So says Robert Alvarez for The Los Angeles Times:
[T]he nation's 104 nuclear power plants are legally storing spent fuel in onsite cooling ponds much longer, and at higher densities (on average four times higher), than was originally intended. And now that the Obama administration has called off proposed plans to store nuclear waste at the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada, fuel is likely to remain at the plants where it was used for decades to come.
This presents a serious threat. Our report found that, as in Japan, US nuclear safety authorities don't require reactor operators to have backup power supplies to circulate water in the pools and keep them cool if there is a loss of offsite power. ...
[A] severe pool fire could render about 188 square miles uninhabitable, cause as many as 28,000 cancer fatalities and cost $59 billion in damage.
Read all of it here.
