Saturday’s Press Herald reported on Microsoft’s plans to restart one of the shut-down nuclear reactors at Three Mile Island to generate clean energy to supply some of its power-hungry data centers (“AI boom may breathe new life into Three Mile Island plant”). Indeed, recently across the country there has been renewed interest in nuclear power as at least an interim measure to reduce CO2 production by electric generation. Maybe we can have our cake and eat it too and enjoy plentiful nuclear-generated power, while we figure out the challenges of getting clean energy more directly from the sun via solar or wind power.

What was not mentioned in Saturday’s article on the Three Mile Island restart, or in any of the other recent articles on nuclear power revival, is what will be done with the high-level nuclear waste in the form of spent fuel “burned” in the reactor during plant operation. Until now, the United States has conspicuously failed to find a solution to the problem of disposing of (or indefinitely storing) highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel from our nation’s fleet of operating and shut-down nuclear power plants.

Various “solutions” have been proposed in the past. For a time, it was thought that the federal government might operate a permanent fuel storage facility in an abandoned salt mine deep in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Alas, the Yucca Mountain project fell victim to NIMBY some decades ago, and there has been no real alternative proposed since.

The result is that all of the high-level nuclear waste created by past and current nuclear power plant operations remains in “temporary” storage, in almost all cases at the locations of the present or former power plants.

In Maine, all of the spent nuclear fuel burned by the Maine Yankee atomic power plant in Wiscasset during nearly 25 years of operation remains at the former plant site more than two decades after the plant itself was dismantled and carted away. The spent fuel is “temporarily” stored in stainless steel canisters encased in concrete casks lined up in rows on a concrete pad guarded by a 24-hour armed security detail. The costs of this storage activity are borne by Maine Yankee’s nuclear decommissioning fund, which has up to now reimbursed by the U.S. Department of Energy.  Although facilities such as the one at Wiscasset were designed with a useful life of 100 years, no one really knows how long the canisters and casks will actually withstand deterioration from their continuously degrading radioactive contents.

The failure of the United States government and our nuclear power industry to develop and implement a viable means of disposing of high-level nuclear waste from plant operations is egregious in comparison with what other nuclear power countries have done to deal with their own nuclear waste products. Some, such as France, reduce the volume of waste by reprocessing and reusing much of the fuel as plutonium. Others, such as Germany, combine reprocessing with centralized storage facilities. Russia reprocesses its spent fuel and has plans for vitrification of the residue.

Spent nuclear fuel is dangerous radioactive material that can cause sickness and death on contact. Spent fuel storage facilities are tempting targets for terrorists.  This material should not be left dotted around the countryside in “temporary” storage facilities pending permanent disposition that never seems to come.

One of the reasons the U.S. nuclear power industry withered in the 1980s was the lack of a solution to the spent fuel problem. It is hardly responsible for us to start it up again in any form, whether as small “cookie-cutter” nuclear power modules or as restarts of the massive reactors of the past without first surmounting the technical and political hurdles to disposition of the nuclear waste.  A nuclear power revival is no electric “free lunch.” It is time for us to solve our nuclear waste disposal problem before we talk about restarting nuclear reactors and expanding nuclear power in any form.