To Mayor Al Hill of Zion, Ill., H.R. 3970 is greatly needed for his town of 25,000 to economically recover from hosting a used nuclear fuel storage site.
That bill was introduced last year by U.S. Rep. Bradley Schneider (D-Ill.), whose district includes Zion. The measure was referred to the House Energy and Commerce environment subcommittee in October and has not moved since.
Schneider’s bill would would create a noncompetitive grant program to provide financial assistance to local governments that have civilian nuclear power plants within their jurisdictions in order to deal with the economic fallout of hosting such plants.
The assistance payments would be $15 per kilogram of spent nuclear stored at a local site per year. The bill would set aside $100 million for the nationwide program each year through 2024.
Hill was the centerpiece panelist at Monday’s briefing for members of Congress, federal officials and their staffs on how decommissioning commercial reactors affects power-plant host communities. The Washington-based Environmental and Energy Study Institute coordinated the panel discussion.
The plant is on 257 acres of Lake Michigan shoreline within the town of Zion. Commonwealth Edison built the plant, and its two reactors went online in 1973 and 1974. The utility shut down the plant in 1998 after control rods in one reactor were inserted too quickly and then withdrawn improperly.
Commonwealth Edison decided the needed fixes and improvements would make the plant too expensive to operate until its scheduled 2013 shutdown date. Exelon became owner of the site in 2000, when it became the parent company of Commonwealth Edison.
ZionSolutions took on the plants’ Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licenses in 2010 so it could conduct decommissioning. That work began in 2011 and is largely complete, with all spent fuel in dry storage as of 2015 and both reactor vessels removed.
The NRC license is expected to return to Exelon in 2020, while 61 casks holding 1,025 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel will remain in dry storage on the Zion site for possibly decades until there is temporary storage, or a permanent repository for the nation’s nuclear waste.
Hill said the presence of those 61 casks from 1998 to an undefined time in the future have greatly hurt Zion.
“All that lakefront land cannot be used for possibly decades,” Hill said. “The nuclear waste presents a negative perception.”
In both the panel discussion and a follow-up phone interview with RadWaste Monitor, Hill said there was “an unwritten deal” that the utility and governments would look after Zion when when the negative effects of being a host town materialized later.
