Interim Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel - Woods Hole Research Center

3. Legal, Institutional, and Political
Constraints on Interim Storage
In the United States and Japan, as in many other countries,
there are substantial legal, institutional, and political
obstacles to expanded reliance on interim storage as a
major element of the nuclear fuel cycle. These factors, far
more than technical or economic issues, are the main constraints
on interim storage as an approach to nuclear fuel
management. In this chapter, we explore these issues in the
U.S. and Japanese contexts. Some key factors are similar in
the two countries (and are likely to apply in a variety of
other countries as well), while others are unique to specific
political, cultural, institutional, and historical circumstances
in each nation. In both the United States and Japan,
the legacies of past decisions and events significantly limit
current and future options.
A brief overview may provide a useful introduction to
the U.S. and Japanese cases. In the United States, interim
storage policy has been shaped by decisions in 1976-1977
not to reprocess (which eliminated the previously planned
management approach for spent fuel); by failure to establish
a geologic repository for spent fuel by the legislatively
mandated January 31, 1998 deadline; and by the Department
of Energy’s consequent failure to meet its legal obligation
to take title to the fuel and begin shipping it away from
reactor sites on that date (which means that larger quantities
of spent fuel will have to be stored for a longer period
than previously planned). For decades, the U.S. government
and nuclear utilities have sought through various
means to establish a centralized interim storage facility for
spent nuclear fuel—so far without success, though two private
facilities are under development. The key obstacle has
been community and state opposition to serving as host for
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such a facility—particularly when the slow pace of progress
on development of a geologic repository, and continuing
controversies surrounding that facility, raise fears that an
interim facility will become permanent.
At the same time, however, reactor operators have
expanded on-site storage dramatically by re-racking fuel in
their spent fuel storage ponds, and many have successfully
added dry at-reactor storage capacity. This route has met
some political opposition, and in a few cases states or communities
have limited the amount of fuel that can be stored
pending the availability of a permanent repository and
imposed other costly conditions. Generally, however, this
approach has proved workable for utilities (although it has
generated prolonged litigation over allocation of incremental
costs for interim storage), and it has recently become the
official policy of the U.S. government.
In Japan, interim storage choices have been influenced
by delays in reprocessing plans, which have led to
larger-than-anticipated spent fuel buildups in at-reactor
storage pools. Japan’s initial contracts with European firms
to reprocess spent fuel have run for their negotiated terms
and are now completed (though a limited new contract is
under negotiation with COGEMA to provide training for
operation of Japan’s Rokkasho-mura reprocessing plant).
Japan’s commercial-scale domestic reprocessing plant at
Rokkasho-mura is not scheduled to begin commercial operation
until 2005, a decade later than previously planned. Its
maximum reprocessing capacity is 800 tonnes of heavy
metal (tHM) per year, while Japanese reactors discharge
900 tHM each year—a figure that will rise if more reactors
are built. A spent fuel storage pond has been built at