Nuclear Policy

The problem of plutonium waste is not confined to Hanford. Plutonium waste is much more prevalent around nuclear weapons sites nationwide than the Energy Department’s official accounting indicates, said Robert Alvarez, who reanalyzed studies in 2010 conducted by the department in the last 15 years for Hanford; the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory; the Savannah River Site, near Aiken, S.C.; and elsewhere.

The odds of any type of reactor-core accident range from several chances in 1,000 to one chance in 10 million per year of reactor operation, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The industry has $19 billion set aside to pay for accidents. But what would a Chernobyl-type release of radioactive gases into the air do to death rates and the habitability of some large area? The Institute for Policy Studies says a spent-fuel fire could cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

"The amount of heat that this spent fuel gives off is so great that it could actually destabilize the geology," [Bob Alvarez] says, "and cause the containers to corrode or crack open, which would lead to migration of the waste, perhaps into water supplies."

ROBERT SEIGEL: This week we've heard plenty about policy...but we've heard far less about the practical side of the nuclear conversation. How is this material actually stored and moved, and what can be done to make it safe besides simply locking it up?

Well, for answers, we turn to Robert Alvarez, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. He served as a senior policy adviser to the secretary of energy during the Clinton administration. And I asked Alvarez about the materials that Ukraine has agreed to hand over. First, the more than 100 kilograms of highly enriched uranium.