Pressure grows for building a centralized nuclear waste repository
While the debate over a centralized nuclear waste repository continues, nuclear power plants continue to be shut down, with the tons of toxic waste produced over the life time of the plant continue to be stored on the grounds of the shuttered plant. There are growing worries about the security of that waste, and lawmakers are drafting a bill stipulating that the fact that a utility has closed down a nuclear plant does not mean that the utility is no longer responsible for securing the abandoned site, and that such sites should not be exempt – as they are now – from emergency and security regulations (see “Lawmakers urge NRC not to exempt shut-down nuclear plants from emergency, security regulations,” HSNW, 5 May 2014; and “Lawmakers want safer waste storage at nuclear plants,” HSNW 15 May 2014).
Under current rules, though hearings are held for public input, the nuclear plant operator and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission make the final decision on how a plant is decommissioned.
Entergy announced in August 2013 that it would be closing the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant because it could not financially compete with natural gas. Today the plant is home to tons of nuclear waste storage containers. Entergy is now planning to construct an additional dry cask storage facility at Yankee. The current storage facility, constructed in 2006, holds thirteen dry casks storage containers with room for twenty-three more. Each cask contains sixty-eight fuel assemblies, resulting in 884 assemblies in dry cask storage. Yankee holds another 2,627 nuclear waste assemblies in a pool in its reactor building and another 368 assemblies in the reactor vessel. The proposed new storage facility would double Yankee’s dry cask waste storage capacity.
Mike Twomey, Entergy’s vice president for external affairs, told the Reformer that he and other industry executives expect that the federal government will eventually fulfill its obligation to remove the nuclear waste from Yankee and sites around the country.
“Until it does, we are confident that we are storing it safely within the spent fuel pool or in dry cask storage. This has been extensively reviewed by the NRC and we are very confident that both methods provide safe storage until such a time as the federal government removes the spent fuel.”
To centralize nuclear waste storage operations, Senate Bill 1240 calls for a pilot facility to store priority waste; one or more additional storage facilities to store non-priority nuclear waste, and one or more repositories for the permanent disposal of nuclear waste. The proposed facilities would be used “to demonstrate the safe transportation of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste … (and) to demonstrate the safe storage of spent nuclear and high-level radioactive waste … at the one or more storage facilities, pending the construction and operation of deep geologic disposal capacity for the permanent disposal of the spent nuclear fuel or high-level radioactive waste,” according to the Bill.
If Senate Bill 1240 is approved, the first pilot facility would be established in the early 2020s. “We should have been pursuing consolidated storage facilities in parallel with repository development,” said Moniz.
