Vermont Yankee: What to do with spent fuel?

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

Senator Jeffords' opposition was not based on scientific problems with Yucca Mountain, which he said appeared to be a safe site when the vote came up in 2002, but because any site needed to guarantee storage for all high-level radioactive waste.

Yucca Mountain, as currently proposed, does not have the storage to handle all the high-level waste to be generated in the United States, which would include Department of Defense materials. Proponents of the site say that the mountain certainly does have the capacity, it's just a matter of amending the law to allow for more storage.

The cost of Yucca Mountain so far has been $5.5 billion. The money comes from federal subsidies and ratepayers who receive electricity generated by nuclear power. The ratepayer piece (paid incrementally through electric bills) was mandated as part of the licensing of a plant to pay for the future storage of the spent fuel. Vermonters have paid about $236 million since 1980.

Alternatives

There are alternatives, but no one seems willing, at this point, to seriously consider them. Among the alternatives is starting the site selection process over again. Proponents, especially, believe that that will take too much time - another 10 years or longer just to choose a site.

The Yucca opponents say the dry cask storage system will last plenty long enough for the DOE to take its time. In any case, as Senator Jeffords and others have pointed out, Yucca will not solve all of the high level radioactive waste issues by itself, so some other solution, even if it's simply expanding Yucca, will have to be found.

Western Europe, which has neither uranium nor vast deserts, has a similar if different problem. The Europeans reprocess the spent fuel from their reactors. This results in less uranium they have to buy from Africa and other places. It also results in a different waste problem.

Reprocessing produces plutonium, which has a much shorter half-life than spentfuel uranium, so the storage concerns are in the hundreds of years, not tens of thousands, or more.

But it's expensive to reprocess. The other major problem is that along with the plutonium, there is a secondary waste product that includes long-lived isotopes. This liquid waste is turned into a glass that in turn must be disposed of much in the same way as spent fuel is in the United States.

One of the advantages of the Yucca Mountain site is that the spent fuel containers could be retrieved. If there were a need some time in the future to reprocess the spent fuel, it theoretically could be accomplished.

Vermont Yankee

The risk and reward for Vermont Yankees owners is the ability to uprate the power output and to extend the license beyond 2012.

The previous owners were principally utilities who were essentially stuck with two, long-term contracts: Yankee and Hydro-Quebec. H-Qs contract expires just four years after Vermont Yankee in 2016.

For selling Vermont Yankee, the utilities received $180 million and, perhaps more importantly, a power contract that runs through 2012. That contract guarantees a price for electricity whether the plant is operating or not. Before, when the plant shut down for regular maintenance, the utilities had to go on to the spot market to buy electricity, which was inevitably more costly.