DOMINION BEGINS SHUTDOWN OF KEWAUNEE REACTOR

Dominion Resources, Inc., yesterday began the shutdown of its Kewaunee nuclear power plant in Wisconsin. The utility announced early this year that it planned to shut down the 556-megawatt reactor in May for financial reasons after seeking unsuccessfully to sell the plant since 2011. Yesterday the plant was removed from the grid, and the fuel will subsequently be removed from the reactor and placed in a spent fuel pool. “The first ten days will look like a refueling outage,” Mark Kanz, a Dominion spokesman at Kewaunee, told RW Monitor, adding, “The next step will be a number of maintenance type activities, particularly with systems dealing with the spent fuel pool, because that is one of the systems that is going to need to continue operating well into the future.”

Dominion has said it will pursue the SAFSTOR method of deferred decommissioning, wherein the facility will be shut down but maintained for up to 60 years to allow radioactivity to decay prior to cleanup activities. An estimate completed by EnergySolutions places total cost for decommissioning at $919.9 million, with license termination activities coming to $542.8 million, spent fuel management at $342.2 million and site restoration at $34.8 million, according to a Dominion filing with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The company has not yet decided how decommissioning work will be performed and contracted. “Those discussions are still being held,” Kanz said, adding later, “Any of the real decommissioning activities, taking apart of major systems and knocking down buildings and that type of thing, for the most part won’t be happening until 40 or 50 years into the future.”