where there are no nuclear-waste storage sites.

The reason that there’s nuclear waste cooling in pools in most states is because—despite the fact that nuclear energy generates 20 percent of America’s electricity and has been a major component of our national energy strategy for decades—the U.S. has never figured out a plan for disposing of it. And reading the GAO report doesn’t inspire much confidence that a viable policy is going to emerge in the near future.

The long and futile history of Yucca Mountain

The closest we’ve come to a nuclear-waste-storage policy has been Yucca Mountain—a site about 100 miles Northwest of Las Vegas. According to GAO, in 1957, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report recommending that nuclear waste could be safely stored in a “geological repository,” meaning an underground cave constructed specifically for that purpose. In the 1960s and 1970s, government agencies looked for appropriate sites, but didn’t find any. In 1987, the Department of Energy began focusing its efforts on Yucca Mountain. Twenty years later, after spending $15 billion, the Department of Energy applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission [NRC] for a license to build a nuclear-waste repository in Yucca Mountain. Originally, it was supposed to open in 2017, but was later delayed until 2020.

By the way, existing nuclear waste already exceeds the 70,000 metric-ton capacity of the proposed Yucca Mountain repository, says the GAO report in a footnote.  And in 2009, DOE announced plans to terminate the Yucca Mountain repository program and instead study other options. The president’s FY 2011 budget went a step further, proposing to eliminate all funding for the program, including the DOE office that managed it. The problem with the Yucca Mountain idea, says DOE, is not that it’s unsafe. The problem is that people in Nevada don’t want it. But as of May 2011, Yucca Mountain remains in administrative, budgetary, judicial and political limbo as agencies, licensing boards, researchers and litigants wrangle over its feasibility, safety, popularity and costs.

Nuclear options

Meanwhile, nuclear waste continues to pile up, and the answer to the best way to store or dispose of it remains elusive. Three options are on the table, but each has pros and cons, says GAO.

First, there’s continued, on-site storage. On the plus side, it’s the current practice, so it requires little effort. Keeping nuclear waste where it’s generated means no immediate transportation costs [until someone figures out a long-term disposal site], and also allows the waste to become cooler and less radioactive over time. Recent advances in “dry-cask” storage systems allow spent nuclear fuel to be stored above ground for as long as 300 years. But this approach is not a forever solution: Commercially produced nuclear waste stored on-site is expected to be “safe” for 60 years beyond the life of a reactor, but after that, it would have to be “repackaged,” at an estimated cost of $20 billion to $97 billion. Waste stored in dry casks would also probably have to be repackaged after 100 years, at a potential cost of $180 billion to $500 billion.

Second, there’s interim storage at a centralized facility. Proponents of this option say that consolidating nuclear waste would make monitoring less complex and could ease reuse of land around decommissioned nuclear plants. Also, commercial operators could end the practice of making their nuclear cooling pools more dense, which could reduce risk. The downside is that interim storage could take years to construct, says GAO, adding that a federalized central storage option with two locations would take about 19 years to implement and would cost $23 billion to $81 billion. Centralized facilities would also face intense state and/or local opposition. Safety would be a concern, too, because you’d have to transport nuclear waste twice: first to the centralized interim site and then to a permanent facility.

Third is permanent disposal in a geologic repository. This option has repeatedly been endorsed as the only safe and secure permanent solution for nuclear waste disposal. But as the saga of Yucca Mountain has shown, the time and cost of developing such a site is daunting, and public acceptance has been a tough sell.

Now what?

Even if the U.S. immediately decommissioned every currently operational nuclear power plant and banned future projects, the problem of nuclear waste would not go away. If the Yucca Mountain option permanently disappears—another site will need to be identified, says GAO, and that process could take several decades. To get it right this time, we’ll need a long-term commitment that transcends politics and presidential administrations, a consistent funding stream, and a willingness to engage and listen to the public in decision-making.

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Coal is clean, right? That’s what the media-savvy American Coalition for Clean Coal Energy [ACCE] tried to get us to believe in an ad campaign a couple of years ago that remains relevant today. During Congressional debates over energy policy in 2008 and 2009, ACCE spent a reported $31 million on an ad campaign to make its point, using the conservative “clean” coal frame that has become the de facto language for this political debate. A recent post at Big Think analyzes how ACCE’s ads cleverly co-opted the usually progressive focus on families, individuals and workers to appeal to emotions and to not-so-subtly imply that being anti-coal is anti-American.

Here’s an example of an ACCE ad, called “Coal Fires This Nation.”

