The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) and Entergy are no fans of a bill again being proposed by a trio of Northeast lawmakers to speed up the transfer of nuclear spent fuel into dry cask storage.
Senators Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (ID-Vermont), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) reintroduced the Dry Cask Storage Act legislation May 26.
The lawmakers have again proposed to require plant operators to remove spent nuclear fuel from spent fuel pools and place that spent fuel into dry cask storage within seven years of the time a removal plan is submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The bill also seeks to expand the size of emergency planning zones.
“Overcrowded spent nuclear fuel pools like the one at Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station are a disaster waiting to happen,” Markey, a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, wrote in a news release. “Pilgrim’s spent fuel pool contains nearly four times more radioactive waste than it was originally designed to hold. We need the NRC to post the ‘Danger’ sign outside these fuel pools and ensure dangerous nuclear waste is moved to safer storage before a nuclear disaster occurs.”
The bill last appeared in the 114th Congress, which ended in January. Bills that have not been signed into law at the end of one legislative session are declared null and void and must be reintroduced in the next session if they are to become law.
This legislation is unwarranted and the nuclear industry opposes it, Rod McCullum, NEI Senior Director, Fuel and Decommissioning, said in a statement to Radwaste Monitor.
“The U.S. nuclear industry has safely and effectively stored used fuel in steel-lined, water-filled concrete vaults at plant sites for decades,” McCullum said.
The sponsors of the bill said a just-published study by Princeton University finds that NRC relied on bad analysis to justify the current policy. The lawmakers also said that current NRC standards don’t adequately address the potential dire consequences of nuclear-waste fires at dozens of reactor sites around the country.
But NEI’s McCullum said this most recent report on the oft-studied topic “offers nothing new and does not change abundant evidence that used fuel at U.S. plant sites is properly managed – a claim consistently verified by industry experts, independent scientists, and the NRC.”
The NRC, after looking at a series of studies recommended in NUREG 2161 that “no further generic assessments be pursued related to possible regulatory actions to require the expedited transfer of spent fuel to dry cask storage,” said McCullum.
An analysis by one of the authors of the study showed that a hypothetical spent-fuel fire at the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station could result in the release of radioactive fall-out across a large swathe of New England, the senators said.
NRC regulations currently allow spent fuel to remain stored in spent fuel pools until the reactor is shut down and completes decommissioning, which can take as long as 60 years, the lawmakers said.
“Pilgrim’s spent fuel pool contains nearly four times more radioactive waste than it was originally designed to hold,” Markey said. “We need the NRC to post the ‘Danger’ sign outside these fuel pools and ensure dangerous nuclear waste is moved to safer storage before a nuclear disaster occurs,” Markey said.
But both NEI’s McCullum and Entergy spokesman Jerry Nappi said the federal government could do something constructive on spent nuclear fuel by reviving the license process for the waste repository at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.
“We do agree with the Senators that the issue of long-term storage of used fuel should be addressed – that is, the Federal Government needs to meet its statutory responsibility to manage used nuclear fuel from the nation’s nuclear power plants,” said Nappi.
“The current administration has indicated support for continuing work on the repository license while also pursuing potential interim storage sites,” said Entergy’s Nappi. “We support these efforts as a means to eventually move the used fuel from the sites.”
