Identifying potential areas for siting interim nuclear waste facilities using map algebra and optimization approaches

The renewed interest in siting new nuclear power plants in the United States has brought to the center stage, the need to site interim facilities for long-term management of spent nuclear fuel (SNF). In this paper, a two-stage approach for identifying potential areas for siting interim SNF facilities is presented. In the first stage, the land area is discretized into grids of uniform size (e.g., 100m x 100m grids). For the continental United States, this process resulted in a data matrix of about 700 million cells. Each cell of the matrix is then characterized as a binary decision variable to indicate whether an exclusion criterion is satisfied or not. A binary data matrix is created for each of the 25 siting criteria considered in this study. Using map algebra approach, cells that satisfy all criteria are clustered and regarded as potential siting areas. In the second stage, an optimization problem is formulated as a p-median problem on a rail network such that the sum of the shortest distance between nuclear power plants with SNF and the potential storage sites from the first stage is minimized. The implications of obtained results for energy policies are presented and discussed.