The Arizona Public Service Company has agreed to implement programs suggested by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission involving violations made at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in 2019 and since.
The Arizona Public Service company operates the station, where it failed to perform an evaluation for a change to a dry cask storage system and procure a license amendment for how it performed calculations of accidents, according to the NRC. The operator also failed to sufficiently “analyze the consequences of a hypothetical accident involving a cask tip over on the independent spent fuel storage installation pad (ISFSI),” an NRC inspection report said.
The report said the company’s failure to adequately analyze a hypothetical accident involving the ISFSI pad occurred from August 2019 to February 27, 2020.
The NRC said the Arizona Public Service company’s agreement to implement programs to prevent such violations in the future resolved the current violations. The agreement was made through an Alternative Dispute Resolution process using a neutral mediator to help the commission and company find a consensus.
The Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, which operates three reactors in western Arizona, is the largest U.S. power plant by net generation.
Palo Verde currently has enough capacity in its ISFSI to hold all the fuel generated until December 2027, the end of its initial operating period. It has enough capacity to store at least a portion of the fuel expected to be generated until November 2047, the end of its planned extended operating period.
Depending on whether and when the Department of Energy takes title to the plant’s fuel — something that is not imminent — APS will either expand or replace the ISFSI. DOE failed to license Yucca Mountain as a permanent repository even when the Donald Trump administration and Republicans controlled the government for two years, and the agency’s plan to build pilot interim consolidated fuel storage sites is moving slowly.
“If uncertainties regarding the United States government’s obligation to accept and store spent fuel are not favorably resolved, APS will evaluate alternative storage solutions that may obviate the need to expand the ISFSI to accommodate all of the fuel that will be irradiated during the period of extended operation,” the company said in its most recent 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
