Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
In case you haven’t noticed, nuclear power is back in the headlines these days.
Even here in New Mexico, where there are no nuclear power plants, it’s an issue. Not only do we have the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), where radioactive waste is stored deep underground in the southeastern corner of the state, federal regulators are considering another facility that would store up to 100,000 metric tons of high-level radioactive nuclear waste, which would be transported in from nuclear reactors around the nation.
This one is called a “Consolidated Interim Storage Facility,” or CISF, and, not surprisingly, there’s plenty opposition to it. There are environmental and transportation concerns — and it’s become a states-rights issue, with New Mexico and other Western states objecting to the federal government’s supposed authority to decide the CISF’s location without the hosting state’s approval.
With 93 reactors and 55 nuclear power plants scattered around 28 states, the need for such a radioactive waste storage facility is pretty clear. Power plants have mostly been storing their own radioactive waste, but that’s increasingly a problem.
It may ultimately outweigh the objections and New Mexico may get the facility whether it wants it or not — especially since nuclear energy might just be making a comeback.
It is getting renewed consideration all over the world as a clean-energy alternative to fossil fuels. Nuclear reactors can produce enormous amounts of electricity with zero carbon dioxide emissions, the main contributor to climate change. It’s clean energy, at least for the atmosphere.
Nevertheless, in addition to the radioactive waste, there’s the ever-present risk of a meltdown, when a nuclear reactor overheats and melts the reactor core, sending radioactive steam into the atmosphere. So far, there’s never been a full-blown meltdown but there have been some close calls that sent radiation into the air. Wikipedia lists 27 “accidents or incidents” worldwide — not bad, proponents of nuclear energy say, considering there are about 440 nuclear power reactors operating on our planet, with the first ones being built in the 1950s.
More than anything else, three nuclear reactor accidents — at Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011 — have tempered enthusiasm for nuclear power, but climate change concerns and a global energy crunch brought on by Russia’s war in Ukraine have some governments reconsidering the value of nuclear energy. Germany was on the way to shutting down its three remaining reactors, but is now thinking about building more.
And over here in the U.S., California is considering a reinvestment into its Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, despite years of protests to shut it down.
But now there’s another hazard to nuclear energy looming — a wartime hazard that’s taking place at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia.
That’s the nuclear power plant in Ukraine that Russia controls. It’s one of the biggest nuclear power plants in the world, with six reactors, and since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine more than six months ago, it has been damaged by shelling. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), after an on-site inspection, has called for a “safety zone” to avert catastrophe. A shutdown would leave millions of people without electricity. A meltdown could leave millions of people sick and dead.
Admittedly, weaponizing a nuclear power plant is not something I ever thought about until the battle for control of Zaporizhzhia came into the news.
I’ll trust in the security provisions in place for such facilities because, well, I have to. No need losing sleep over something you can’t control.
Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at: