When Commonwealth Edison lowered enriched uranium into the nation’s first commercial nuclear power plant in 1959, near Morris, Ill., the federal government vowed to dispose of the highly radioactive fuel once it was spent.
Almost 40 years later, all the nuclear waste ever produced by Dresden 1–some of it as old as an Edsel–remains on the Illinois site, cooling in a deep pool of clear water.
Now Edison plans to move the waste from the pool, which is becoming outdated, into massive, high-tech barrels, because the question of when the federal government will take the waste seems as open as it was at the dawn of the nuclear age.
Figuring out how to store something that will remain lethally radioactive for millennia has turned out to be much more complex, socially and technically, than anyone had first imagined. In a sense, splitting the atom proved simpler than deciding what to do with what is left over.
So, as the federal government continues to struggle over the science and politics of storing spent nuclear fuel, individual plants are being forced at tremendous expense to find new ways to replace storage facilities that are outmoded or filled up.
Even though the common solution–something called “dry cask” storage–is considered one of the safest temporary storage methods known, it has been plagued with problems, underscoring the bedeviling complexities of nuclear waste.
Following the lead of other utilities, Edison plans to spend $30 million to move the 165 tons of spent fuel assemblies from the shuttered Dresden 1 plant, the smallest of the three Dresden reactors about 60 miles southwest of the Loop, into the 17-foot-tall casks.
Across the nation, 11 nuclear power plants have moved spent fuel into dry casks, though not without problems. Gases ignited in one, and another was nearly dropped while being lifted.
If federal regulators approve the casks Edison wants to use, 14 will be filled with spent fuel and lined up outside the plant on a concrete slab a few hundred yards from the Illinois River. There they will await the day when the federal government can dispose of them, along with all the other spent fuel stacking up at nuclear power plants across the country.
Even if scientists determine that Yucca Mountain, a stone-gray bump in the Nevada desert, is the right place to bury the waste for eternity, a facility there is more than a decade away.
That has utilities going to court and pressuring Congress to force the U.S. Department of Energy to store the waste at an interim site, probably near Yucca Mountain. An interim site would save Commonwealth Edison $300 million in dry cask storage facilities alone, a company spokesman said.
The company points out that Illinois electric customers have paid $1.8 billion–more than any other state–into a federal fund to establish and build a permanent site for the waste.
“We want the Department of Energy to meet the terms of the contract and take the fuel,” said Edison’s Mike Wallace, a senior vice president. “We paid them for it. Our customers paid them for it.
“We are moving the fuel 100 feet now. We could just as easily move it 100 miles or more. Wouldn’t it be better if we were moving it to a federal repository where it would all be in one place?”
That argument does not sway those who say that if the fuel is sent to an interim storage site near Yucca Mountain, but the mountain is then rejected as a permanent site, the waste might have to be moved twice.
“I know the nuclear industry wants it done tomorrow, they want it out of their hair,” said Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), who voted against the last bill to establish an interim site. “But we want to do it right.”
With the government still unable to take the waste, Edison plans to move the spent fuel from Dresden 1’s pool, designed in the late 1950s to hold the waste for 40 years. Already, a soggy hole has been dug for the 40-by-200-foot concrete pad to hold the dry casks.
Edison hopes to begin moving fuel outdoors as early as next year.
The loading operation takes place underwater, using cranes and television cameras to move the 12-foot-long fuel assemblies from submerged racks into a snug grid inside the container. When the cask is filled, the crane would hoist its 125-ton bulk out of the pool onto ground. Once one lid is welded on and another bolted on, a crawling transporter would lift the cask just a few inches off the ground and carry it out the door, across a short stretch of pavement to the waiting pad.
As a concept, dry casks are widely considered safe. Unlike the storage pools, they do not rely on pumps, valves and cooling water–all of which can fail. The casks are considered tornado-proof and earthquake-proof. Prototypes have been hit by trains and survived intact.
But dry cask storage systems have had several problems.
A year ago, Consumers Energy, which operates the Palisades nuclear plant near South Haven, Mich., announced that one of its casks had a defective weld and would have to be unloaded. The casks there already were controversial, sitting in open air 150 yards from Lake Michigan.
In Wisconsin, gases inside a tank ignited when a cask was being welded shut. Although the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said it was not an explosion, the flash pushed the heavy lid askew.
Another fear is that one of the heavy casks could drop while being moved, potentially rupturing the fuel pool and exposing the waste. Edison engineers called the scenario extremely unlikely.
Last summer, though, the NRC issued a memorandum to utilities warning of trouble moving the casks. Utilities “have experienced problems during the movement of casks as a result of crane interlocks, errors in the accounting for weights of cask components, and human error,” the memorandum said.
In 1995, the memorandum said, a 100-ton cask dangled over a spent fuel pool for 16 hours after a crane stalled at the Prairie Island nuclear plant near Minneapolis. At the Oconee Nuclear Station in South Carolina, a cask was set into a fuel pool at an angle, then slipped off the crane when it was lifted.
“Once you get the fuel in the cask and get it out of the building, it is like an airline’s black box–it is going to survive almost anything,” said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It is getting it out of there where there is risk.”
Despite their assurances of the casks’ safety, the utilities would rather have the government take the waste to an interim storage site near Yucca Mountain. A bill to accomplish that is before the Senate, but was declared all but dead in February. Since then, its backers have worked on a strategy to save it, but the prognosis is unknown.
“Limbo is a good word to use for it,” said Derek Jumper, spokesman for the Senate’s Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
Many environmental groups oppose the bill, arguing that if the waste is out of the power plants, the government would lose its sense of urgency for finding a permanent burial ground.
“We would be diverting the money and political energy away from a permanent solution toward putting the waste in a parking lot,” said Mary Olson of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, an anti-nuclear group.
“Under current law, taxpayers take the waste only when there is a permanent repository sited,” Olson said. “Under the proposed law, the taxpayers have responsibility for the waste once it leaves the utility’s gate.”
Meanwhile, the scientists probing Yucca Mountain are due this fall to give their first broad assessment of the site as a permanent repository.
Under a best-case scenario, the site could begin accepting waste in 2011, more than 50 years after operators first fired up Dresden 1.
