The Department of Energy has applied for a 20-year renewal of the license for storage in Idaho of debris from the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, according to documents made public Tuesday.
The regulator issued the license for Three Mile Island Unit 2 (TMI-2) Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation (ISFSI) on March 19, 1999. If the agency approves the DOE request, the license would not expire until March 19, 2039.
“The NRC staff is conducting an acceptance review of the application to determine if it contains sufficient technical information in scope and depth to allow the staff to conduct the detailed technical review,” agency spokeswoman Maureen Conley said by email Wednesday. “The staff plans to complete its acceptance review in April 2017. If the NRC accepts the application for a detailed technical review, we will establish a review schedule at that time.”
Unit 2 at the nuclear power plant near Middletown, Pa., famously experienced a partial core meltdown in March 1979, though little radiation escaped the facility. It never resumed operations and its core was removed, though the plant’s Unit 1 reactor remains operational.
The ISFSI at the Idaho Nuclear Technology and Engineering Center at DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory is licensed to store debris and associated materials from the Unit 2 reactor core. That, according to the license, includes the following: the remains of 177 fuel assemblies, 61 control rods, and various canisters to hold that material. The maximum amount to be stored is 82,985.9 kilograms of uranium from the unit’s fuel assemblies, contained in about 139,293 kilograms of material extracted from the reactor vessel.
All material was placed in the facility’s 30 dry storage casks by 2001 and no more would be added under the extended license, according to the March 6 license application submission letter from Richard Provencher, deputy assistant energy secretary for Idaho Site Operations.
He noted that the ISFSI has a design life of 50 years, which would cover both the 20-year original license and the two-decade extension.
Exelon Generation said Friday that it has formally taken ownership of the James A. FitzPatrick Nuclear Power Plant in upstate New York. The announcement came nearly a month after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission signed off on the $110 million sale by Entergy to Exelon.
Prior to the deal, Entergy was scheduled to close the FitzPatrick facility by this year, citing increasing operational costs, low natural gas prices, and other economic challenges.
Exelon agreed to buy the plant last August, after the New York Public Service Commission approved Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Clean Energy Standard, an energy subsidy expected to pay upstate nuclear power providers about $8 billion over the program’s lifetime. Exelon would collect the entirety of the subsidy, as it already owns the other two upstate nuclear plants: the R.E. Ginna Nuclear Power Plant and Nine Mile Point Nuclear Station.
The sale includes the plant’s operating license, as well as its estimated $700 million decommissioning trust fund. Staffing levels at FitzPatrick should remain steady in the near term at about 600 workers, according to an Exelon press release.
Waste Control Specialists has filed its last updates with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to the company’s license application to build and operate an interim storage site for spent nuclear fuel, CEO Rod Baltzer said Wednesday.
That wraps up the Dallas-based company’s responses to the regulator’s request for additional information to the application filed last April, Baltzer said in a blog update.
The NRC is also moving expeditiously, according to the CEO. It is establishing the scope of the environmental impact statement for the project, and is taking public comment on the planned document through April 28. The fourth public hearing on the EIS is scheduled for April 6 at NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md.
Waste Control Specialists plans by 2021 to build a West Texas facility with the capacity to store 40,000 metric tons of spent fuel now held on-site at nuclear power plants around the nation. Holtec International is scheduled on Friday to submit its own license application, for a facility designed to hold 120,000 metric tons of waste in southeastern New Mexico.
If approved, the sites would store the stockpile of spent fuel — now at roughly 75,000 metric tons and growing by about 2,000 tons per year — until the Department of Energy fulfills its legal mandate to build a permanent repository for the waste.
The Trump administration’s preliminary fiscal 2018 budget proposal would provide $120 million for interim storage and resuming licensing of the Yucca Mountain commercial-defense waste repository in Nevada. If Congress agrees, this would represent an about-face from the Obama administration’s plan for separate storage sites for defense and civil waste.
“It’s been five years since the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future presented its report to DOE in January of 2012 recommending the consolidation of spent nuclear fuel at an interim storage facility. Those recommendations are still valid and the need for a solution grows more urgent with the passage of time,” Baltzer wrote.
SHINE Medical Technologies announced Monday that it has selected nuclear medicine industry veteran Martyn Coombs as a part-time strategic adviser.
The announcement comes as the company advances toward the start of construction of its 43,000-square-foot facility in Janesville, Wis., for production of medical isotopes including molybdenum-99. Moly-99 decays into technetium-99m, which is used widely for medical diagnostic imaging.
“Really we’re looking for his insight from more than 15 years of being in the industry,” in business areas such as strategic partnerships, Katrina Pitas, SHINE’s vice president for business development, said in a telephone interview.
Coombs is CEO of ImaginAB, a medical imaging company based in Inglewood, Calif. He previously was president of Jubilant DraxImage and an executive with Amersham/GE Healthcare. He is a contractor rather than an employee of SHINE, Pitas said. The company has six advisers in total, separate from its board of directors and management.
SHINE anticipates beginning construction of the facility this year, though a specific date has not been set, Pitas said. It plans to produce test batches of isotopes in 2018 and to begin commercial production in 2019. The facility has been reported to cost $100 million, though Pitas said she could not discuss the price tag.
SHINE is among several U.S. companies that intend to help fill the gap in moly-99 production left last year after Canada’s National Research Universal reactor stopped producing the isotope on a regular basis
