Cost overruns for core cleanup projects at the United Kingdom’s Sellafield nuclear site are expected to total £913 million ($1.16 billion), the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee said Wednesday.
In a report on the U.K. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority’s efforts to reduce the risk left by former nuclear weapons and power operations at the complex in Cumbria, the parliamentary panel said significant progress had been made since its last evaluation in 2015. It specifically noted reductions in schedule slips and anticipated budget busting at 14 major projects that are expected to cost £6 billion ($7.7 billion).
However, “there is still a long way to go and the NDA cannot afford to be complacent. Most major projects at Sellafield are still significantly delayed, with expected combined cost overruns of £913 million,” lawmakers wrote. “The NDA has not systematically reviewed why these projects keep running into difficulties, or analysed properly the constraints it says prevent them from making faster progress. Until this work is completed, we remain sceptical about its long-term strategy to decommission Sellafield.”
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority is an executive nondepartmental agency of the U.K. government charged with overseeing nuclear cleanup jobs around the nation. It is the parent body to Sellafield Ltd., which conducts used fuel reprocessing and remediation across the property.
The committee issued seven specific findings and recommendations for the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, including:
- There is still no assessment from NDA and Sellafield Ltd. regarding how the complexity of operations and other challenges at Sellafield are directly keeping them from more rapidly reducing risk at the site. They should study the matter and report back to the committee within six months with detail on how this information will contribute to several upcoming planning documents.
- Lessons learned have not been gleaned from canceled projects and other errors. Three projects alone cost £586 million ($747.6 million) before being canceled in the last six years, the report says. While the NDA said it has found new cost-savings approaches for faster risk reduction, the committee wants a report within three months on how this will lead to cost savings.
- There are persistent concerns regarding oversight of Sellafield by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy. These bodies should describe to the committee how they will improve oversight, no more than six months following release of an independent inquiry into the soon-to-be-terminated contract for decommissioning of the U.K.’s retired Magnox reactors.
The NDA did not respond by deadline Friday to a query regarding its response to the report. Decommissioning at Sellafield is anticipated to be complete in 2120, the BBC reported.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved Exelon’s request for an exemption to federal regulations so the power company can use part of the decommissioning trust for its Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station for related but otherwise prohibited operations.
However, the exemptions will be effective only so long as Exelon owns the single-reactor plant in Lacey Township, N.J., which closed on Sept. 17. The company has applied for NRC approval to transfer the license to New Jersey-based energy technology company Holtec International, which would take ownership of the facility and decommissioning trust, along with all responsibility for cleanup and spent fuel management. The companies hope for an NRC ruling in 2019.
Federal regulations restrict use of nuclear power plants’ trust funds to work covered by a specific definition of decommissioning – removing the site from service and reducing radioactivity so the property can be released for separate use and the license terminated. Exelon, though, wants to use some portion of its trust for irradiated fuel management and site restoration. It also sought exemption from the requirement to notify the NRC before withdrawing funds from the trust.
In its March application, the Chicago-based power company provided data showing that the trust balance of $979 million as of Dec. 31, 2017, would, assuming growth over time, be enough to cover both the exempted work and decommissioning. As of May, it estimated radiological decommissioning would cost $1.1 billion in 2017 dollars, plus $290 million for spent fuel management and $60.2 million for site restoration.
Agency staff concurred regarding Exelon’s capacity to pay for all that work and also determined the exemptions “will not present an undue risk to the public health and safety, and are consistent with the common defense and security,” according to the order published Oct. 25 in the Federal Register.
Exelon requested the exemptions when it planned to delay decommissioning and site restoration for several decades, completing the work around 2080. Holtec, though, would move quickly to cleanup if it acquires the facility, saying it could complete decommissioning by 2027 while shaving the price tag for all post-closure work down to $885 million. The work would be carried out through a joint venture with Canadian engineering company SNC-Lavalin, formally called Comprehensive Decommissioning International.
If it does become the license holder, Holtec would need its own exemptions for use of the decommissioning trust — an application is anticipated in November, NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said Tuesday.
“We’re still in the early stages of reviewing that the Oyster Creek license transfer application,” he wrote in an email message.
Public comments on the license transfer application are being accepted through Nov. 19. Requests for a hearing on the proceeding can be filed until Nov. 8.
The New Jersey branch of the Sierra Club said this week it had filed a petition for a hearing.
“The NRC needs to have a public hearing on the transfer of licenses from Exelon’s Oyster Creek to Holtec. The public needs knows what is happening in terms of the license transfer, cost of cleanup, and liability. Before the NRC approves the transfer, we must make sure this is a good deal for the ratepayers, environment, and communities of New Jersey,” Jeff Titte, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, said in a press release.
More than 6,000 cubic yards of radioactively contaminated soil has been excavated from the Luckey Site in Ohio and shipped for disposal in Michigan, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Monday.
North Wind-Portage in April began excavation of an anticipated 129,000 cubic yards of soil under a $100 million contract through the Army Corps’ Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP). The soil is contaminated with beryllium, lead, radium-226, thorium-230, uranium-234, and uranium-238, left behind by a former beryllium production plant.
As of Oct. 19, North Wind had dug up 6,293 cubic yards of material from the southwest portion of the property 22 miles southeast of Toledo. That is roughly 15 percent of the amount to be retrieved in the first phase of cleanup and 4 percent of the total, according to an Army Corps announcement.
