Interim Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel - Woods Hole Research Center

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Chapter 1: Introduction 3 some of the same flexibility as interim storage, making it possible to remove the spent fuel at any time, should circumstances make that desirable. There is, however, a crucial technical difference between interim storage facilities and permanent underground repositories, even if the repositories remain retrievable: interim storage facilities are by their nature designed to be temporary, have no permanent disposal purpose, and are not intended to have the capacity to ensure safety for thousands of years, even after human monitoring may end—whereas deep underground repositories are designed to be permanent, and to ensure that human health and the environment will be protected for as long as the radioactive material in the repository poses a hazard (far longer than the likely lifetime of the human institutions that help ensure the safety of interim storage facilities). Thus, interim storage facilities are a complement, not a substitute, for permanent approaches to managing spent fuel and nuclear wastes. Both are needed. Interim Storage: Political, Legal, and Institutional Constraints Interim storage approaches are not without their problems. Political, legal, and institutional obstacles have limited both expansion of at-reactor storage and establishment of awayfrom-reactor storage facilities in several countries. Today, cooling ponds for storage of spent fuel at many reactor sites are nearing capacity, and some reactor operators have been unable to find a legally and politically acceptable means to establish additional capacity, putting them at risk of having to shut their reactors if a solution is not found. Some utilities are pursuing reprocessing of spent fuel not because they have any immediate desire to recycle the plutonium from the spent fuel, but simply because shipping the fuel to a reprocessing plant is the best (or the only) solution for getting it out of their reactor cooling ponds that they have been able to find. But that expedient forces them to deal with the resulting separated plutonium, recovered uranium, and high-level wastes, which in some cases has proven costly and controversial. The situation in the United States offers an example of some of the difficulties and dilemmas of spent fuel storage. The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act established disposal in geologic repositories as the principal approach for spent fuel management, and laid out an institutional and legal framework for both permanent disposal and interim storage; the burden of nuclear waste disposal was to be balanced by having one repository in the West and one in the East, and it was specified that a centralized interim storage site should be built in a state other than the state where the first repository would be located, to further spread the burden. In 1987, however, the act was amended to prohibit the Department of Energy from studying any geologic repository site other than Yucca Mountain. Since the 1982 Act, both the government and coalitions of utilities in the United States have attempted to find an acceptable site for a centralized interim storage facility where fuel could be stored pending disposal in a geologic repository. So far these efforts have been wholly unsuccessful, despite a long history of different approaches and proposals. Meanwhile, the U.S. program to establish a geologic repository has encountered serious delays, and as a result the Department of Energy failed to meet the 1998 deadline specified in the 1982 act (and in contracts with the utilities) for beginning to accept the spent fuel from the reactor sites. A substantial number of U.S. reactors are likely to fill their spent fuel cooling ponds to the point that they no longer have the capacity to unload an entire reactor core in an emergency long before a geologic repository is ready to accept their spent fuel. To resolve this problem, and avoid having to continue to pay for spent fuel storage they had expected the Department of Energy to take care of after 1998, the nuclear industry has pushed hard for legislation to establish a Federally funded centralized interim storage site near the planned repository, which could accept spent fuel long before a permanent repository actually opened. The utilities have also sued the Department over its failure to meet its contractual obligations to take the fuel. But the proposal for a centralized site near Yucca Mountain has been strongly opposed as prejudging the outcome of the decision as to whether the Yucca Mountain repository site is suitable, and potentially risking transporting all the spent fuel to one place only to have to transport it somewhere else if the Yucca Mountain site never opens. 2 In the meantime, utilities have been investing in dry cask storage, but in a few cases there has been substantial con- 2 See Allison Macfarlane, “Interim Storage of Spent Fuel in the United States,” Annual Review of Energy and the Environment, forthcoming.
