The Omaha, Neb., Public Power District has issued a contract for the final move of spent reactor fuel into dry storage at the retired Fort Calhoun Station nuclear power plant.
In a press release Wednesday, Orano (formerly AREVA) said its used fuel management branch Orano TN would move 944 fuel assemblies from the plant’s cooling pool to an on-site independent spent fuel storage installation. The assemblies will be relocated within Orano NUHOMS canisters and then placed in same-named horizontal storage modules.
The nuclear plant shut down in October 2016, and all used fuel was removed from its single reactor by the following month. Orano previously moved 320 assemblies to Fort Calhoun’s storage pad in 2006 and 2009.
The total value of the new contract was not released, but Orano said it is in the tens of millions of dollars. The company expects to begin relocating the fuel next year and to complete the project in 2020.
The Omaha Public Power District expects decommissioning to cost nearly $1.4 billion over more than five decades, according to the post-shutdown decommissioning activities report (PSDAR) filed in March 2017 with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It would first place the reactor in SAFSTOR (safe storage) mode, under which nuclear power plants can delay full decommissioning for up to 60 years while radioactivity levels drop and additional funds are set aside for cleanup.
