San Onofre Risk Factors
[link to www.rand.org]


snip


In the entire 55-year history of nuclear power in the United States, no closed nuclear power plant site has ever been completely vacated. Plenty of nuclear power plants have been decommissioned, mothballed and even dismantled before this. But all those cases are stuck at the final step: removing the spent nuclear reactor fuel stored at the power plant site. The problem with clearing out the spent fuel is that there's nowhere else to put it.

Not that the government and the nuclear industry haven't thought about this critical step — it has been known from the outset that nuclear power would generate highly radioactive waste that would need to be isolated from the biosphere for hundreds of thousands of years. Early on the scientific community arrived at a consensus that the only feasible way to do this is to put the spent fuel in a permanent repository located deep underground. However, after decades of research, commissions, hearings, decisions and a long and thus far unsuccessful run at Yucca Mountain, the United States still has not been able to site, license, and open a facility for the safe disposal of spent nuclear fuel.

So what we're left with is that nearly the entire 70,000 ton inventory of spent nuclear fuel created since the dawn of nuclear power in the U.S. is still being stored at the sites of the nuclear power plants where it was generated. Can this go on? It seems so, but for how long?