A venture capitalist studying options for spent nuclear fuel storage and reprocessing in South Carolina said Wednesday his group will not pursue an interim storage license with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, instead shifting focus to new reactor design and reprocessing.
Mike Stake, head of the Spent Fuel Reprocessing Group, originally told the NRC in July 2016 that the organization planned to apply for an operating license for an interim spent fuel storage facility, with the capability of reprocessing spent fuel from the state’s nuclear reactors at a site planned near the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in Aiken.
Stake in an interview Wednesday said there is simply not enough demand for such a facility in South Carolina. His plans drew criticism from environmental groups last fall, when RadWaste Monitor reported details of the concept, while South Carolina utilities showed little interest in shipping their waste to the planned facility.
“It was more of an economic drive – is really what our shift (in focus) was,” Stake said by telephone. “If you don’t pay attention to the economic drive, you’re not going to have a product that’s going to be saleable. So it was mainly economics. We’re going to have pushback everywhere we go and whatever we do, but if we can’t have it economically viable, you’ve got nothing.”
Stake said his group is pursuing a reactor design similar to that of Transatomic Power, which has developed a molten salt reactor design for nuclear plants to supplant the traditional light-water reactor. The company claims the new design produces less than half the waste of the light-water reactor.
Stake said the Spent Fuel Reprocessing Group’s reactor is projected to cost anywhere from $800 million to $1 billion. The team aims to reprocess spent fuel that has been stranded at four nuclear reactor sites in South Carolina, calling it “beneficial re-use.” Stake said the organization aims to finance the project through multiple private investors. For the new reactor design concept, the group will need an NRC operating license, as well as various state approvals and permits.
The group has yet to notify the NRC that it will not pursue the interim storage application, as it is still working through details on the new plan, according to Stake. Spent Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Group would have potentially been the third recent entity to apply for an interim storage application with the NRC. Waste Control Specialists in April 2016 applied for a 40-year license to operate a facility in West Texas, while Holtec International last week submitted its own application with the regulator.
Stake said his team does not yet know the reprocessing capacity for the facility, and he did not want to speculate on when the group hopes to begin operating the facility. He said it has been crunching numbers on the concept for the past six months.
“We’re not going away,” Stake said. “It’s just that this problem (with nuclear waste) didn’t happen overnight.”