But then, Al Gore’s Reality Coalition struck back with its own $31 million campaign. Reality Coalition’s ads used humor to skewer the coal industry’s insistence that coal can be clean. Take a look, have a chuckle. And remember, this battle is far from over. [For example, see the latest–May 2011– alert from the Union of Concerned Scientists about new investments in outdated coal technologies.]  And although clean coal bills appear legislatively dead  [again] in 2011, they will most likely return to Congress in the next session, when the framing wars will reignite. I missed these ads the first time around, but I suspect that they—or something like them on both sides of the issue—will be back. The question is: are they effective? You decide.

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Recent news:  The space shuttle Atlantis docked at the international space station on May 16, 2010,  after officials decided there would be no need to perform a maneuver to avoid a piece of debris.

This may well have been the last flight of Atlantis. Following this mission it will be kept in working order, to be used as a possible rescue vehicle for one of the few remaining manned space flights.  While risk is still a crucial factor in the manned space program, in some ways, the program appears to be “yesterday’s news.”

Columnist Thomas Friedman has challenged us to launch a green energy technology program to match the intensity of the information technology program that has evolved over the past seventy years.  And he gives us a sound barometer to measure how we’ll know when the energy technology movement is beginning to make a real difference.  It will be when we have failures.  He’s talking about the kind of failures that occurred in the information revolution.  Failure is a reflection of the healthy competition that evolves from Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest.

The ashes and rubble of failed programs and companies in the information revolution litter recent history.  But in many cases, each failure represented someone else’s success.

In the 1950s, the Navy’s Vanguard missile program to launch an unmanned satellite suffered one mishap after another, while the Army’s Redstone program succeeded in launching Explorer 1, an eighteen lb. satellite, into space on January 31, 1958, where it remained for twenty-two years.  The Army’s work was the precursor to NASA’s manned-space program.

On the commercial level, we see today’s winners: Apple, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Sony, Canon, Nikon, Microsoft, and many others.  Friedman asserts that they stand tall and in many cases continue to battle one another because they won the battles with previous competitors.  Some may remember the Commodore 64, which in the early 1980s was considered the class of the personal computing field.  But its operating system could not keep up with the Macintosh OS and Microsoft’s DOS and then Windows.  Prior to the Commodore, we had  the first personal computer, the Radio Shack TRS-80.  Unfortunately for the company, the computer lived up to its nickname, the TRASH-80.

If you were an investor in the 1980s, you were constantly getting tips on this company or that, one of which was going to revolutionize the computer industry.  The low-price stock might be making memory chips, fiber optics, new welding techniques, or the “brains” to the newest device to swipe credit cards.

While we remember tech stocks as being good investments in the 1980s and 1990s, we forget that most of the losers had investors, and they often lost all of their equity in a failed company.

Friedman’s point is surprisingly simple and logical.  Look at the table below and, while you can’t write on your computer screen, think of  how many information technology companies you could list in the left column and how few green energy technology companies your could list in the right column.

The green energy companies are there, they are just hard to find because they’re not that large (you’re not allowed to count a company called ‘BP’ that wants you to think that its initials stand for ‘Beyond Petroleum’).

Friedman takes the analogy between information and clean energy one step further.   I.T. essentially got its start from government.  During World War II,  the U.S., U.K., Germany, Soviet Union, France, and Italy were all working on hi-tech devices, mainly to become weapons of mass destruction or to be used for espionage.  Following the war, the American and Soviet governments put hundreds of billions of dollars into programs that could only succeed if based on information technology.  First the U.S. worked through the military, then NASA, and by giving tax incentives for research and development as well as building an infrastructure for the internet.

Friedman contends that green energy will become successful when it advances so far that we don’t even use the adjective ‘green’ in front of it, because all energy will be assumed to be green.  This phenomenon will happen when the government makes large financial commitments to partner with private entrepreneurs as it did with the information revolution.  Some of the private companies will succeed and make investors wealthy, and others will go by the wayside and leave some investors holding the bag.  But this is how it worked in our last major revolution and how it has to be if we are going to be successful in going green.

If and when a green revolution succeeds, the corporate corpses may include large fossil-fuel energy companies that currently thrive, as well as start-ups that by design or misfortune just didn’t find a niche in the program.  So if you want to see the clean energy program really take off, look for the failures as well as the successes.

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One of the challenges President Franklin Roosevelt faced in fashioning the New Deal was determining which sections of the nation were most in need of aid and economic development.  Clearly none were exempt from poverty, but there were certain areas where living conditions and economic deprivation were more extreme than others.

Today, we are in the midst of a heated debate about whether “clean coal” is actually clean, and if so, is it economically feasible and safe to mine coal and utilize it as an energy source. The outcome of this debate could go to either extreme.  On one hand, since the U.S. has such an abundant supply of coal, “King Coal” could dominate energy production as it has for much of American history.  On the other hand, if America and the world’s alternative energy programs are regarded with greater importance and provided with more funding, coal could become somewhat of a relic of the past because of the prohibitive problems of carbon dioxide and sulfuric emissions, as well as destruction to our land by strip mining (cutting off mountain tops, etc.).

