Happy Friday, nuke-watchers — hope you’re recovering from any St. Patrick’s Day festivities. As we head into the weekend, here are a few more stories that RadWaste Monitor was tracking this week.
Safety systems at Zaporizhzhia nuke plant still online, IAEA reports
Two of five power lines connecting Ukraine’s largest nuclear plant to the grid are still online and safety systems at the site are still functional, the U.N.’s nuclear authority said this week.
Although one of the power lines feeding Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant went down Wednesday, “there are no safety concerns,” the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) wrote in a report Thursday. The plant has four main lines and one on standby, two of which remain functional, IAEA said.
Russian forces seized Zaporizhzhia March 3 in the second week of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Fighting at the site caused a fire in a training building near one of the plant’s six reactors, but no radiological releases have occurred as of Friday. Zaporizhzhia, located northwest of Mariupol along the Dnieper River, is also home to around 3,000 spent fuel rods kept in onsite dry storage. The plant’s six reactors were brought online between 1985 and 1995.
Meanwhile, IAEA noted Thursday that the Chernobyl Nuclear Power plant “remain[s] connected to the national electricity grid” after engineers restored power to the site Monday. Chernobyl, whose 1986 reactor meltdown produced one of the worst radiological releases in history, lost power March 9. Russia took control of the site Feb. 24.
SONGS spent fuel advocacy group could be getting another member
Another California community is weighing whether to join a growing advocacy group aimed at getting a nuclear power plant’s spent fuel inventory off the Golden State’s coastline.
According to minutes from a March 9 meeting of the Oceanside, Calif., city council, Mayor Esther Sanchez directed the council to draft a resolution adding the community to Action for Spent Fuel Solutions Now, a special interest group formed in March 2021 by San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) operator Southern California Edison. The resolution should be ready by March 23, the minutes said.
Oceanside, located just a couple of miles south of SONGS along the California coast, would join its northern neighbor San Clemente, Calif., on the coalition alongside San Diego and Orange County.
Meanwhile, Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) in February reintroduced a bill in Congress that would amend the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to put SONGS near the top of the pecking order when it comes time for the Department of Energy to take title to spent fuel. The Pendleton, Calif., plant has around 123 canisters of spent fuel at an onsite dry storage pad.
Perma-Fix and Westinghouse to build nuclear treatment facility in UK
Perma-Fix Environmental Services, Atlanta, announced last week that it had signed an agreement with Westinghouse to develop a radioactive materials treatment facility in the United Kingdom.
The companies signed a term sheet March 7 at the annual Waste Management Symposia in Phoenix, Westinghouse said in a press release. The “state-of-the-art” facility would be built at Westinghouse’s Springfields nuclear fuel production facility in Lancashire, England, the release said.
The joint facility would use Perma-Fix’s Bulk Processing Unit (BPU) treatment vessel, designed to accept a “broad range of material types” while reducing overall waste volume, Westinghouse said.
“With the success that our BPU vessel has had in the United States for over two decades, we are eager to bring this technology to new markets, enabling more plants globally to enhance their capabilities when it comes to handling radioactive waste removal,” Perma-Fix CEO Mark Duff said in the statement.