A local advisory committee on Tuesday urged the Energy Department not to accept shipments of spent nuclear fuel from Germany at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
The recommendation was one of three approved during the meeting of the SRS Citizens Advisory Board’s (CAB) Nuclear Materials Committee. The three recommendations all complement positions widely held among local community members against the site becoming a permanent storage station for nuclear waste.
The German fuel issue dates to 1953 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched the Atoms for Peace program. Under the program, highly enriched uranium produced in the United States was sent to several other countries for research purposes. The material was used in German research reactors and is now considered spent fuel. Per the terms of the program, the United States is supposed to take it back, even though one option DOE is considering is to simply let the material remain in Germany.
The uranium would arrive in the form of 1 million graphite spheres, each about the size of a tennis ball. Germany first proposed repatriating the material in 2012 when it asked the Energy Department for help in disposing of the HEU.
The Savannah River Site processes HEU at its H Canyon facility, the only hardened chemical separations plant still in existence in the United States. The final product would be stored at SRS until the federal government secures a long-term repository for nuclear waste. It is unclear how much the effort would cost, but Germany would pay for the entire project.
The full CAB has already formally opposed SRS taking the material, and the Nuclear Material Committee’s unanimous vote reinforced that position.
Committee member David Hoel said he takes issue with accepting the material because the Energy Department has said it does not pose a proliferation concern. The CAB’s position has been that the lack of a proliferation threat makes accepting the material unnecessary. “Generally, I support getting this stuff back,” Hoel said. “But when DOE itself admits that this is not a proliferation concern, then it just doesn’t make sense.”
The committee on Tuesday also recommended that the full CAB ask DOE to “not consider SRS as a reasonable consolidated interim storage location for spent nuclear fuel.” The recommendation also requests that the department “stabilize and remove such waste from SRS as soon as possible.” All told, the site stores about 2,700 bundles of spent fuel that originated from operations at SRS and other sites.
The CAB wants the department to focus on securing a federal repository for the material and is concerned about SRS receiving more material without a pathway out of South Carolina.
The Department of Energy’s fiscal 2018 budget proposal requests $110 million for restarting licensing of Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a permanent repository for U.S. nuclear waste, along with $10 million to advance development of interim spent fuel storage until the final facility is ready.
A recently discarded plan aimed to solve the issue of spent fuel in South Carolina. Mike Stake, head of the Spent Fuel Reprocessing Group, told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in July 2016 that the organization planned to apply for an operating license for an interim spent fuel storage facility, with the capability of reprocessing spent fuel from the state’s nuclear reactors. But in April, Stake said there is simply not enough demand for such a facility in South Carolina.
“It was more of an economic drive – is really what our shift (in focus) was,” Stake told the ExchangeMonitor. “If you don’t pay attention to the economic drive, you’re not going to have a product that’s going to be saleable. So it was mainly economics. We’re going to have pushback everywhere we go and whatever we do, but if we can’t have it economically viable, you’ve got nothing.”
In a final, less-anticipated recommendation, the CAB committee this week asked DOE to provide full funding for H Canyon missions. The panel did not elaborate on how much funding it believes is appropriate, but said increasing production at the canyon would help rid the Savannah River Site of unwanted materials. “Storage space is limited and the site is not intended to be a permanent repository. Processing the fuel allows more of the material to leave the site boundaries,” the committee wrote.
The recommendations will now go to the full CAB for a vote. If passed, they will then be considered by DOE headquarters. The department will decide if it will fully or partially implement the recommendations, or if it will reject them.
