Nuclear Policy

But Robert Alvarez, a former senior adviser to the energy secretary and an expert on nuclear power, points out that unlike fuel pools, dry casks survived the tsunami at Fukushima unscathed. "They don't get much attention because they didn't fail," he said. Moving all the nation's fuel once it has cooled in pools for at least five years could cost $7 billion, Alvarez said.

“Power companies don’t want to pay for it,” says Robert Alvarez, former senior policy adviser at the US Energy Department.

But Robert Alvarez, a former senior adviser to the secretary of energy and expert on nuclear power, points out that unlike the fuel pools, dry casks survived the tsunami at Fukushima unscathed. “They don’t get much attention because they didn’t fail,” he said.

Mr. Alvarez contended that this precaution was not enough to prevent an accident. “A single reactor has five to 10 times more radioactive material in the pool than was released in the Chernobyl accident” in 1986, he said in a telephone news conference on the fuel pools in May.

"We need to step back and take a serious look at the advisability of extending the license on this reactor — and others like it — until these concerns are addressed," said Robert Alvarez, a former top Energy Department official and nuclear-policy analyst for the progressive Institute for Policy Studies.

“In protecting America from nuclear catastrophe, safely securing the spent fuel by eliminating highly radioactive, crowded pools should be a public safety priority of the highest degree,” wrote Robert Alvarez in May in a report for the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal Washington, D.C., think tank.

The report’s lead author, Robert Alvarez, said, “The largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet will remain in storage at U.S. reactor sites for the indefinite future.”

“What they failed to mention is that they discharged an equally large amount into the ocean,” says our guest Robert Alvarez, former senior policy adviser to the U.S. Secretary of Energy. “As [the radiation] goes up the food chain, it accumulates. By the time it reaches people who consume this food, the levels are higher than they originally were when they entered the environment.” Alvarez also discusses his new report on the vulnerabilities and hazards of stored spent fuel at U.S. reactors in the United States.

Analysts have long recommended that spent fuel be removed from pools after several years and placed into dry casks that sit on land. Shifting fuel into dry storage would reduce the amount of radioactivity that could be released during an accident at a pool, said Robert Alvarez, a scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies who studies the issue. Dry casks are more resistant than pools to accidental damage or a terrorist attack.

While Alvarez, a former policy advisor to U.S. energy secretary, said losing pumps for an hour is not a crisis, he said the incident raises larger policy issues.

“Every time one of these things happens, you’ve got to ask yourself when’s a more serious event going to happen?” he said.