Sierra Club

Recently, I went to the unveiling of the new charging stations for the current and future fleet of electric cars.  It was an impressive presentation held on the grounds of the state house with about ten current, or soon to be, models of electric vehicles available, including the very stylish Chevy Volt and the expensive, but very sleek and fast, Tesla.  Bringing electric cars into mass production and getting them onto our roads will be a great thing for our nation as it will, hopefully, create millions of jobs, foster competition, innovation and investment and bring about a change in our way of thinking about transportation.

We could have had these cars thirty years ago if the shortsighted administration of the time hadn't pulled the plug . . . for more on that story, go to your local video store and rent “Who Killed the Electric Car” . . . it's a very interesting story.

But now that it seems we are poised to actually make this great leap forward, a few questions do emerge.  Our main concern is how will we generate the electricity this new generation of cars will require?

We all believe that replacing the gasoline burning combustion engine will reduce emissions and CO2 in the atmosphere, but this will only be a net gain in CO2 emissions if we don't build new coal or other fossil fuel plants to create the electricity, and herein lies the rub:  what new energy sources will be needed and used to power these cars?

Right now, there is a lot of talk about nuclear power as our big future energy source.  We have four new reactors planned for our state: two in Jenkinsville and two in Gaffney, along with the seven plants that are already active.  Around the Savannah River site, a lot of talk has been focusing on the idea of small modular reactors, refrigerator-sized units that could be used in a community or a smaller area.  Already, SRS folk are stirring the pot to get prototypes of these SMRs (small modular reactors) built at a proposed energy park on the DOE site adjacent to Aiken, South Carolina.

As magical as these may sound, there are some very serious questions that must be asked and answered before we should march down that road.  The first concerns nuclear radioactive waste, something we don't want any more of in our state.

This is where the issue becomes a bit complicated . . . right now, there are 60,000+ tons of spent (used) highly radioactive fuel rods sitting around the country at commercial reactor sites.  With the failure of Yucca Mountain as a secure, long-term geologic repository, this dangerous waste has nowhere to go.  One plan being discussed is the idea of a "centralized interim storage."  There are many who would like to dump it all here at SRS with the hope of some future "disposition" to come.  We all know how that's likely to turn out.  What has been dumped here in the past has not left, except for some very small amounts that have gone to WIPP in New Mexico.  In a state with a high water table, situated over the multi-state Tuscaloosa aquifer, leaving radioactive waste here, that will be deadly for a      millennium, is obviously a bad idea.

The second plan is to take that irradiated fuel and reprocess it . . . the industry likes to say recycle, but this is a misnomer . . . only a tiny fraction is reused . . . and here's the REAL problem with reprocessing: it creates huge volumes of additional radioactive waste that are very toxic and difficult to deal with.  The thirty-four-million gallons of high-level waste, still awaiting disposition at SRS, are from Cold War reprocessing, the very same process they want to use for commercial fuel.  Fifty years later, we are still trying to clean up and figure out what to do with THAT waste . . .

The reason some industry insiders want to reprocess this waste is because at least one of the SMRs would use plutonium, recovered from reprocessing, as a fuel.  Even though these small units would hold much less fuel and have a life expectancy of only ten to twenty years, once they are spent, they still contain deadly, radioactive fuel, which must be dispositioned . . . notice we don't say disposed of, because you can't just dump them in a landfill . . . the spent fuel will be deadly for centuries.  So where would these hundreds, if not thousands of SMRs go once they are spent?  The best answer we've been able to get from the industry is that they would come back to their origin of         production: SRS.  Bingo.  More nuclear waste for our state.

Recently, I was asked to speak before Energy Secretary Chu's Blue Ribbon Commission, the body currently studying the issue of commercial nuclear waste and what to do with it.  My statement (which you can read on my blog on the chapter website) represented the views of 167 conservation groups across the nation, along with many South Carolina groups, including the Coastal Conservation League, the League of Women Voters, Conservation Voters and Upstate Forever.  Our message was this: we support clean-up at SRS, and we welcome new missions and/or an energy park so long as it does not include the dumping of out-of-state nuclear waste here, or the creation of new, vast amounts of radioactive waste for which there is no good, permanent solution.  Reprocessing is an environmental nightmare and fiscal failure everywhere it has been practiced, including France.  It still requires a geologic repository (we have none) and leaves behind liquid radioactive waste and other high-level waste that must be vitrified.  Couple that with the enormous expense (socialized in other countries) and the problems of proliferation, since weapons-usable plutonium and other materials result, and it’s easy to see why we think this is a very bad idea.

So what do we think the solution should be?  Keep the waste at the reactor sites in Hardened On-Site Storage (HOSS), a safe and secure way to handle it until a new geologic repository can be sited.  Why should one state, South Carolina, be targeted to take the nation's inventory of deadly spent fuel?  Let every state that benefited from its use take part in caring for it until regional repositories can be sited.  This is the best and cheapest way to deal with the unsolvable problem of what to do with materials that will be radioactive for a millennium.

And how should we power the electric cars of the present and future?  First, by implementing energy efficiency programs, we can save tremendous amounts of the electricity we already produce.  Second, why not solar panels?  Don't say they’re too expensive.  Nuclear has already passed solar in the cost per kilowatt.  Biofuels created in our own state?  Why not?  Put farmers back to work growing biofuel crops that can power electrical generation.  Offshore wind farms . . . solar powered charging stations . . . There are many other options.

The option we should not support is the one that will make our state, once again, the nuclear waste dump of the country; forced, this time to store HIGH LEVEL waste at SRS for some very expensive, very dirty and completely unnecessary technology that, while admittedly does not create CO2, leaves behind its own deadly, toxic legacy for future generations to pay for . . . I think we can do much better than this.