The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Stations in southern California is 60% dismantled, the San Diego Union Tribune reported.
The paper quoted plant decommissioning executives.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is moving toward deciding whether Pacific Gas and Electric Corp.’s application to extend the operating license of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in Avila Beach, Calif., for another 20 years is acceptable.
“The acceptability of the tendered application for docketing, and other matters, including an opportunity to request a hearing, will be the subject of subsequent Federal Register notices,” the commission wrote this week in a Federal Register notice. The commission did not provide a timetable for vetting the application.
Fukushima Daiichi Decontamination and Decommissioning Engineering Company completed the third discharge of irradiated wastewater from the decommissioning of the shuttered Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant on Japan’s east coast, plant owner Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) said this week.
The company sent into the Pacific Ocean about two million gallons of water during the third discharge, according to data Tepco released this week. The third discharge began on Nov. 3 and ended on Nov. 20. The second discharge from the plant ended on Oct. 23. The first ended on Sept. 11. Each took several weeks, according to Tepco data.Tepco had not published a schedule for a fourth discharge as of deadline.
NorthStar last week said it shipped the decommissioned Vallecitos boiling water reactor to Waste Control Specialists in west Texas for final disposal.
The company announced the milestone in a press release. NorthStar took over decommissioning of the Vallecitos boiling water reactor for GE-Hitachi in May. It is one of three reactors at the Vallecitos Nuclear Center, in Sunol, Calif., close to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The U.S. Nuclear Waste Fund balance stood at roughly $50.3 billion in the government’s 2023 fiscal year ended Sept. 30, up from about $48.5 million in fiscal 2022, according to an independent audit of the Department of Energy-administered fund.
DOE’s Inspector General posted the report online last week. The fund, amassed from fees charged to nuclear power plant owners, is supposed to pay for DOE’s handling and storage of spent nuclear fuel from power plants, but no federal repository for such high-level waste has been built. Plant owners have successfully sued DOE over its failure to take custody of spent fuel, but payments from those suits come out of the U.S. Judgement Fund, administered by the U.S. Treasury.
The United Kingdom’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) reaffirmed its cooperation with South Korea’s Korea Radioactive Waste Agency, according to a press release published this week by the NDA.
The reaffirmed agreement involves the exchange of personnel, know-how and data among the two agencies. It also involves “observation of, and participation in, relevant studies and/or developing joint studies through shared funding or contributions in kind,” NNDA wrote in the release.
Local officials from the Township of Ignace, a potential host community for a future Canadian deep geologic repository, returned from Finland, where they visited with nuclear waste experts and toured the Onkalo geologic repository that Posiva is building near the Swedish border, the local news outlet nwonewswatch.com reported this week.
The Ignace delegation arrived in Finland on Nov 6. and returned Nov. 10, nwonewswatch.com reported.
The U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD), part of the Transportation Department, is seeking public comment about how to preserve the historic, decommissioned nuclear ship NS Savannah: the first and only nuclear-powered commercial shipping vessel in the U.S. The public comment period is open until Feb. 16, MARAD has said.
The agency last week held a public meeting about the effort to preserve the ship, which is being decommissioned by a joint venture of Radiation Safety and Control Services Inc. and EnergySolutions. The reactor’s pressure vessel was sent to EnergySolutions Clive, Utah, disposal facility in November 2022.
NuScale Power this week announced plans to Collaborate with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for a “techno-economic assessment” of the Portland, Ore.-based company’s small modular reactors.
The announcement followed bad news for the company earlier this month, when it announced the cancellation of a long-running plan to install a bank of small modular reactors at the Idaho National Laboratory. Not enough customers wanted to buy the power the reactors would generate.
