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Commentary: Federal Shift on Nuclear Waste Leaves Utilities With No Clear Direction
Special to Law.com
September 03, 2009
The Kenrich Group's Christopher F. Tierney
courtesy photo
Patrick Jensen
On the eve of what many in the commercial power industry are calling a "nuclear renaissance," commercial nuclear power plants still face uncertainty from the U.S. Department of Energy as to what individual nuclear utilities are to do with their spent (or used) nuclear fuel. Having already missed its own legislatively mandated deadline to begin acceptance and long-term storage of SNF, the federal government recently caused further confusion when it announced that it will pursue alternatives to geologic storage, including reprocessing (or recycling) of SNF.
This ongoing lack of guidance or action on the part of the federal government continues to require commercial nuclear power plant owners across the country to build facilities to store SNF on their plant sites. In addition to having to bear the significant costs of onsite storage, the absence of a national strategy for the ultimate disposition of SNF has hindered utilities’ progress toward developing a new generation of nuclear plants. Of course, this uncertainty complicates decision-making at a time when demand for abundant, emission-free, competitively priced energy has become, for many, an urgent national concern.
During the 1960s and ‘70s, most commercial nuclear power plants in the United States were designed with the expectation that SNF would be reprocessed, thereby enabling most of it to be reinserted into the reactor core to generate additional electricity. However, due to concerns related to the production of weapons-grade nuclear material as a by-product of reprocessing and proliferation, President Jimmy Carter prohibited reprocessing more than 30 years ago. By the time President Ronald Reagan reversed that decision, the reprocessing option was all but dead in the U.S.
As a result, the DOE -- as mandated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1982 (pdf) -- entered into a standard contract with plant owners by which they would pay the DOE one mil (or one-tenth of a cent for each kilowatt-hour of electricity generated) in return for a guarantee that the government would begin collecting SNF from nuclear power plants by January 1998 and assume full responsibility for its disposition.
The 1998 deadline came and went with the DOE making little progress on licensing and constructing the necessary facilities for handling and storing SNF. In fact, it was only last year -- nearly 10 years after the pick-up deadline -- that the DOE filed an application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to seek design approval for an SNF national repository sited at Yucca Mountain, Nev.
In the meantime, individual nuclear plants had no choice but to implement their own solutions for safely storing SNF. Many expanded the storage capacity of the pools of water originally designed to store relatively small amounts of SNF while it "cooled" from use in the reactor over several years before the SNF was taken away for reprocessing. While the expansion of these pools was a short-term solution for many, it became clear that the DOE was not going to be able to implement a plan to accept SNF before the pools reached the limits of expansion.
The growing need for a longer-term solution led many nuclear power generators to adopt dry-storage technology, whereby SNF could be removed from the pools after the cooling period and stored in heavily shielded vaults or casks that would be kept in high-security facilities on-site. These facilities are commonly known as independent spent fuel storage installations, or ISFSIs. Implementation of dry storage ISFSIs first began in the late 1990s, but is now a growing standard in the nuclear power industry. After all, commercial nuclear plant owners had to develop a solution to the SNF problem on their own or shut down their plants. The billions of dollars in lost revenue and/or increased costs to replace that capacity made the decision relatively obvious -- build on-site dry storage.
