Dumping Ground Debate: Scott Peterson

NEXT@CNN: Should people be concerned about used fuel security?

Scott Peterson: Used fuel is absolutely secure at plant sites today. It's stored in one of two ways: in steel-lined vaults at the plant, under water, very safely monitored. The water itself is very clean and is a shielding agent, along with the lead that lines the pools, for the radiation and fuel. The second option is stainless steel and concrete containers at the site. These containers have been tested by the Sandia National Laboratories (and) they are certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as safe. And it is an interim step, a safe step until ultimately we move this fuel to a national repository, as is our national policy.

NEXT@CNN: Can you allow for a plane crashing into say -- a spent fuel pool?

Peterson: Spent fuel pools are going to be very difficult targets to hit for several reasons. It's because their location within the facilities themselves makes them very difficult to even approach if you are a terrorist, or if you are trying to hit these with any object coming in from outside the plant site. So in that context, we think they're very safe. Really if you look at the nuclear industry, it's a model of industrial safety that's really ahead of it's time in terms of the types of scenarios that we're looking at today.

NEXT@CNN: So is Yucca Mountain the way to go?

Peterson: Certainly science suggests that Yucca Mountain right now is a suitable site, and world-class engineers and scientists have been studying Yucca Mountain for the past 20 years. They've done a tremendous amount of work in geology, in engineering, looking at volcanoes, earthquakes, water movement throughout the mountain. Doing scientific tests underground to super-heat the rock to see what chemicals or what reactions may change within the rock once the fuel is placed in there. There's no piece of ground that's better studied in the world than Yucca Mountain right now. And the Department of Energy has wrapped up all these scientific reports, and is in the position now to make a determination on the site suitability on Yucca Mountain.

NEXT@CNN: Why don't the plants want to store the waste on-site and forego the controversy?

Peterson: The plants were never contemplated to store fuel on site, and in fact were built to store a very small amount of fuel until the federal government met its obligation to move it to one facility where it's easier to manage and more cost effective to manage. And so, what you have are power plants that are starting to run out of fuel. And nuclear power today produces electricity for one out of every five homes and businesses. So we're getting to the situation where if we don't have a federal project that's up and running, you're going to start having 20 percent of the nation's power shut down.

NEXT@CNN: What is spent fuel? Why does it need so much protection?

Peterson: Well-used fuel -- when it comes out of the reactor -- has undergone the fission process, so it's highly radioactive. But we know how to keep it safe, and we do that on-site in these storage pools and in the containers. We know how to transport this material safely. We've done it through 3,000 shipments since the mid-1960s here in the United States, without any consequence whatsoever to public health or the environment. And now, the DOE has said we know that we can manage this long-term in a repository. And we think as an industry that Yucca Mountain is that site. The engineering is in place to move these containers safely to a federal repository, and store them 1,000 feet underground, where they are more secure and easier to manage.

NEXT@CNN: Aren't all those transports vulnerable to accidents or terrorist attacks?

Peterson: The transportation program has been developed with safety as really the first step in it. And we've demonstrated over the past 35 years that we can move this material across the country very safely. We have a lot of state and local input into this process. These shipments are monitored by satellite the whole way. They have police escorts through the states. The state governors are notified. So every precaution has been taken to make this process safe, from the engineering of the containers themselves to be able to withstand fantastically incredible accident scenarios to the guides who get them to the repository itself.