After the baking heat of a Virginia summer, the spent fuel pool at Surry Nuclear Power station, which sits on the James river in the south-east of the state, looks almost inviting. That would be unwise. Some 25 feet below the surface of the clear blue water, the tops of radioactive fuel assemblies glisten. Every 18 months or more, a new load of spent fuel - uranium pellets encased in zirconium - is removed from the power station two reactors and put into the pool, which absorbs the excess heat and some of the most dangerous (and short-lived) radiation. There it sits for five years, before being moved outside into concrete containers which look like huge washing machines.
But what then? Since the start of Barack Obama term in office in 2009, America has had no support for the long-term plan for its nuclear waste. As a candidate, Mr Obama promised to oppose the long-term plan to build a repository in Yucca Mountain, some 80 miles (129 km) north-west of Las Vegas, to win the support of Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democrat leader in the Senate. As a result, some 70,000 tons is waiting at power plants around the country, such as the one at Surry, in silos or in pools. Mr Reid, like Mr Obama, is standing down in 2017. Their successors will face a difficult question - How to reopen the debate about what to do with spent fuel and when to open the Yucca Mt. facility to operation.
In the early days of the nuclear age, when the priority was beating the Soviet Union, nuclear waste, much of it from weapons programs, was disposed of without much care. Spent fuel was left to disintegrate in pools, liquid waste was buried in tanks where it could leak into groundwater, where is that? That has left places such as Hanford, a former weapons-production site in Washington state, contaminated. The cleanup there involves some 11,000 workers, costs around $3 billion a year and will not finish before 2046. But that is post-cold ware clean-up.The problem now, however, is civilian waste.
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