Editorial: Zion’s nuclear problem will last 160 million years

The owners and decommissioning contractor issue a report every year that outlines how far away from permanent extinction the Zion nuclear plant is.

Destroying the pile of mildly radioactive architecture and shipping it to Utah will take Exelon’s contractor another three years to finish a decade-long, $800 million project.

But the nuclear energy rods now are being transferred into 61 concrete canisters. Each 19-foot cask will hold 167 tons of the 2.2 total million pounds of spent fuel.

Without a new federal repository for spent nuclear fuel to replace Yucca Flats, Nevada, they will sit in Zion cooking at 400 degrees.

There’s been no sign Congress has the energy to resolve the ultimate dump problem. Zion shockingly has become a de facto dump.

Based on public complaints and pleadings by Zion officials, they might not sense the chronology, either.

The fuel’s radioactive half-life is 16 million years, with a defined hazardous life of 160 million years.

http://newssun.chicagotribune.com/2015/01/24/editorial-zion-160-million-year-nuclear-problem/