Thomas Gardiner
A citizens’ organization in California is proposing an alternate means for long-term storage of spent fuel that would take the waste away from nuclear power reactors without necessarily relying on the Department of Energy building a permanent repository.
Citizens’ Oversight says its proposal would protect key water resources found near many nuclear plants still holding spent fuel, and remove the danger of long-distance transport of the material to interim or permanent storage sites being considered by the federal government.
“Nationally, we need a better plan for dealing with spent nuclear fuel waste, and we should target safe storage for the next 1,000 years,” the group said in its Nov. 2 white paper laying out its plan.
Citizens’ Oversight has been deeply involved in the legal battle over management of waste at the shuttered San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) in San Diego County. Its proposal follows an August settlement between the nonprofit group and SONGS primary owner Southern California Edison that provided a framework to remove spent nuclear fuel from its current location about 100 feet from the Pacific Ocean and just a few hundred yards from one of the busiest sections of Interstate highway in the nation.
The report advocates for a process that moves spent nuclear fuel from U.S. reactors to a “Hardened Extended-Life Local Monitored Surface Storage” facility away from water resources that could be contaminated, preferably staying within the state of the waste’s origin or within a grouping of states. The material would be placed in a double-layer “Monitored, Extended Life Overcask” (MELO), with the internal container held within a “sacrificial” pressurized outer container.
“Sacrificial is used to mean that expect the outer shell to be compromised over time, and we could replace it,” Citizens’ Oversight founder Ray Lutz said Wednesday in a conference call with stakeholders. “There would be a pressurized area between the inner and outer cask, so we can monitor pressure to indicate leaks.”
The planned facilities would be surface-level, hardened structures to protect against potential external threats. “These facilities would be permanent,” Lutz said. “It’s almost like storage is permanent where it is now, and we need to do better than that.”
The proposal questions the viability and likelihood of DOE’s long-planned but still unrealized Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada – “which was to be licensed and open for business by January 31, 1998. It is now nearly 20 years later and we can note that no geologic repository is open. YM is far from viable, and nothing is on the horizon.”
“After 60 years, the spent fuel assemblies are still about 260 degrees. In a mountain full of these containers, it wouldn’t take long before human beings couldn’t even get inside the facility, and then you couldn’t deal with any leaks or other problems inside,” Lutz said during the call.
There are also significant risks to shipping what is now more than 75,000 metric tons of spent fuel from nuclear plants around the country to a permanent repository or consolidated, interim storage sites planned in New Mexico and Texas.
The United States has no commercial experience moving spent fuel, because it is all currently stored on its site of origin, according to the report. While moving the fuel by rail largely eliminates the danger of vehicle accidents, long journeys on trains that pass through major cities are a threat to the public, Citizens’ Oversight said.
The report intentionally skirts questions of cost or specifics of implementing the proposal, but Citizens’ Oversight said it should be funded by the Nuclear Waste Fund, which has collected more than $30 billion from atomic energy ratepayers to pay for the Yucca Mountain repository.
Lutz said the report was first disseminated at this month’s SONGS Community Engagement Panel meeting, and is being circulated within the Department of Energy by a DOE consultant.
The report lays out a number of recommendations toward meeting its goals, including:
- Establishment of spent fuel storage strategies by individual states or groups of states for consolidated, local storage, or keeping the waste on-site “using a prudent, 1000-year design basis.”
- Using the MELO-design cask in current on-site independent spent fuel storage installations or consolidated waste sites.
- Congressional approval of using the Nuclear Waste Fund to pay for new storage sites and resuming collection of funds from nuclear ratepayers, without demanding approval of the Yucca Mountain project.
Southern California Edison spokeswoman Maureen Brown said the utility “has no comment on the report itself, except to note it is not related to the commitments we made in the settlement agreement to explore offsite storage options,” she said. “SCE continues to plan to store San Onofre’s used fuel in dry cask storage, using a licensed, proven technology, until off site storage is available.”
