Staff Reports
RW Monitor
11/20/2015
Plans are in the works to deliver at least 25 spent fuel rods from the North Anna Power Station in Virginia to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The Tennessee lab is preparing to cut up and analyze the “fast burnup” fuel to better understand the aging processing outside the reactor and how the changes may impact future disposition of the highly radioactive materials.
ORNL Director Thom Mason confirmed Tuesday that a proposal was under review, but he said it had not yet been approved by the Department of Energy.
“DOE has not made a decision on this proposal pending a thorough review,” Mason said. “Until the review is complete there is no firm schedule.”
Three activist groups – the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, Savannah River Watch, and Snake River Alliance Education Fund – made the budding project public with a release earlier this week in which they raised concerns about the transportation hazards and the possibility that ORNL could become a de-facto storage facility for the highly radioactive materials.
In the release, Snake River Alliance Nuclear Program Director Beatrice Brailsford indicated this shipment had previously been intended for the Idaho National Laboratory. DOE in October said it had canceled the first of two planned spent fuel shipments to Idaho.
The groups said they had filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to obtain more details about the spent-fuel plans.
There is some conflicting information about the extent of the ORNL role.
According to the watchdog groups, the plan is to ship a relatively small amount of spent fuel – 25 fuel rods – to Oak Ridge for the initial analysis and research. They said a later shipment from North Anna would involve about 20 tons of spent fuel.
“What most concerns us is the second shipment,” Ralph Hutchison, coordinator of the Oak Ridge group, said in a statement. “This is some of the nastiest waste created by the nuclear industry. And since there is no approved disposal facility or plan, it’s safe to say if it comes to Oak Ridge, it will never leave.”
The ORNL director said if the project is approved the Oak Ridge lab would evaluate how the spent fuel evolves over time. Mason said the plan is to bring about 25 “sister rods” – the same as other spent fuel rods to be kept in storage.
He acknowledged the possibility that Oak Ridge could later receive some of the spent fuel now being kept in storage, which would allow for comparison of how the material changes over time when compared to the first group of rods. But Mason insisted ORNL has had no discussions about bring 20 tons of spent fuel to Oak Ridge for research.
“Indeed,” he said, “that would exceed our capacity by a significant margin.”
ORNL has considerable experience in handling and evaluating spent nuclear fuel, and the lab has the capabilities and the personnel expertise to do the work safely, he said.
The spent fuel analysis would be carried out in ORNL’s Irradiated Fuels Examination Laboratory, a hot-cell facility in the middle of the Oak Ridge research complex.
“These are nuclear facilities, and there are obviously very rigorous safety evaluations and operating protocols,” Mason said. “We’re fortunate we have very capable experts in all the different areas.”
The proposed project meshes well with the lab’s nuclear programs and those carried out by the Department of Energy, he said.
It’s not clear when the fuel may be shipped or when DOE may give the go-ahead for the work to begin.
Hutchison said his organization had asked for a map of the shipping route for the material a couple of weeks ago but had gotten no information. “So we are resorting to the formal – and more expensive for the government – FOIA process to get information,” he said in a statement.
Hutchison said there are multiple concerns: “Oak Ridge is already a Superfund site, and there are massive, unfunded cleanup challenges here. To date, we have not been able to find any environmental analysis addressing the risks inherent in shipping and experimenting with spent nuclear fuel from a commercial reactor, especially high burn-up fuel. To bring it to Oak Ridge without an Environmental Impact Statement would be illegal.”
