Give license to private firm for temporary nuclear waste storage, NRC staff says
'This is an important milestone in what is a long and rigorous licensing process for a facility like this.'
By Teri Sforza | tsforza@scng.com | Orange County Register
PUBLISHED: August 6, 2021 at 4:59 p.m. | UPDATED: August 6, 2021 at 4:59 p.m.
In 2017, Bridget Bartlow holds a sign during a protest at the Huntington Beach pier against nuclear waste storage at the San Onofre nuclear power plant. (Photo by Bill Alkofer, Orange County Register/SCNG)
The potential for moving stranded nuclear waste off San Onofre’s coast — and away from scores of other nuclear power plants nationwide — took a step forward in July when the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff concluded that a private, temporary storage facility in Texas poses little risk to the environment and should be licensed.
Interim Storage Partners, a joint venture of Waste Control Specialists and Orano USA, wants to build a temporary home for highly radioactive spent fuel that currently languishes at commercial sites like the shuttered San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.
Location of proposed temporary storage for nuclear waste, where Texas and New Mexico meet. Source: NRC
That way, much of America’s radioactive waste would be concentrated in just one or two places, rather than scattered across the nation, while the federal government continues its decades-long quest for a permanent geologic repository. Shuttered sites like San Onofre could finally return to other uses.
Interim Storage Partners plans to house up to 40,000 metric tons of waste near the Texas-New Mexico border for up to 40 years. It would use dry storage systems resembling what’s at San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station right now. The new facility would rise beside a low-level radioactive waste disposal site that Waste Control Specialists already operates in Andrews County, Texas, less than a half-mile from the New Mexico border.
“We appreciate the rigorous and deliberate process of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to thoroughly investigate the environmental soundness of our license application,” said Interim Storage Partners in a statement. The decision “is another indication of our application’s quality and thoroughness.”
The NRC also is reviewing a similar application for a similar temporary storage site by Holtec International — the company that made San Onofre’s dry storage system — about 50 miles away in Lea County, New Mexico. Holtec’s facility would house up to 100,000 metric tons of high-level waste.
About 36 miles west of the Interim Partners site is the nation’s one and only permanent, deep geologic repository — the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, which has been disposing of federal waste from the production of nuclear weapons and the like since 1999. WIPP is the sort of ultimate solution that commercial utilities hope for: Waste is stored more than 2,000 feet underground, in large panels mined from salt rock beds.
But that sort of permanent solution for commercial nuclear waste is a long way off. Licensing private, temporary storage facilities is considered the swiftest route to removing waste from San Onofre’s quake-prone coast, many experts say, but — in a story familiar to anyone following the tortured Yucca Mountain saga — lawmakers in Texas and New Mexico vow a brutal fight to keep their corner of the country from becoming the nation’s radioactive slag heap.
“Stranded” nuclear waste at shuttered power plants nationwide. Source: NRC
Illegal under federal law?
“Bringing this nuclear reactor waste to Texas and New Mexico would result in dangerous de-facto permanent dumps,” said a July letter from Texas lawmakers to the NRC, asserting that the facilities are actually illegal under federal law.
“(Texas) Governor (Greg) Abbott has expressed concerns about potential impacts to the Permian Basin, the world’s largest producing oilfield. Abbott said the region would become a ‘prime target for attacks by terrorists and saboteurs. This location could not be worse for storing ultra-hazardous radioactive waste.’ “
Further raising the specter of disaster, they argued that thousands of rail shipments of spent nuclear fuel would wind through the nation’s major cities if the facilities are licensed, and accidents, leaks or sabotage could cost up to $648 billion.
Five Texas counties and three cities have already passed resolutions opposing the storage sites, they said.
“Storing high-level radioactive waste in Texas or New Mexico would be especially risky due to temperature extremes, wildfires, lightning, flooding, and intense winds. The region is prone to sinkholes and earthquakes. … Please prevent nuclear disasters that risk the health and safety of Texans and imperil our businesses and economy. Please deny the ISP and Holtec International licenses.”
A conceptual drawing of the proposed waste storage facility in Texas. Source: NRC
Industry paints a different picture.
After some 70 years of nuclear power production, there have been no serious accidents involving spent nuclear fuel, experts have said. Around the world, spent fuel is regularly transported from reactors to reprocessing facilities and/or storage sites, from France to Japan, with little drama.
Officials at both the NRC and Interim Storage Partners analyzed “credible accidents,” including natural disasters and external events, and concluded there would not be radioactive releases that would significantly impact the health of workers or local residents. Over years of normal operation, estimated health effects, including fatal cancer, nonfatal cancer and severe hereditary effects were “most likely zero,” the report said.
Meanwhile, the project would produce jobs and economic growth that would benefit the local community, the report said. It would cost about $351 million to build, another $251 million to transport fuel to the site, and $202 million to $490 million a year to operate. At the end of its life — once a permanent, federal disposal site comes online — it would cost another $251 million to transport the waste to that final resting place, and another $57 million to decommission the temporary site. That’s about $1.4 billion, according to the report.
In contrast, leaving nuclear waste scattered across the nation as it currently is would cost nearly $4 billion, it said.
Next steps
Map of the proposed temporary storage site, in purple. Source: NRC
The license application was originally submitted to the NRC in 2016, and the license could be granted by September.
Now, the NRC must file its report with the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA must publish a notice in the Federal Register. The NRC then must wait at least 30 days before making a licensing decision.
“This is an important milestone in what is a long and rigorous licensing process for a facility like this,” said John Dobken, spokesman for Southern California Edison, which runs San Onofre.
So far, it’s all proceeding “pretty much exactly as expected,” said David Victor, a professor at UC San Diego and chair of San Onofre’s volunteer Community Engagement Panel. “Licensing parts of interim storage are relatively straightforward, and I don’t think anybody has foreseen any major concerns on the environmental or other regulatory front.
“The real issues are the politics around a change in federal law, reliable support for interim storage including funding, and transportation risks along the way.”
Congressional action would be necessary for commercial waste to be stored in private, temporary facilities — and for the costs of that storage to be borne by the federal Nuclear Waste Fund, where more than $40 billion waits to be spent on a solution.
That money came from utility customers all across America — including about $1 billion from Edison customers — but is earmarked for government storage costs, not private storage costs.
“We’ll continue to support these efforts so the fuel can be removed form our coastline, but there needs to be a federal element,” Dobken said. “To move all the spent fuel from SONGS would mean about $100 million in additional costs. lt’s important for us to protect our customers.”