COVERT, Mich. -- For the foreseeable future, more than 70 communities near nuclear generating plants will become repositories for spent nuclear fuel, the most radioactive of all atomic wastes, without any public hearings or environmental studies of the sites.
Utilities have no choice but to build de facto permanent repositories near their plants, because after decades of searching for a centralized nuclear waste site, the United States is still at least 15 years away from a solution and has found nowhere else to store the roughly 30,000 tons that have already accumulated.
In a little-noticed ruling in January, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, cleared the way for utilities to store radioactive wastes indefinitely at their nuclear power plants without holding formal public hearings or conducting any environmental assessment.
On Feb. 1, members of the Mescalero Apache tribe in New Mexico turned down a proposal to build a national high-level nuclear waste storage center on their reservation.
Both supporters and critics of nuclear power agree that those two decisions mean it is much easier, even necessary, for utilities to build storage sites for atomic wastes. Despite having spent nearly $2 billion studying a potential repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, the Department of Energy still does not know if the site is suitable. If it is, the earliest a permanent repository could open there would be in the year 2010.
Here at the Palisades Nuclear Plant, an hour southwest of Grand Rapids, nine 16-foot-tall concrete and steel casks are being erected in a monument to one of the 20th century's enduring technical and political failures. The casks, each of which holds 30 tons of spent nuclear fuel and cost $500,000, stand side by side on a table-flat concrete pad a stone's throw from Lake Michigan. How long the casks and their contents will remain here is anybody's guess.
This was never envisioned in the 1950s and early 1960s, when the government promoted the development of immense electric generating plants powered by atomic energy. Anticipating that the government would either allow spent fuel to be recycled or would construct a permanent repository, utilities generally built small water pools to store their wastes temporarily.
But the recycling idea was barred in the late 1970s by President Jimmy Carter, who feared it would produce huge quantities of plutonium capable of being used in nuclear bombs. And efforts over the past four decades to establish government-owned permanent repositories in Kansas, Washington state, Texas and Nevada have failed.
Now utilities that own the nation's 109 operating reactors and manage several others that have been closed are studying how to move spent nuclear fuel from bulging indoor storage pools to outdoor concrete casks.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has already received applications from utilities in Arkansas, California, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania for permission to build storage sites like this one, and more applications are expected, commission officials say.
Palisades officials say they have no choice. Roughly 18 percent of the energy generated each year by the plant's owner, Consumers Power, a subsidiary of the CMS Energy Company, is produced by the Palisades reactor. Nationwide, about 21 percent of all electricity is generated by nuclear power.
As long as the reactors operate, they will produce high-level radioactive waste, adding to the 30,000 tons accumulated since the 1960s, according to the Department of Energy. By the second decade of the 21st century there will be 55,000 more tons of spent nuclear fuel, department officials estimates.
"We're out of space in our pool, and we looked at several other options for storing wastes," said Mark Savage, the Palisades spokesman. "Dry fuel storage in casks was the option we chose, and it's the safest and simplest component we have at this plant. There are no moving parts and nothing to break. It sits on a pad and releases heat."
Four other nuclear power plants in Maryland, South Carolina and Virginia already store their wastes above ground in casks. What distinguishes the Palisades project from the others is the relative ease with which Consumers Power established it. The other sites had all required extensive environmental evaluations and full public hearings.