Dense Packing 2.0
Mike Derivan has posted a response to the Dense Packing Fiasco on his substack. Mike was the hero of the Davis Besse warning. If his response to nearly the same failure that occurred at Three Mile Island two years later had been properly processed and promulgated by the NRC, Three Mile Island would almost certainly have been just another unremembered upset.
Mike's post contains valuable information on dense packing and its history. Anyone interested in this issue should check it out. Mike's basic point is that it was the Feds that created the problem by reneging on the deal to take back the fuel. Mike thinks my post puts way too much blame on the utilities. In his view, my post claims that "the utilities caused the Dense-pack problem".
I agree that the Feds including Congress created the mess. Mike's right the post did not make that clear. But I also think Mike's being a little thin skinned. The post really did not go very far into the industry response either. It certainly never claimed the utilities caused dense-packing. The utilities reacted to the Fed created problem very poorly. The industry could have said ok we are stuck with dry casks. The risk/reward of dense packing is lousy, and gone back to open racking by building the necessary dry cask pads. But that's not what they did.
The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) is the well-funded lobbying arm of the nuclear power utilities. The NEI ran a series of expensive ads in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other leading newspapers claiming that dry cask storage was unsafe. The ads made the argument that it would be much better to store all the waste in a single deep geologic repository. The NEI also lobbied against sub-seabed disposal because the tests that were deemed necessary would take ten to 20 years, and that would mean dry casking in the interim. This behavior makes no sense, since they could have rolled the cost of the dry casks into the rate base and pushed the extra cost onto the ratepayer.
Most importantly, in its drive to push the problem back on the Feds where it legally belonged, the industry lost the opportunity to make the point that essentially all the penetrating radiation is gone in about 500 years. At that point, the spent fuel is just another toxic material. In order for it to do any harm, you would have to swallow it. It could be Class C landfilled. The industry’s arguments against dry cask storage and the need for a deep geologic repository to guard against a million year danger were an enormous gift to the anti-nukes.
The nuclear waste problem was created by the Congress, at least four presidents, the NRC, the DOE, and the utilities. All of the above are responsible for turning a beautifully small technical problem into a horrendously expensive, political football.