Chris Schneidmiller
RW Monitor
01/29/2016
Waste Control Specialists is on track to in April submit a license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to operate a consolidated interim spent nuclear fuel storage facility on its property in Andrews County, Texas, company CEO and President Rod Baltzer said last week.
“So, what does this mean exactly? It means we should be the first in line at the NRC,” Baltzer wrote in a Jan. 20 blog post on the Waste Control Specialists website. “It also means that we are serious about our proposal to build a state of the art facility to store spent fuel.”
The company would be first in line, but not by much — Holtec International expects to file a license application of its own with the NRC in June, spokeswoman Caitlin Marmion said by email Wednesday. Both companies plan to build interim spent fuel storage facilities under the Department of Energy’s “phased, adaptive, consent-based” plan for finding permanent resting places for tens of thousands of tons of U.S. spent reactor fuel and high-level radioactive waste. The DOE siting program began formally in December after the Obama administration in 2011 halted funding for the Yucca Mountain geologic repository in Nevada and formed a blue-ribbon panel that in 2012 issued findings that emphasized the consent-based strategy in dealing with the growing amounts of waste.
On Feb. 5, 2015, WCS submitted a notice of intent to apply for an interim storage license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The company notified the agency of its plan to submit its license application in spring 2016 and to have the site open for business before the close of 2020. That would allow for a three-year NRC review that WCS expects to end with the approval of a 40-year license in June 2019. The company would afterward aim for 20-year license renewals.
Holtec anticipates its HI-STORE project in southeastern New Mexico, developed in partnership with the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance, would also be ready to accept fuel by 2020, Marmion said. Maximum capacity would be roughly 75,000 metric tons. “Holtec’s schedule for the HI-STORE project is dependent on: Funding for construction of the facility, DOE taking title to the spent fuel, and providing transportation of the spent fuel to the HI-STORE facility,” according to the spokeswoman.
Waste Control Specialists, meanwhile, plans to build a facility with a maximum capacity of 40,000 metric tons of spent fuel, adding to the six distinct waste storage facilities already built on its 14,000-acre site in West Texas. The new facility would be constructed in eight phases, with each segment capable of holding 5,000 metric tons of heavy metal waste.
Roughly 70,000 metric tons of spent reactor fuel are already stored at nuclear plants across the nation, with more being produced. The DOE is ultimately responsible for permanent disposal of the material. “This means we are a compliment to a geologic repository, but we are not the entire solution,” Baltzer stated.
Both companies said this week they had no public cost estimates for their projects.
Waste Control Specialists’ plan predates its sale from Valhi Inc. to former rival EnergySolutions, which is expected to be completed in mid-2016. That deal does not appear to have dimmed the company’s enthusiasm for the spent fuel storage depot – which would effectively be a long-term waystation for reactor fuel now held on-site at plants around the nation until it finally goes to permanent repositories.
“The new ownership is excited by all the things we’re pursuing now and we’re going to go full-speed ahead,” Waste Control Specialists spokesman Chuck McDonald said on Wednesday.
The first phase of the project would be employed for storage of spent fuel now being stored at 10 sites where the reactors have been closed. Those facilities now hold about 3,000 metric tons of “stranded” spent fuel, according to the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future. Holtec would also prioritize that material, Marmion said.
McDonald said Waste Control Specialists has held at least four pre-application meetings with NRC officials on issues such as the environmental impact assessment of the site and what would need to be included in the physical security plan. Holtec held its first pre-application meeting with the agency on Dec. 9, Marmion said.
The NRC is likely to be able to complete its license application reviews within three years, spokeswoman Maureen Conley said Wednesday. It will benefit from the fact that the NRC in 2008 approved an interim spent-fuel holding facility, the ultimately abandoned Private Fuel Storage project in Utah, similar to those planned by WCS and Holtec.
The wild card will be the number of public hearings that must be scheduled for the applications and the scope of safety and environmental objections from local stakeholders. “We can’t predict how long the hearings are going to be,” Conley said in a telephone interview.
The Department of Energy in December laid out a three-part strategy for storage of spent fuel and high-level waste. The first step would be building a pilot site that would primarily hold spent fuel from closed reactors followed by an interim site with greater capabilities, potentially including packaging waste for long-term storage. Last would come building one or more permanent sites.
“No one argues that a facility to handle the permanent disposal of this waste is decades away and that safe and secure consolidated storage is necessary,” Baltzer wrote. “We needed it yesterday. Put in those terms, our timeline doesn’t seem so aggressive after all. But it is a realistic timeline.”
