By John Stang
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has determined there would be no significant environmental impact in approving the license termination plan for the Zion Nuclear Power Station in Illinois.
Agency staff on June 25 issued an environmental assessment and finding of no significant impact (FONSI) for the 2014 request from ZionSolutions, a subsidiary of Salt Lake City-based nuclear services company EnergySolutions that is decommissioning the plant for owner Exelon.
The finding makes it likely the agency will approve the amendment the NRC licenses for Zion reactor Units 1 and 2 that encompasses the license termination plan. The agency will decide in a few weeks whether to approve that amendment, according to an NRC spokesman.
“During its review of [the license termination plan] the NRC concluded the impacts for most resource areas—land use, water resources, air quality, ecology, socioeconomics, historic and cultural resources, aesthetics, noise, and transportation—were still bounded by the previously issued Decommissioning Generic Environmental Impact Statement (GEIS). Therefore, the NRC does not expect impacts beyond those discussed in the GEIS, which concluded that the impact level for these issues was SMALL,” the agency said in a Federal Register notice.
The finding means a more comprehensive environmental impact statement is not necessary, according to the notice.
Commonwealth Edison built the plant, and its two reactors went online in 1973 and 1974. The utility shut down the plant in 1998 after control rods in one reactor were inserted too quickly and then withdrawn improperly. Commonwealth Edison decided the needed fixes and improvements would make the plant too expensive to operate until its scheduled 2013 shutdown date. Exelon became owner of the site in 2000 when it became the parent company to Commonwealth Edison.
ZionSolutions took on the NRC licenses in 2010 so it could conduct decommissioning. Work began in 2011 and is largely complete, with all spent fuel in dry storage as of 2015 and both reactor vessels removed. The site’s component parts and contaminated materials are being shipped for disposal to EnergySolutions’ waste site in Clive, Utah, and the Waste Control Specialists complex in Andrews County, Texas.
The NRC expects the final survey will be conducted around 2019-2020, with the site license then limited to the fuel storage pad.
Sixty-one casks holding 1,025 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel will remain on the Zion site, 40 miles north of Chicago, until there is temporary storage or a permanent repository for the nation’s nuclear waste.
