Nuclear fuel facts misrepresented in story

The spent nuclear fuel facts and figures were presented well in the March 23 Associated Press story but the conclusions were wrong. The amount of spent fuel is much too small to be

considered a “problem.” To understand their numbers, note that a standard railroad car will carry 100 tons of coal. The spent fuel produced by all 104 U.S. reactors for an entire year would fill 22 rail cars. It would take five years for a single reactor to fill one rail car.

All of the spent fuel more than five years old can be taken out of the storage pools and stored elsewhere on the reactor site. The dry casks used now are certainly safe. They are made to withstand every imaginable kind of abuse and are ridiculously expensive. The spent fuel is valuable and must not be “disposed of.”

Ninety-seven percent of the original nuclear energy is still in the fuel, and new reactors now being designed can make use of this energy. The fission products are even more valuable than the uranium.

These include the rare earths and some of the platinum metals. Most of these are no longer radioactive after 20 to 50 years.

Ed Norbeck

Coralville