Interim Storage Partners — a joint venture of Orano USA and Waste Control Specialists (WCS) — on Monday submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission a renewed license application to build and operate an interim storage facility for used nuclear reactor fuel.
The consolidated interim storage facility (CISF) pad would be built on WCS’ 14,900-acre waste disposal property in Andrews County in West Texas, near the border with New Mexico.
“We are pleased to re-energize this application and begin addressing the industry’s increasing need for completing the decommissioning of shutdown nuclear energy facilities across the country. This interim solution is a near-term action on the path of eventual permanent storage in a federal repository.” Interim Storage Partners President Jeff Isakson said in a press release.
The license had previously been submitted in April 2016 solely by Waste Control Specialists under its previous management and ownership, with the U.S. branch of French nuclear company Orano (then still called AREVA) and NAC International as partners in the project. The proposal remains the same in the renewed application: an initial 40-year license for disposal of up to 40,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel in eight phases. After 40 years, the two corporations expect to seek to renew the license in 20-year segments.
Waste Control Specialists requested the NRC suspend its review in April 2017 while the company waited on closure of its sale from holding company Valhi Inc. to EnergySolutions, a rival in the domestic market for low-level radioactive waste disposal. A federal judge blocked the deal on antitrust grounds in June 2017, but WCS in January was sold to private equity firm J.F. Lehman & Co. Under new leadership, WCS announced its intention to partner with Orano to renew the license application.
The site could be part of the solution for the Department of Energy’s longstanding congressional mandate to dispose of spent fuel from U.S. nuclear power reactors. With the planned Yucca Mountain permanent repository in Nevada still hotly contested, attention has turned toward a medium-term solution. New Jersey-based Holtec International has also applied for an NRC license, for a facility with capacity for more than 100,000 metric tons of radioactive waste in southeastern New Mexico.
Interim Storage Partners tentatively anticipates receiving the license in 2021 or 2022.
An NRC spokesman said the agency was in an early stage of its technical review when WCS withdrew its application last year. The regulator will review the updated application and should within 30 to 60 days post a Federal Register notice that it is reopening the scoping period for the environmental portion of its evaluation. Interested parties will also have an opportunity to request a hearing. At that time, the NRC will have a better estimate on the timing of the review, the spokesman said.
Two full-time NRC staffers are assigned to both the Holtec and Interim Storage Partners applications, supported by approximately 20 other staffers as part of their overall workload. Each technical reivew will cost roughly $7.5 million, which is billed to the applicants, according to an NRC spokesman.
Last week, Waste Control Specialists President and Chief Operating Officer David Carlson said Interim Storage Partners would focus initial storage operations on licensed Orano and NAC International containers at nine closed or nearly retired nuclear plants: Maine Yankee, Connecticut Yankee, Millstone in Connecticut, Yankee Rowe in Massachusetts, La Crosse and Kewaunee in Wisconsin, Zion in Illinois, Rancho Seco and San Onofre in California, Crystal River in Florida, and Oyster Creek in New Jersey (scheduled for closure in October).
The WCS-Orano team says its chosen site is not above nor adjacent to any underground drinking water supply, with the nearest down-gradient drinking-water well 6.5 miles to the east. At least 400 monitoring wells are measured quarterly, with many usually found dry. And about 150 of those wells have water samples — if available — collected and analyzed in a lab every six months. The area averages 15 inches of rain a year.
The Andrews County Commissioners Court and the Texas Legislature have voiced support for the project.
The CISF project is one component of J.F. Lehman’s plan for turning around Waste Control Specialists, which was long a money sink for Valhi, Carlson said.
The Dallas-based company also hopes to increase its share of the market for disposal of low-level radioactive waste (LLRW) generated at nuclear power plants, industrial sites, hospitals, and other sources. The Waste Control Specialists property contains one of four active NRC-licensed facilities for LLRW; the others are EnergySolutions’ sites in South Carolina and Utah and a US Ecology facility in Washington state.
The WCS facility’s state regulator, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, is conducting a rulemaking that would reduce a number of fees for LLRW disposal at the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact facility, which the company operates for the state. The new fees could be adopted by October, according to the state timeline. That could increase WCS’ competitiveness in the marketplace, according to Carlson, who joined the company in January from Veolia.
“We get very little Class A waste today from certain customer groups, and that we would expect that by being competitive that some percentage of those customers might be willing to ship to us instead of the alternatives,” he told RadWaste Monitor last week on the sidelines of the ExchangeMonitor’s Decommissioning Strategy Forum in Nashville.
Class A is the least hazardous form of low-level radioactive waste and represents well over 90 percent of that material. Carlson said Waste Control Specialists is also emphasizing to nuclear power plants and the Department of Energy that its Resource Conservation and Recovery Act landfill is a less-expensive option for disposal of particularly low-level Class A waste designated as exempt under Texas regulations.
Another potential opportunity is Greater-Than-Class-C Waste — low-level radioactive waste with radionuclide concentrations above the limits set in the NRC’s designation for Class C waste. The NRC is considering a rulemaking on disposal of such waste, and DOE has said generic commercial facilities – such as the WCS facility – are part of its preferred approach to disposal of GTCC material.
The Energy Department forecasts the United States will hold roughly 12,000 cubic meters of GTCC and GTCC-like waste by 2083. The material – such as activated materials and sealed sources – is now held on-site by the generators.
The increasing market for waste from decommissioning nuclear power plants is another opportunity. Six U.S. power reactors have shut down since 2012, and another 12 closures are already anticipated from this year to 2025, according to the NRC. Waste Control Specialists CEO Scott State holds the same position for New York City-based NorthStar Group Services, which hopes by the end of this year to buy the retired Vermont Yankee plant for cleanup. Waste from that project would go to WCS, and other opportunities are on the horizon, Carlson said, though he declined to discuss specifics.
“J.F. Lehman bought WCS with a strategy in mind and that strategy is absolutely decommissioning. So decommissioning is very much a near-term and a midterm opportunity for us,” Carlson said.
Management also hopes to reduce operational costs, though Carlson said no layoffs are planned. Waste Control Specialists employs about 160 workers on-site in Andrews County, plus another 25 off-site personnel.
“There’s certain things in regulation that perhaps over time we can have changed, there’s certain things in our licenses and permits that perhaps over time we can have changed,” he said. As a theoretical example, Carlson cited getting regulator approval for limiting groundwater monitoring in which decades of observation have shown no escape of contaminants from the disposal site.
