POWER November 2014 - 42

NUCLEAR FUEL
Spent Nuclear Fuel: Is Off-Site
Storage Now Off the Agenda?
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's recent " waste confidence " ruling, which
declares storage of spent fuel at reactor sites safe indefinitely, could fundamentally
undercut the decades-long U.S. policy of seeking an off-site,
permanent burial site for high-level nuclear waste.
Kennedy Maize
A
five-decades-old goal of the U.S.
nuclear power industry, its regulators,
and the Department of Energy
(DOE)-permanent, off-site disposal of
spent reactor fuel-has been on life support
for about the past 20 years. Today, it appears
to be even nearer death.
The formal order recognizing the likely
end game for off-site storage may have come
from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
(NRC) in an Aug. 26 proceeding the
NRC has called, without any acknowledgement
of terminological irony, the " waste
confidence " proceeding. The NRC describes
this as a " generic determination regarding
the environmental impacts of storing spent
nuclear fuel (SNF) beyond the licensed life
for operation of a nuclear power plant. " In
late August, the NRC said it is confident that
spent fuel can be stored in reactor fuel pools
for 60 years and in licensed above-ground,
dry casks for 100 more years and beyond.
The NRC decision is both good news and
bad news for nuclear power plant operators
and the nuclear industry. It clears the way for
the commission to issue licenses for new plant
construction, which have been on hold for two
years as the NRC reviewed the spent fuel issue.
That's the good news, although few analysts
expect a rush of license applications to result.
The waste confidence finding does allow
the NRC to extend the operating licenses for
the two-unit Limerick station outside Philadelphia
and give the two-unit Calvert Cliffs
plant in Maryland an extension on its license
for dry cask storage (see sidebar " From Wet to
Dry Storage " ).
The nuclear industry says it is pleased
with the NRC regulation. Ellen Ginsberg,
general counsel at the Nuclear Energy Institute
(NEI), the industry's Washington lobbying
group, told POWER in mid-September
that the industry is " very supportive of the
NRC issuance of a rule that involves a full
analysis of on-site and off-site storage. " She
praised the NRC for a two-year process that
" engaged the public very extensively, " with
42
public meetings throughout the country. The
work was thorough, Ginsberg said, noting
that the completeness of the Generic Environmental
Impact Statement is demonstrated
by its bulk, some four inches thick.
The bad news is that the NRC ruling undercuts
any urgency for development of a
permanent resting place for spent nuclear
fuel, probably dashing moves by the industry
and its supporters in Congress to try to resurrect
the DOE's Yucca Mountain underground
burial project in Nevada. Begun in the 1980s,
by 2009, Yucca Mountain was a dead project
walking. The new Obama administration,
paying off a political debt to Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), authorized euthanasia
for the troubled repository.
Backers of Yucca Mountain insist that the
project should go forward, as spent fuel is piling
up at U.S. reactors, with pool storage slots
filling up and dry cask storage presumably
a short-term answer. The NEI says, " Underground
disposal in a specially designed facility
is an essential element of a sustainable,
integrated used nuclear fuel management program.
The industry supports the completion of
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's review
of the DOE license application to build a repository
at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. "
The NRC's late August decision undermines
that industry position. The NRC said,
" Although future repository availability remains
an important consideration because
it provides an eventual disposition path for
spent fuel, it is no longer needed to provide
a time limit for the environmental impacts
analysis because the [generic environmental
impact statement] evaluates the environmental
impacts of indefinite storage. "
NEI's Ginsberg said she doesn't see the
NRC ruling as having any implications for
permanent off-site waste disposal. " This regulation
is a component of licensing of nuclear
power plants, " she said. " It does not change
the government's obligation. The NRC has
no responsibility for the [waste disposal] program.
It doesn't sanction long-term onsite or
www.powermag.com
offsite storage. " That responsibility belongs
to the DOE, the administration in power in
the White House, and Congress.
In June 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the D.C. Circuit rejected the NRC's 2010
waste confidence-that on-site storage in
spent fuel pools was safe for up to 60 years-
finding that it violated the National Environmental
Policy Act. The court grounded its
decision in part on the failure of the regulators
to consider the possibility that no permanent,
central repository would be available
in 60 years and the waste would have to be
stored outside of the reactor and on site.
The New York Times commented in August,
" The decision, in a unanimous vote of
the commission on Tuesday, means that new
nuclear plants can be built and old ones can
expand their operations despite the lack of a
long-term plan for disposing of the waste. "
Although she voted for the policy, NRC
Chairman Allison Macfarlane told the Times,
" If you make the assumption that there will
be some kind of institution that will exist,
like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,
that will assure material stays safe for hundreds
or thousands of years, there's not much
impetus for Congress to want to deal with
this issue. " She added, " Personally, I think
that we can't say with any certainty what the
future will look like. We're pretty damned
poor at predicting the future. "
A History of Wasted Opportunities
The story of past U.S. efforts to deal with radioactive
wastes from its atomic endeavor is
a tale of sometimes willful ignorance, misdirected
science, poisonous politics, and feckless
policy. During the Army's Manhattan
Project in World War II, the scientists and engineers
involved in building the first atomic
bombs paid scant attention to what was left
behind after stripping U-235 from U-238 or
creating plutonium. Their issue was urgency,
to create an atomic bomb before our adversaries
could. That left behind a nasty chemical
and radioactive brew, which ended up being
POWER | November 2014
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POWER November 2014

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