Llewellyn King: A prize is needed for ideas on dealing with nuclear waste

Places in Continental United States where nuclear waste is stored

A “scram” is the emergency shutdown of a nuclear power plant. Control rods, usually boron, are dropped into the reactor and these absorb the neutron flux and shut it down.

President Trump, a supporter of nuclear power, has in a few words scrammed the whole nuclear industry, or at least dealt its orderly operation a severe blow.

Scientists see nuclear waste as a de minimus problem. Nuclear-power opponents — who really can’t be called environmentalists anymore — see it as a club with which to beat nuclear and stop its development

The feeling that nuclear waste is an insoluble problem has seeped into the public consciousness. People, who otherwise would be nuclear supporters, ask, “Ah, but what about the waste?”

For its part, the nuclear industry has looked to the government to honor its promise to take care of the waste, which it made at the beginning of the nuclear age.

In the early days of civilian nuclear power — with the startup of the Shippingport Atomic Power Station, in Pennsylvania, in 1957 — the presiding theory was that waste wasn’t a problem: It would be put somewhere safe, and that would be that.

Civilian waste would be reprocessed, recovering useful material like uranium and isolating waste products, which would need special storage. The most worrisome nuclear byproducts are gamma, beta and X-ray emitters, which decay in about 300 years.

The long-lived alpha emitters, principally plutonium, must be put somewhere safe for all time. Plutonium has a half-life of 240,000 years. It’s pretty benign except that it’s an important component of nuclear weapons.

If you get it in your lungs, you’ll almost certainly get lung cancer. Otherwise, people have swallowed it and injected it without harm. It can be shielded with a piece of paper. I have handled it in a glovebox with gloves that weren’t so different from household rubber ones.

But it’s plutonium that gives the “eternal” label to nuclear waste.

Enter President Jimmy Carter in 1977. He believed that reprocessing nuclear waste — as they do in France, Russia, Japan and other countries — would lead to nuclear proliferation. Just months in office, Carter banned reprocessing: the logical step to separating the cream from the milk in nuclear waste handling.

Since then, it’s been the policy of succeeding administrations that the whole, massive nuclear core should be buried. The chosen site for that burial was Yucca Mountain, in Nevada. Some $15 billion to $18 billion has been spent readying the site with its tunnels, rail lines, monitors and passive ventilation.

In 2010 Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) — then the majority leader in the Senate — said no to Yucca Mountain. It’s generally believed that Reid was bowing to casino interests in Las Vegas, which thought this was the wrong kind of gamble.

The industry had pinned all its hopes on Yucca Mountain being revived under Trump: He had promised it would be. Then on Feb. 6, and with an eye to the election (he failed to carry Nevada in 2016), Trump tweeted, “Nevada, I hear you and my administration will RESPECT you!

In the Department of Energy, which was promoting Yucca Mountain, gears are crashing, rationales are being torn up and new ones thought up, even as the nuclear waste continues to pile up at operating reactors. No one has any idea what comes next.

Time, I think — after watching nuclear-waste shenanigans since 1969 — to take a very fresh look at nuclear- waste disposal. Most likely, a first step would be to restart reprocessing to reduce the volume.

I’ve been advocating that to leave the past behind, a prize, like the XPRIZE — maybe one awarded by the XPRIZE Foundation — should be established for new ideas on managing nuclear waste. The prize must be substantial: not less than $20 million. It could be financed by companies like Google or Microsoft, which have lots of money, and a declared interest in clean air and decarbonization.

The old concepts have been so tinkered with and politicized that nuclear waste is now a political horror story. Make what you will of Trump being on the same side of nuclear-waste management as presidents Carter and Barack Obama.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.

Containers or low-level nuclear waste

Champagne weather; politics and state wealth

  This has generally been a beautiful summer in New England -- not too hot, not too cool and soothing breezes most days.

Of course, as the mutual fund companies are compelled to note in their marketing, past performance should not be taken as assurance of future success.

It's tough to think of weather that could be nicer than nice weather in this corner of the world.

xxx

The story this week about Rhode Island's unemployment rate, at 7.7 percent, now the third highest in the country, got me thinking about how little  effect state tax  and other policies may have on prosperity. Or rather, in some places, they may have effects that surprise ideologues.

For instance, Georgia,  Mississippi and, somewhat less so, Nevada have long had regressive taxes  --  disproportionately hitting the poor. They tend to be light on environmental and other regulations and to give lots of public money to companies promising to locate or expand there.

Mississippi now has the highest jobless rate in the nation, at 8 percent. Georgia is second, at 7.8 percent. Rhode Island is in third place, tied with Michigan and Nevada.

Rhode Island's median household income is ranked at 17th in the nation, Georgia's at 33th,  Michigan's 34th (post collapse of car industry), Nevada's at 27th and Mississippi's at 50th.

The governors of all the states listed except Rhode Island are conservative Republicans.

After a half century of huzzahs for the alleged prosperity-fueling effects of Sun Belt tax and regulatory policies, the states there remain at the bottom of the household-income pile. The richest states are in the Middle Atlantic and Northeast -- as they have long been. And they have high taxes and lots of regulations. But some of these states have clearer, simpler, better written regulations than others. Clarity and predictability of regulations seem to be quite important in encouraging businesses to expand.

Rhode Island lags  in wealth rankings for its region. It does that because  of its absurd smallness (which skews its numbers), slowness in moving to new industrial models, dense  and badly written regulations exacerbated by an excessive number of jurisdictions (39 cities and towns!)  that discourage business creation and expansion and corruption, or,  probably more, the perception of corruption .

Corruption is doing well in other states, too, including Connecticut and Massachusetts. It has, however, always seemed to me, from decades of observation, that Rhode Island had a disproportionately high number of  particularly petty grifters. But of course, there's no way to prove that. That the "colorful'' Vincent Cianci is considered a serious candidate for mayor of Providence may also suggest either a suicidal or a bread-and-circuses mentality in too much of the state's electorate.

Anyway, if the eastern third of Connecticut were a state, its jobless  rate and household income would look a lot like Rhode Island's.

But that Rhode Island is a "liberal'' state per  se doesn't seem to be a problem.  Other "liberal''  states in the region --- e.g., Massachusetts and Maryland --- do very well indeed.

 --- Robert Whitcomb