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During a virtual meeting held by Southern California Edison's Community Engagement Panel, experts considered a number of Doomsday Scenarios that could threaten the nuclear waste stored at the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant. But things got weird with fear of things like short-range missiles //
San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, or SONGS, has been inundated with this stuff for a long time. But the intensity seems to be growing, even eight years after the nuclear power plant shut down. The recent focus has been on the spent nuclear fuel, better referred to as slightly used nuclear fuel.
This fuel has been out of the reactor for between 8 and 27 years. The really hot stuff decays away before 5 years while the spent fuel is still in pools of water. The half-life of the remaining hot stuff, Cs-137 and Sr-90, is only 30 years, so these are a lot cooler than when they were in the reactor. After 200 years, the fuel isn’t very radioactive at all since all the hot gamma-emitters are gone. //
So as a scientist who has worked on nuclear waste for 35 years, has handled and experimented on this waste, measured these systems to get exact numbers, designed disposal systems, was an author of the Yucca Mountain License Application, monitored the waste, have lived beside nuclear waste for these last 35 years, have had my children and grandchildren live next to nuclear waste – I can tell you without reservation that you have nothing to worry about from the nuclear waste at San Onofre.
Compared to all other risks that you face in Southern California, the risk from nuclear waste at SONGS is vanishingly small. //
As an example, one accident scenario assumed the lid of a dry cask was completely removed, or blown off, and that all of the fuel rods were damaged. All of the volatile, or gaseous, radionulcides in the gaps and spaces around the rods, like Xe, Kr and I, are released. As bad as this is, and as unlikely as it would be to occur, the dose at 100 meters from the fuel would be only a one-time 3 mrem (0.03 mSv) dose.
Eating a bag of potato chips a day gives you more than 4 mrem/yr (Yes, potato chips are the most radioactive food with about 13,000 pCi of beta radiation per 12-oz bag, nothing to worry about, just to give some perspective) //
Just lob an RPG at a chlorine tanker car as it passes through San Diego on Interstate 5 and you’ll kill more people than Chernobyl did. Or hit a natural gas plant – that would do real damage.
And nuclear waste is orders of magnitude less risky than an operating nuclear reactor.
There’s lots of myths that add to this nuclear fear and they always pop up during any nuclear discussion:
You can’t make a nuclear weapon out of commercial spent nuclear fuel – we tried to.
You can’t even make a dirty bomb out of commercial spent nuclear fuel – we tried to.
You can’t get cancer by living next to a nuclear power plant – we’ve studied that extensively. The only time that’s happened was at Chernobyl 34 years ago, and that was a meltdown at a weapons reactor that didn’t even have a containment building. All reactors in America have containment structures and are completely different types of reactors. //
Contrary to popular opinion, nuclear energy is the safest form of energy there is, even renewables kill more people per TWh than nuclear, although renewables are really safe compared to fossil fuel.