By John Stang
The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board is working on reports about transferring spent fuel from five storage near power plants to a temporary repository, the board said this week in a meeting held in Florida.
These upcoming reports will address the commercial reactor sites at Crystal River, Fla., La Crosse, Wis., Rancho Seco, Calif., Rowe, Mass., and Zion, Ill.
They will follow six other similar reports submitted in 2017 for the shuttered Big Rock Point, Connecticut Yankee, Humboldt Bay, Kewaunee, Maine Yankee and Trojan reactors.
After that, the board planned to begin work this year on reports for California’s San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in San Diego County and the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant in Vernon, Vt.
The board is an independent federal agency that performs independent reviews of the U.S. Department of Energy’s activities related to managing and disposing of high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel.
The nation has some 90,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel at 84 facilities with that expected to grow to 140,000 metric tons by 2075, the board heard Tuesday in a briefing. Each of the 84 facilities will need individual fuel transfer plans, DOE officials told the board. None of the plans have budgets attached.
With a permanent fuel storage site at Yucca Mountain indefinitely stalled, commercial interim storage sites are in the works in Andrews County in west Texas and in southeastern New Mexico near the Texas border. Both state governments have dug their feet in to oppose the sites.
“We don’t know when transportation will occur,” Erica Bickford, an official with DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, told the board Tuesday.
“There’s nowhere to ship it to,” said David Pstrak, an official with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
DOE officials said most of the transportation will be by rail car because most of the casks containing spent fuel will be too heavy for trucks driving along highways. However, not all spent fuel facilities have access to rail lines, so the fuel will have to be trucked to the nearest rail loading area.
Bickford and Gerry Jackson, a security official with DOE, said many roads and rail lines need to be upgraded to ensure that there is sufficient clearance beneath overpasses to admit casks on rail cars and truck beds. The federal government offers no incentives for local governments to maintain and upgrade those passages to transport fuel casks, the officials said.
Meanwhile, federal officials on Tuesday provided long lists of activities needed to transfer fuel from a site to New Mexico or Texas. The details vary from site to site, they said.
“Our focus is planning ahead for improvements that are needed,” Bickford said.
Among the problems to be addressed are identifying needed equipment, researching power needs, getting clearances for all routes, mapping out emergency responses, and getting a detailed handle of the insides of each fuel-filled cask.
Three types of railcars are being designed to haul the spent fuel. Testing is underway on the 20-axle Atlas rail car. Bickford expected a real world trial run with the Atlas car to take place in September on a round trip between Avondale, Colo. and Scoville, Ida.
A Fortis rail car, smaller with eight axles, was expected to be ready by 2026. The third car is a buffer rail car, which is essentially an empty flatbed car to separate the rail cars with casks from each other and from rail cars carrying people.
