Power plant waste

The column by Donald Grant (BDN, July 13) urging Congress to enable nuclear power plant waste to be stored at a central storage site recalled for me a senior class in mechanical engineering design project. The reactor rods were as now stored in a pool at the Maine Yankee Plant in Wiscasset.

The problem proposed was to use the stored rods to heat buildings on the UM campus in Orono instead of the river used to cool the pool then as now. The issue then was so completely politically incorrect as to not be worthwhile to debate in any energy forum, although a copy of the project was sent to Maine government.

The students found several useful things:

1. The rods release energy at a nearly steady rate almost indefinitely.

2. The thermal potential is more than adequate to deliver heat for buildings through heat transfer and circulation devices.

3. The rods can be safely transported by rail or truck in already tested containers.

4. Rod transfer methods and handling are routine.

They also discovered that the pool at Wiscasset is benign. Workers had fallen in it without harm (not intentionally of course).

Based on the experience of that design project, I think that the nuclear power plant “waste” reactor rods might now be considered an energy resource.

Weekly discussions by the class tried to discover insurmountable problems of endangerment from radiation. None was as dangerous as, for example, driving a car, oil transport by sea or over the ground, and nowhere near as the potential lethalness of hazardous chemical use and transport still is today.

John Wyman

Steuben