By Wayne Barber
Dominion Energy and contractor NAC International have finished moving spent fuel at the retired Kewaunee Power Station in Wisconsin into dry storage, the utility announced last week.
That included transporting nearly 900 fuel assemblies this year alone from the spent fuel pool to the nuclear power plant’s dry-cask storage pad, a Dominion spokesman told RadWaste Monitor this week.
“We loaded 24 MAGNASTOR casks at Kewaunee this year, each one containing 37 fuel assemblies except for the last cask, which contained 36,” Dominion spokesman Richard Zuercher said by email.
“During the spent fuel offloading campaign this year we transferred 886 fuel assemblies from the pool into dry storage,” he added.
Another 14 canisters were loaded from 2009 to 2014, each with 32 fuel assemblies for a total of 448.
Zuercher did not disclose the cost of the full fuel-relocation campaign.
The 556-megawatt Kewaunee plant closed in May 2013 after nearly 40 years of operation. Shortly after retirement, the plant still had fuel in two spent fuel pools as well as a generally licensed independent spent fuel storage installation (ISFSI).
The latest fuel relocation to dry storage began early this year and was completed on June 15.
Staffing levels have dropped from 635 when the plant closed to 140 at present, with another 90 to be laid off over the next nine months as work wraps up to place the reactor in SAFSTOR decommissioning mode.
Dominion then will have up to 60 years to finish decommissioning and decontamination of the nuclear power site along Lake Michigan about 35 miles southeast of Green Bay.
