Vermont Yankee: What to do with spent fuel?

Vermont Business Magazine, Aug 01, 2004 by McQuiston, Timothy

You're much higher than you think. You could take Camel's Hump, which graces the Vermont quarter, and stand Mt Philo on top of it just to reach Yucca Mountain's 5,000-foot summit.

There are no trees to block views. From the top, you can see the desert floor that somewhere marks the border with California to the west.. The Sierra Nevadas rise, about 75 miles away and beyond that lies Death Valley. You can discern to the north the remnants of a volcano whose eruption created the Yucca Mountain ridge; and you can see the Calico hills to the east. You can see very clearly a very long distance, across the atomic weapons test site and beyond. And you can see why proponents say this site is ideal for storing highly radioactive waste.

What you can't see is how the federal government will get past the regulatory and legal hurdles to allow Yucca Mountain to receive waste from the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, or from anywhere else for that matter, any time in the foreseeable future.

In 2012 Vermont Yankee's license expires. In 2008, the pool storing spent fuel rods at the Vernon site will be filled. As has been done at every other nuclear reactor site, some of the spent fuel will be moved to "dry cask" storage on site, the rest will remain in the pool until it is ready to be moved, either to a permanent repository supervised by the Department of Energy, or on-site in Vernon.

This fortified cement storage system, called dry casks, will hold the waste until a permanent geologic repository is ready to take it. Yucca Mountain is supposed to be the location for that facility.

Whether or not Yucca Mountain will be the recipient for the highly radioactive spent fuel, Vermont Yankee will have to store spent fuel on-site. Yankee officials have applied to "uprate" the power plant to increase power output. If the $60 million uprate is approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the spent fuel pool will be full a year earlier and dry storage will have to begin in 2007.

The NRC regulates nuclear power in the United States. It has already approved the dry storage containment system that would be put in place at Vermont Yankee. However, utility construction projects must be approved by the quasi-judicial state regulator the Public Service Board, The PSB has its own criteria. The PSB can't pass judgment on something like nuclear safety, but it still must approve the application. The PSB has already approved the uprate.

Vermont Yankee spokesman Brian Cosgrove said Vermont Yankee will file an application with the PSB for the dry cask storage by the end of this year. He also anticipates that Yankee will go before the Vermont Legislature next year to seek its approval for storing the spent fuel on site.

The dry casks cost $500,000 to $1 million a piece. The casks are large cement cylinders that can hold about 40 assemblies a piece. The assemblies themselves are contained in a metal container. The entire unit is constantly monitored.

It's unclear whether the money ratepayers have contributed to the permanent repository could be applied to the onsite dry storage.

In a somewhat complicated legal issue, the original owner of the power plant, the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Corp, had as part of its original license permission to dry store spent fuel on site.

However, when Entergy Nuclear, a subsidiary of Entergy Corporation of New Orleans, bought the power plant in August 2002, that permission did not come with it. VYNPC still exists as a shell entity which acts as a kind of middleman in selling electricity back to the original owners, principally Central Vermont Public Service and Green Mountain Power.

According to Cosgrove, if Vermont Yankee does not receive approval to store spent fuel in dry casks, the plant would have to shut down in either 2007 or 2008, depending on the uprate, because the spent fuel pool would be full.

The plant is currently licensed to operate until 2012. Vermont Yankee produces about a third of Vermont's electricity.

"It's not just an intellectual exercise," Cosgrove said.

Yucca Mountain

Michael Voegele led a tour last spring to proposed permanent geologic repository which included a visit to the 4,950-foot summit of Yucca Mountain (Camel's Hump is 4,083 and Mt Philo is 980) and into the five-mile test tunnel underneath.

Voegele, a PhD in engineering, is the senior technical adviser for Bechtel SAIC Company, the construction company building the facility. The tour included

Vermont Yankee personnel and associates, journalists and Brattleboro-area business leaders. It was hosted by the Nuclear Energy Institute, a nuclear industry policy organization

At one point during the tour, Voegele said to the group, "This is probably the best site in the entire world."

And it looks it. Except for the very occasional Joshua tree, it's a barren place with low, scruffy plants. Dry is almost an understatement. Yucca Mountain is with in the federal government's Nevada Test Site, which, among other things, used to host nuclear weapons tests.

Voegele spent much of his discussion explaining the geology of the site. It is the geology, both sides agree, that is the most important factor in making for a safe spent nuclear fuel repository.