4 troversy over expanding on-site spent fuel storage in the absence of any guarantee that there will be somewhere else to ship it to soon, leaving a few utilities wondering if they will be able to find a solution before they have to close their reactors. Some utilities are now working to establish utilitysponsored centralized storage sites, but whether these proposals will be any more successful in overcoming the legal and political hurdles to establishing such sites than past ones remains to be seen. Similarly, in Japan, the law until recently prohibited storage of spent fuel at sites other than reactor sites and reprocessing plants, but delays in building a reprocessing plant at Rokkasho-mura have left a number of utilities concerned that they will run out of storage space. The government has therefore changed the law to allow the establishment of away-from-reactor storage facilities that are not at reprocessing plants, and the utilities have begun quiet discussions with the governments of some prefectures concerning the possibility of establishing such facilities. The mayor of Mutsu in Aomori prefecture, in particular, has volunteered that community for preliminary investigations of whether it would be a suitable site for a storage facility. In the meantime, the utilities are negotiating additional reprocessing contracts with France (to provide training for eventual operation of the Rokkasho plant), which will allow a modest amount of spent fuel to be removed from existing storage pools. But at the same time, the plutonium fuel and highlevel wastes arising from reprocessing are becoming more and more controversial in Japan, particularly in the wake of the Tokai-mura accident and the revelations of falsification of safety data in the fabrication of plutonium fuel for Japanese reactors in Britain. As a result, immediate plans to begin burning plutonium fuel in Japanese commercial reactors have been postponed, at least temporarily. In recent years, local politics in the areas near nuclear facilities has had a growing influence on Japanese nuclear energy and nuclear safety policy. Siting of any new nuclear facilities requires the consent of the prefectural governor. In addition, for each nuclear facility, a “nuclear safety agreement” is negotiated between the local community and the utilities. While not official regulatory documents, these agreements often require “prior consent” from the governor before major actions—including even expanding spent fuel storage capacity at an existing site—are taken. With increasing local INTERIM STORAGE OF SPENT NUCLEAR FUEL concern and non-government activism over nuclear safety, the governors have begun wielding their consent power much more energetically, postponing a variety of projects or seeking concessions in return for their support. As spent fuel management decisions are often linked to each other, one governor’s decision about a particular facility can influence Japan’s entire nuclear energy program. In Japan, the United States, and other countries, spent fuel storage facilities are inevitably controversial, as communities are concerned about nuclear safety and do not wish to become a permanent “dumping ground” for nuclear waste generated elsewhere. Finding a genuinely democratic process for siting spent fuel storage facilities that builds acceptance of and support for such facilities in the communities and regions where they are located, while meeting the continuing spent fuel storage needs of the nuclear industry, has posed an enormous challenge in countries around the world. No reliable answer to the problem has yet been found, though a number of general principles to increase the chances of success in building public support for siting such facilities have been developed from past experience, and are described in this report. The most critical and difficult issues facing interim storage of spent fuel around the world are political, legal, and institutional challenges, more than technical ones. In recent years, there has also been increased attention to the possibility of international storage or disposal sites for spent fuel—that is, sites that would accept spent fuel from multiple countries, either in their region or around the world. This new focus on international concepts has been driven by the increasingly urgent need for additional spent fuel storage capacity around the world, the likelihood that some countries with nuclear power programs might be unable to find reasonable solutions (for reasons of geography, poverty, or politics), the economies of scale that might be achieved through cooperation, and the willingness of many reactor operators to pay substantial sums of money for a solution to their spent fuel storage problems. Such international approaches, if appropriately safeguarded and secured, could potentially offer some nonproliferation benefits, by allowing plutonium-bearing spent fuel to be removed from regions of acute proliferation risk, allowing utilities that do not wish to recycle plutonium immediately an alternative to near-term separation of weapons-usable plutonium. Some proposals might also provide large rev-
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5. Key Issues, Tensions, and Approa
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6. Conclusions and Recommendations
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The Project on Socio-technics of Nu
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Interim Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel - Woods Hole Research Center

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