Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
9/19/2014
The lack of movement on the Department of Energy’s spent fuel management program is creating a backlog of spent nuclear fuel stored at reactor sites, making the logistics to consolidated storage more difficult with each passing year, according to members of a panel appearing before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week. Spent fuel accumulation is delaying shutdown sites from terminating licenses and creating a host of regulatory questions concerning dual-purpose storage/transport canisters, according to Thomas Cotton, vice president of Complex Systems. “When the Nuclear Waste Policy Act was passed, there was no serious expectation that there might be over 90,000 MTC of spent fuel stored at reactor sites by the time federal waste acceptance began, or that a substantial portion of that would be in a wide variety of large welded shut dry storage systems, which hadn’t even been licensed technology at the time,” Cotton said. “[This] makes clear the logistics challenge we are now facing. With a nominal waste acceptance rate of 3,000 metric tons a year, it takes 2,000 tons of that just to stop the growth of inventory at reactor sites, leaving only 1,000 metric tons a year left to start removing the backlog inventory themselves. There is a lot of momentum in this system, and nothing is going to change quickly.”
Cotton added that with the wave of expected decommissioning reactors in the coming years, DOE will have to deal with even more waste. DOE’s strategy states that shut down sites would be the first in line to ship their spent fuel to a consolidated storage facility. According to Cotton, the wave of shut down sites will make this even harder on the Department. “It’s going to be hard to catch up with [all the decommissioning sites],” he said. “If current trends continue, and they don’t have to, but if they do, it might take a much longer time than was ever expected to clear the shutdown reactor sites of spent fuel, terminate the cost of continued maintenance, and make the sites available for other uses.
Ostendorff: Strategy in “Limbo”
Commissioner William Ostendorff added that the disconnect between the Obama Administration’s strategy and the legislative requirements has left spent fuel in an in-between stage. “We are kind of in a limbo status,” Ostendorff said. “It’s difficult for me to see how we move forward to some repository solution. My personal viewpoint on consolidated storage is I’m not opposed to that. The interface of that with repository siting is so important. That’s an elephant in the room we really aren’t talking about.”
DOE, meanwhile, is attempting to implement, as much as it can, the Administration’s waste management strategy. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act precludes the Department from working on any site besides the designated Yucca Mountain, but DOE deemed that site “unworkable” in 2010 and has since moved on to interim storage. While the legislative particulars are worked out, the Department has been focusing on generic waste management studies to prepare itself once Congressional approval is achieved. According to Jeff Williams, project director for nuclear fuels storage and transportation within DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, part of this generic work includes identifying potential regulatory pitfalls in the transportation of spent fuel canisters as well as regulations for licensing an interim facility. “Current and planned activities that may be of interest to you include developing interim storage design options, including the development of a Topical Safety Analysis Report for submittal to the NRC,” Williams told the NRC. “This is a key activity that we believe can be performed now to help reduce uncertainties and mitigate potential risks associated with full implementation in the future.”
72-71-72 Operation Sequence
Part of DOE’s generic research is to look at transportation of spent fuel to a potential interim facility. A major question, though, concerning the regulations of storage/shipment canister has arisen. Under NRC regulations, storage is regulated under 10.CFR.72 while transport is regulated under 10.CFR71. “We refer to this as the 72-71-72 operation sequence, which raises some 72-71 regulatory sequence issues that require discussions,” Williams said. “This would include, for example, the approach to ensuring the contents of the arriving canisters meet Part 72 requirements for restoring them to service; inspections; plans for capability to remediate a non-conforming canister; plans for aging management of a canisters that have previously been in service for many years at ISFSIs; the timing and approach for canister system license renewals; and plans for the capability to prepare dual-purpose canisters for shipment to a disposal facility eventually.”
The cask discussion was a major point of discussion during the briefing. Since a storage facility has taken a lot longer to come about than originally thought, there will be a wide arrange of cask technology needed for shipment. Some of those casks might even need repackaging. “A central storage facility is going to have to handle a wide variety of storage canisters that have already been stored at reactor sites for various and perhaps extended periods,” Cotton said. “This is very different from earlier concepts in which standard storage systems would be used at the acceptance facilities, and if they were loaded at reactors, they would be shipped directly to the facilities fairly quickly without a long period of on-site storage. The main implication here to me is that when you are updating the regulations that are applicable to central storage you need to address this wide variety of canisters that are going to have to be stored and also the possibility of repackaging.”