We have been reminded recently of the dangers of shaft mining.  The recent disaster in West Virginia  resulted in more deaths than any other mining incident in the past forty years.  Mining is still a very dangerous occupation. What is different from the days of the New Deal and before is that through strong union leadership, miners are now well paid for their efforts.

Franklin Roosevelt often used his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, as “eyes and ears” on conditions in the hinterland.  Ms. Roosevelt often collaborated with her best friend, Lorena Hickok, to explore these locales far off the beaten path.

In 1935 Lorena Hickok toured Appalachia.  First she went to West Virginia, where according to H.W. Brands, author of Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, she found that “there was not in the state a single city or county hospital with free clinics or free beds.”  She elaborated, “Some of them [the people of West Virginia] have been starving for eight years.  I was told there are children in West Virginia who have never tasted milk.”

She then went to the eastern Kentucky portion of Appalachia where conditions may have been even worse.  She wrote:

They all carry guns and shoot each other.  And yet they never think of robbing people.  I cannot for the life of me understand why they don’t go down and raid the Blue Grass country…They shoot each other, and yet there is in them a great deal of gentleness.  Toward their children, for instance.  And you hear about them stories like this: Relief in Kentucky having been none too adequate in the matter of clothing, most of them are scantily clad.  An investigator visiting one of their villages back up in the mountains in Clay County a few weeks ago noticed that all the men and boys, as they passed one cabin, pulled their caps down over their eyes.  When asked why, they told him: “Well, you see, the women folks in that thar place hain’t go no clothes at all.  Even their rags is clean wore out and gone.”

Historian Harry Caudill, in his book Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area, refers to eastern Kentucky as “the first frontier in the war on poverty.”  In the forward to the 1962 book, John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall wrote:

This is Daniel Boone country, where Indians and then fiercely independent frontiersmen found in these isolated valleys the elements that sustained a vigorous life.  Yet it is one of the ironies of our history that many of their descendants live there today in bleak and demoralizing poverty almost without parallel on this continent.

In visiting the area in 1973, I found mostly wooden shacks, irregular access to electricity, dirt roads, and remnants of company towns.  But there was a somewhat robust coal industry made possible by the presence of railroad spurs criss-crossing the land to haul out the fuel.  Peering to the horizons,I saw that  mountain tops were often sheared off as the more economically feasible strip mining was literally making its mark on the land.  As depressed as the area was, it was largely untouched by the icons of much of economically distressed America.  There were virtually no neon signs, fast food franchises, visible liquor stores, pawn shops, or other magnets of fast-paced America.

When I returned in the mid-1990s, my image of “romantic poverty” (easy for me to say since I didn’t have to live it) was shattered.  Pizza Hut, McDonalds, Radio Shack, AutoTire, even Blockbuster signs dotted the land.  The streets were littered with more broken glass, paper wrappers and crushed cans.  The area was still poor, but now a very garish brand of poverty.  This was not the eastern Kentucky that Lorena Hickok had seen in 1935.

Despite its historic poverty, Appalachia has rich traditions that are an essential part of Americana.  Music was created with the use of never-before-invented, hand-made instruments.  The stories in the songs reflect a life unique to this remote part of America.  There are crafts representing the values and experiences of the people as well as their limited resources.  And while the relationships among some Appalachian people have been characterized by long-lasting grudges (most notably the Hatfields and McCoys.), there is an essentially kindness of the people.

Ever since coal was first mined in these rounded mountains, the workers and their families have been exploited by the companies of King Coal.  You can read Night Comes to the Cumberlands for one vivid story after another of exploitation of people, first by big business, and then regrettably at times by their own unions.

If a determination is made that coal can really be mined and burned cleanly, then there will be economic benefits for the people of Appalachia, but perhaps at certain social costs.  If coal is deemed an unfeasible source of power, and it can be adequately replaced by clean fuels such as wind and solar power, then the future of Appalachia is more uncertain.  Parts of the land are still pristine enough for eco-tourism; more investment dollars are in the hands of the people; and the reduction or elimination of coal would mean that the corporate landlords who have dominated the area for centuries would move their business elsewhere.

If coal becomes a relic of the past, we owe a considerable amount to the miners who risked their lives and sacrificed for their families, and who brought us a truly American culture during the years when coal was king.  These are hard-working people who did not make the decisions to pollute our skies, rivers, and lakes with toxic particulates.  The people of Appalachia have been largely forgotten for most of their history. If coal becomes a relic of the past, the people of Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia will be further at risk.  Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater; we owe them the right to live as productive lives as any other Americans.

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