Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
9/26/2014
Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chair Allison Macfarlane and former NRC Commissioner William Magwood called on countries to make better progress at building geologic repositories for the spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors in remarks during the International Atomic Energy Agency’s General Conference, held this week in Vienna. Both Macfarlane and Magwood, who now serves as Director General of the Nuclear Energy Agency, warned that although spent nuclear fuel can be stored in dry cask storage, nations should not be satisfied with that result. A geologic repository is needed to safely dispose of the waste, Macfarlane said. “To those countries who are considering going into nuclear power, you’re in some ways the best position,” Macfarlane said. “You can learn from our mistakes. But, it’s really important, I think, to get it right from the beginning. Before you develop and turn on your reactor, you need a plan for how you are going to manage and dispose of this material. If you have that plan in place, you are going to save a lot of money, a lot of time, and a lot of stress.”
Magwood added, “I think that is the most important aspect of this: to recognize that these materials especially in the case of direct disposal, will be hazardous for tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years. As we prepare to past those on to future generations, we need to make sure we did the best we can and deal with the challenges instead of passing them on to future generations.”
Macfarlane Reiterates 72-71-72 Sequence Problem
Macfarlane also discussed in her remarks the dry cask storage versus transportation issue that was the topic of a briefing the NRC held last week. Under NRC regulations, storage is regulated under 10.CFR.72 while transport is regulated under 10.CFR71. Each regulation allows for a different threshold of heat production, resulting in some complicated shipment problems. “When we move this material to dry cask storage, as a number of us do—In the United States many, many of our reactor sites have dry cask storage of some kind—there are a number of issues we are just now encountering,” Macfarlane said. “One has to do with the cask systems themselves. We are now licensing cask systems at two different levels: for storage and for transport. The heat production limits for storage are different for storage than for transport. It turns out that they are sometimes twice that for storage than for transport. What are the implications of this? This means if you fill a cask to the higher storage heat production limit, you are committing the site to many decades of storage because it will take a long time for that heat to decay away so you can transport it.”
She added that the most efficient way to deal with this problem would be to have a single cask that could do both functions. “The most efficient way to design a plan to manage and dispose of spent fuel would be to have one cask design that does everything for you,” Macfarlane said. “That design would do storage, transport, and disposal. That would be the most cost efficient way to do it. Unfortunately, a lot of us have not done it that way.”