In those six months, 336 truckloads of soil were sent from Luckey to a US Ecology disposal site in Belleville, Mich. Each truck carried 15 tons of material.
Also, 315,448 gallons of water were pumped out of the dig zone and retrieved from drains, then processed through an on-site treatment system. Almost three-fourths of the treated water was used for dust suppression and the rest dumped into a ditch along Luckey Road.
FUSRAP is the Army Corps’ program for cleanup of sites contaminated by defense and civilian commercial programs managed by the Manhattan Engineer District and Atomic Energy Commission from the 1940s to the 1960s. The Luckey property was used by Brush Beryllium Co. (later called Brush Wellman) for production of different forms of beryllium from 1949 to 1958 via an Atomic Energy Commission contract. About 1,000 tons of contaminated scrap metal were also brought to the site in 1951.
The total excavation project is expected to last a decade, spread over five phases, and to cost $244 million.
Three managers at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission are receiving promotions effective Dec. 23.
Daniel Dorman will succeed the retiring Michael Johnson as deputy executive director for reactor and preparedness programs. K. Steven West will assume a job Dorman currently holds on an acting basis: deputy executive director for materials, waste, research, state, tribal, compliance, administration and human capital. Finally, Darrell Roberts will take over for West as administrator for the NRC’s Region III, which covers Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota. Ohio, and Wisconsin.
“I want to thank Mike Johnson for his many years of dedicated service to NRC and the nation,” Margaret Doane, NRC executive director for operations, said in an Oct. 25 press release. “We are very fortunate to have strong talented individuals like Dan and Steve to assume their roles as deputy executive directors.”
Dorman served as a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine officer prior to joining the NRC in 1991 and the senior executive service a decade later. His roles at the agency have included project engineer for the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, head of the Quality Assurance and Safety Assessment Section for the office’s Division of Inspection Program Management, and positions in several offices before becoming administrator for NRC Region I.
West started at the NRC in 1985 as a fire protection engineer for the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation and has taken on positions of increasing responsibility, including senior executive service roles in Region III and IV, the Office of Federal and State Materials and Environmental Management Programs, the Office of Research, and the Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response.
Roberts came to the NRC in 1989 as a reactor engineer intern for the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation. He has also served in Regions I, II, and III and did a stint at acting deputy director for the Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response. He has been deputy administrator for Region III since 2014 and will be replaced in that job by John Giessner.
Separately, the NRC’s inspector general said in a recent annual report that ensuring the safety and security of the nation’s nuclear waste is among the primary challenges facing the agency in the current fiscal year.
The NRC regulates both high-level radioactive waste, generated primarily by commercial nuclear power operations, and low-level radioactive waste that is the byproduct of atomic energy, medical, and industrial activities. There are disposal facilities for low-level waste in four NRC agreement states, but the federal government has yet to build a permanent repository for high-level waste, which can remain dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years.
“In addition, the number of nuclear power reactors being decommissioned continues to increase as more reactors reach the end of their licensed life or face challenging financial conditions,” according to the report from Inspector General Hubert Bell, dated Oct. 23. “The decommissioning of nuclear power reactors continues to be a challenge for NRC and many licensees.”
Among the specific challenges, the report says: Ensuring sufficient oversight of interim storage of high-level waste until a permanent repository is built and opened; management of technically complex decommissioning operations; and advancing additional regulations for atomic energy facilities that are being decommissioned.
In fiscal 2019, which began Oct. 1, the Inspector General’s office plans to begin an audit of the NRC regulatory process for oversight of reactors shifting from operations to decommissioning.
Lynchburg, Va.-based BWX Technologies has selected executive David Brown to head a joint venture, BWSR LLC, focused on decommissioning and tearing down facilities at Naval Nuclear Laboratory sites.
As president of BWSR, Brown will lead the 250-person BWXT Technical Services Group-APTIM Federal Services team that provides cleanup at sites under contract to Fluor Marine Propulsion in Idaho, Pennsylvania, and New York, according to a Tuesday press release. The venture, which has been at the sites since 2010, is nearing the end of a $140 million, two-year contract extension, though it has an option for a third year.
The vacancy at the helm of BWSR was created when John Stewart became president of BWXT’s Tennessee-based Nuclear Fuel Services subsidiary in July.
Brown, who joined BWXT four years ago, has more than 35 years of decommissioning and demolition (D&D) and other nuclear experience, and most recently led a $238 million facility deactivation project for BWXT at the X-333 process building at the Energy Department’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio. He has managed both government and commercial nuclear decommissioning projects in the United States and abroad.
On the commercial front, Brown was the waste management and construction manager at the Zion Nuclear Power Station decommissioning project in Illinois from January 2010 to January 2014, a project managed by EnergySolutions. Brown also spent 11 years as a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine officer.
“Dave’s impressive history with BWXT and his professional roots in the D&D industry and U.S. Navy submarine force make him uniquely suited for this leadership role with BWSR,” said BWXT Nuclear Services Group President Ken Camplin in a press release.
The joint venture headed by Brown tears down inactive facilities at the three facilities, and also removes complex systems in operating nuclear facilities to allow for new ones to be installed.
