Mistrust bubbles up as nuclear waste storage talks come to rural Colorado
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CAÑON CITY, Colo. — For well over a decade, the U.S Department of Energy has been working to create one central location to temporarily store nuclear waste. Meanwhile, this spent fuel has been piling up on-site, at power plants across the country.
Then, three years ago, the DOE began asking for public feedback on this issue of nuclear waste storage. The agency received hundreds of responses.
One theme rose to the top: Mistrust.
A group called Colorado Citizens Against Toxic Waste, or CCAT, was one of the organizations that filed concerns in the federal record.
“A major reason for the public’s irreparable loss of trust in (the U.S. Department of Energy) is its incompetence, or worse, at managing irradiated nuclear fuel and highly radioactive waste over decades past,” CCAT and other groups wrote in a joint letter.
Jeri Fry, who co-founded CCAT, lives in Cañon City, a community still dealing with the fallout of uranium processing from decades ago, which resulted in the release of radioactive material into soil and groundwater. Her father, who worked at the Cotter uranium mill, died of cancer after winning a lawsuit alleging his lymphoma was linked to radiation exposure.
Waiting for a cleanup
Now, Fry runs one of the most unusual and somber tours in Colorado. It starts with her loading a Geiger counter into her car to check for radiation at her destination— down a quiet gravel road on the outskirts of Cañon City.
The lonely road is starting to be reclaimed by weeds and sagebrush. It ends at a gate and an old guard shack. Signs warn of radiation and a restricted area. Beyond the gate are the remains of the mill, where an estimated 5.8 million tons of radioactive waste is buried behind a berm.
“We're living with an active Superfund site that hasn't been cleaned up since it was declared. And so it's more than 40 years now,” Fry said in November.
As she works to gain awareness of and pressure the government to clean up past contamination, Fry also has eyes on the future. She is regularly commenting on federal nuclear energy proposals, introducing herself in a letter last year as a “second-generation neighbor of a 40-year-old Superfund site in southeastern Colorado.”
“My radioactive neighbor is a daily residual reminder and threat to my community, that is not cleaned up. I bear witness to the desperate need for sincere investment in policy and technology at the filthy nuclear front end,” she wrote.
As the government searches for a place to store waste from the back end of the nuclear cycle, some communities in northwest Colorado have expressed an interest in learning more.
An economic development group is shopping around the idea of a temporary storage facility as a way to boost the economy in the region.
While Fry isn't a trained nuclear scientist, she does want communities to know about the history and risks of the nuclear industry, including the uranium that was mined and processed to feed those reactors.
“These things have half lives that are centuries, millennia long,” Fry said. “And so a community that is not given full disclosure and full information about what they're signing on to, could just get a horrible commitment.”
Scientists have mixed views
Historical waste and large-scale disasters have many Americans distrustful of nuclear power. For Anna Erickson, major accidents at nuclear reactors like Chernobyl sparked her interest in the subject.
“It was done very carelessly in the past. It is not how we do things today,” she said of the nation’s handling of radioactive materials. “We have a lot better understanding of material associated with the uranium fuel cycle, and we do not think that depleted uranium is harmless anymore.”
Erickson is a professor of nuclear and radiological engineering in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. She also leads a research consortium sponsored by the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration
She says the scale of today’s waste from power plants is much smaller and more manageable than the waste from nuclear weapons and fuel production left in places like Cañon City.
“If you take all of the spent fuel that's been stored on site of nuclear reactors, and you consolidate it all, it’s (the) size of about a football field, right, about 10 yards deep,” she said.
This kind of highly radioactive waste, which engineers call spent nuclear fuel, is stored in large cylinders made of concrete and steel.
“Once the fuel is stored in those casks, the radiation around those casks is actually not that high,” Erickson said. “Those casks are regularly inspected today by humans with those Geiger counters that you've seen or other instruments. But in the future, we're looking to move to robotics inspection.”
She says the U.S. has a good safety record while storing it on a temporary basis.
“We have not had major accidents, or pretty much any accidents related to release of the material from those spent fuel casks,” she said.
According to a federal study from 2016, more than 1,300 spent fuel shipments had been completed safely in the United States over a 35-year period. Four shipments were involved in accidents, but “none resulted in a release of radioactive material or a fatality due to radiation exposure.”
The Government Accountability Office calls the spent nuclear fuel inside “one of the most hazardous substances created by humans.” Federal documents acknowledge that while many safety precautions are in place to prevent leakage, there are risks to moving the fuel into the storage casks and transporting it.
Citing studies, the government says, “The key risk posed by spent nuclear fuel involves a release of radiation that could harm human health or the environment.”
Edwin Lyman, the director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C., has a list of concerns about current storage methods.
“If there's no long term plan to transfer that spent fuel to a more durable structure that can last for geologic time, then we can have a problem,” he said. “The real challenge of nuclear waste disposal is finding a way to make sure that it doesn't affect the environment over this very long time period, that it'll remain toxic.”
Lyman also said the nation’s track record in storing the material is not perfect.
In 2018, workers moving a canister of spent fuel in California made an error and almost dropped it eighteen feet onto the floor of a concrete bunker. Lyman called it a near miss. According to government reports, the risks can accelerate if more spent fuel has to be moved.
Lyman has other concerns like transportation accidents, sabotage and terrorism.
“A deliberate attack is certainly one way where you could maximize the potential harm to the community from that facility,” Lyman said.
Finally, Lyman said any community that considers building a temporary storage facility for the spent fuel needs to understand they would be accepting this waste without a long-term storage plan in place.
“Because right now, there's no plausible indication that it's going to be going anywhere else,” he said. “So they know they need to consider the fact that their community will ultimately be tagged as that permanent nuclear waste repository,” he said.
Raising questions
After Jeri Fry tuned into some of the nuclear waste discussions happening in Northwest Colorado on YouTube last fall, she says she was saddened.
“Because it's the same old game, and it's very opportunistic,” she said of the federal government's efforts to manage spent nuclear fuel.
She worries a community might raise its hand for a storage facility without being given a complete picture of the risks and should be asking a lot of questions
“If, as a community, we're going to have to host this, ‘How long is that going on?,'” she said. “The containers that this (spent fuel) is in, are the containers going to last the life of the contents?" ?
Those opportunities to ask questions will likely come soon. Public meetings on the waste storage idea are being planned in Northwest Colorado. The Department of Energy plans to formally ask which communities around the country are interested in the idea, this fall.
Type of story: News
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
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