The Department of Energy has applied for a 20-year renewal of the license for storage in Idaho of debris from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, according to documents made public Tuesday.
The regulator issued the license for Three Mile Island Unit 2 (TMI-2) Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation (ISFSI) on March 19, 1999. If the agency approves the DOE request, the license would not expire until March 19, 2039.
“The NRC staff is conducting an acceptance review of the application to determine if it contains sufficient technical information in scope and depth to allow the staff to conduct the detailed technical review,” agency spokeswoman Maureen Conley said by email Wednesday. “The staff plans to complete its acceptance review in April 2017. If the NRC accepts the application for a detailed technical review, we will establish a review schedule at that time.”
Unit 2 at the nuclear power plant near Middletown, Pa., famously experienced a partial core meltdown in March 1979, though little radiation escaped the facility. It never resumed operations and its core was removed, though the plant’s Unit 1 reactor remains operational.
The ISFSI at the Idaho Nuclear Technology and Engineering Center at DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory is licensed to store debris and associated materials from the Unit 2 reactor core. That, according to the license, includes the following: the remains of 177 fuel assemblies, 61 control rods, and various canisters to hold that material. The maximum amount to be stored is 82,985.9 kilograms of uranium from the unit’s fuel assemblies, contained in about 139,293 kilograms of material extracted from the reactor vessel.
All material was placed in the facility’s 30 dry storage casks by 2001 and no more would be added under the extended license, according to the March 6 license application submission letter from Richard Provencher, deputy assistant energy secretary for Idaho Site Operations.
He noted that the ISFSI has a design life of 50 years, which would cover both the 20-year original license and the two-decade extension.
