By John Stang
Significant technical challenges remain to the eventual rail shipment of the nation’s used nuclear reactor fuel to temporary storage or permanent disposal, issue experts acknowledged Wednesday.
To start, there is not yet an approved railcar to carry commercial spent fuel – though a specially designed railcar is in development. Also, no agency or company appears to be in charge of coordinating shipments that could begin in the next few years — particularly in selecting the order in which shipments go first, second, and so on.
Those observations surfaced Wednesday at the summer meeting of the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an independent body that provides expert advice to the Department of Energy on nuclear waste management. The meeting, in Idaho Falls, Idaho, addressed technical issues that must be addressed before DOE begins moving spent fuel around the country.
No recommendations were made at Wednesday’s meeting.
Congress in 1982 gave DOE until Jan. 31, 1998, to begin permanent disposal of what is now upward of 80,000 metric tons of used fuel stored on-site at U.S. nuclear power reactors. That is expected to increase by 2,000 to 2,400 metric tons per year, according to figures from the Nuclear Energy Institute, the lobbying arm of the nuclear industry. “There’s increasing public and political pressure to move fuel from those sites,” Mark Richter, NEI senior project manager for fuel and decommissioning programs, said at the meeting.
Congress’ assigned disposal repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., has not been licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, much less built. It remains vehemently opposed by the Nevada state government and disputed on Capitol Hill, with the House currently favoring funding and the Senate zeroing out all requests.
The NRC also has received two license applications for consolidated interim sent fuel storage sites: one from Holtec International for a facility in southeastern New Mexico and the other from a Waste Control Specialists-Orano team for storage in West Texas. With approval, they could open early in the next decade and hold the waste until a permanent site is ready.
In 2015, AREVA Federal Services (now Orano) received an $8.6 million contract for design and production of prototype high-level radioactive material transport railcars – better known as Atlas Railcars.
Among the challenges to this program, according to speakers at Wednesday’s meeting: The designs must meet performance standards set by the Association of American Railroads; and they will have to manage the 125-ton weight of a dry storage canister, plus carry equipment to monitor the canisters for heat, radiation, and other stresses inside and outside the casks. Also, the fuel at the reactor sites is stored within several different types of canisters from different manufacturers.
Now, DOE is negotiating a contract for the final two phases of the contract – single-car and multiple-car testing. That is due to begin next March, with project completion anticipated in 2022.
Wednesday’s meeting produced two estimates for the Association of American Railroads to provide conditional approval for a transport railcar: Richter said four years, while William Boyle of DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy said seven years.
“I’m struck by the difference in timelines,” said Jean Bahr, chair of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board.
“We encourage DOE to reach out to us, to begin a dialogue with us,” Richter said.
Board members also asked Wednesday who will decide the order in which fuel will be shipped and whether it will go to New Mexico or Texas, assuming both sites open.
Energy Department officials and Myron Kaczmarsky, Holtec’s senior director of business development, said the issue of a master coordinating agency on transporting the fuel has not been addressed yet. Kaczmarsky speculated that contracts that Holtec and the WCS-Orano team (formally known as Interim Storage Partners) eventually sign with their customer utilities will play a major factor in scheduling.
Interim Storage Partners has said its initial focus will be on shipping used fuel currently stored in containers built by Orano and NAC International from nine different retired or soon-to-close nuclear plants spread around the country, from Maine Yankee and Connecticut Yankee in New England to San Onofre and Rancho Seco in California.
The issue of which railroad routes will be used is up to the railroads, officials said. They noted that permits and emergency responders will have to be lined up in each individual state that the fuel goes through.
