"Electricity production at nuclear power plants will be up 100 to 200 percent by the middle of the century," according to estimates from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog.

Nuclear power plants will emerge in Nigeria, Morocco, Vietnam, Turkey, Poland as well as a number of other countries in the next 15 to 20 years.

But properly storing nuclear waste continues to be a challenge. Exelon Chief Executive Officer John Rowe said the United States is unlikely to construct new reactors until the industry has greater security about storage. His firm provided some 15 percent of U.S. nuclear energy.

The greater the amount of fuel at a site, greater is the risk of an accident.

"For all plants, that risk really doesn't change," David Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concern Scientists, a private nonprofit watchdog group, told North Carolina's News & Observer. "You have to store the spent fuel in the pool for the first five years. The consequences, however, are determined by how much spent fuel is in the pool. The more spent fuel, the greater the consequences will be."

Wet pool storage is higher risk than dry cask storage since radioactive fire poses greater risks to a spent fuel pool. Fire causes the container for the fuel to break and release radioactivity. "The fire propels that radioactivity far and wide and puts more people in harm's way," said Lochbaum. "The chances of a spent fuel accident are low, but the consequences are high."

While a wet pool has a capacity to hold hundreds and in some cases thousands of tons of spent fuel, dry cask hold some 20 tons. If an accident or act of terrorism hits a dry cask, the size of a radioactive cloud coming from a cask is much smaller than that coming from a spent fuel pool.

Because equipment is necessary to prevent overheating at a spent fuel pool, it is more likely to have a spent fuel problem than a dry cask accident. Risk is greater when plant owners do not keep spent fuel pools to the minimum level.

Lochbaum recommends transferring fuel that came out of a reactor more than five years ago into dry casks, which would reduce the spent fuel risk by maintaining minimum levels.

As the House-Senate conference committee negotiates an energy bill that includes several proposals to increase nuclear power plant construction, the lack of proper nuclear waste storage still remains, raising questions about nuclear security. Congress has been planning to store the country's nuclear waste in the Yucca Mountain in Nevada since the 1970s. One interim suggestion raised was to construct a series of dry casket storage facilities that would keep waste safe for some 100 years. But such temporary sites could be unpopular in communities where they would be located.

No country really has a long-term solution to nuclear waste disposal. France is looking to store waste for about 100 years in an interim site until deciding on a long-term repository while German plans to build a geological repository but has not yet opened one.

IAEA Deputy Director Yuri Sokolov said: "Demand for nuclear power reactors and nuclear fuel supplies is the greatest China, India and Southeast Asia in general."

The IAEA warned members about proper safekeeping and recycling of fuel supplies and its repatriation for safekeeping and recycling.

"Facilities for the civilized keeping and recycling of spent nuclear fuel should be created at international nuclear centers in the United States, Finland, Russia and some other countries where such technologies have been created and are at the highest level," said Sokolov.

Russian Atomic Energy Agency Head Alexander Rumyantsev said: "Such a center may incorporate fresh nuclear fuel storages, from where the fuel might be leaded to the user countries with newly-built nuclear power plants."

Rumyantsev argues centers could create an emergency reserve of fresh nuclear fuel in case of a suspension of commercial supplies to the countries whose nuclear power industry is in the development phase.

Under a U.S.-Russian agreement, the two sides held training exercises Tuesday to assess preparedness on unexpected potential damage to a facility with nuclear waste in the process of its transshipment from a technological platform to a ground for provisional storage. Observers from the United States, Norway and Sweden were present.

Waste will continue to be a problem. Britain uses an expensive process by repossessing its waste. The United States continues to use swimming pools to store fuel. Industry experts say the best alternative is geological storage which is a method of interring waste very deep.

After more than 50 years of nuclear power usage, the world has accumulated 200,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel of which, 70,000 tons has been processed while the rest is kept at nuclear power plants. This is fraught with possible risks if they are kept or recycled in incompetently or become available to international terrorists.

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