TVA has little room left to store nuclear waste

TVA has little room left to store nuclear waste

MILLIONS SPENT WHILE AWAITING PERMANENT SITE PLANNED IN NEVADA

By Duncan Mansfield
ASSOCIATI;O PRESS

KNOXVILLE - The Tennessee Valley Authority, its nuclear-waste storage pools overflowing or nearing capacity, is spending millions storing spent fuel at its reactor sites while waiting for the Department of Energy to open a permanent repository.

The nation's largest public utility, though not alone in its dilemma, has more than 2,260 metric tons of spent fuel on its hands with no plans to slow down its nuclear program.

The storage pool at the Sequoyah station near Chattanooga, Tenn., is full and the pool at the Browns Ferry station in Athens, Ala., is expected to reach capacity next year.
Already, TVA has spent more than $25 million building additional dry-cask storage space at Sequoyah. Some 44.6 metric tons of waste were moved out of the storage pool to the above-ground casks in June.

Similar storage costing more than $22 million is being built at Browns Ferry, where TVA has two operating reactors and is spending $1.8 billion to restart a long-shuttered third reactor in 2007.

TVA provides electricity to 8.5 million people in Tennessee and parts of Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.

TVA officials say dozens of other nuclear utilities are similarly hamstrung by DOE delays in opening a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

TVA recently won a U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruling that could lead to recovery of storage costs on grounds that DOE breached a 1983 contract to dispose of TVA's nuclear waste beginning in 2002.

Meanwhile, TVA says the dry-cask interim storage option is a proven technology already used or planned at 38 nuclear plants.

"I think our first consideration is ensuring the safety of our employees and the safety of the communities where we operate," TVA director Skila Harris said.

"We have invested in the technology and the security measures at those sites that would protect safety. So in terms of safety, I don't consider that an issue."

Beyond that, she said, the nuclear industry "has long anticipated that there might be delays in completion of a permanent repository."

With the support of the White House and Congress, DOE hopes to have Yucca Mountain operating in 2010.

But Nevada is waging a court battle, and a federal court in Washington declared in July that even a 10,000-year radiation safety standard proposed by the government was insufficient for the site.

"This is a reflection of poor planning by the nuclear industry," said Steve Smith, director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. "They have continued to generate this waste even though they don't have a long-term storage operation for it."

"This is sort of the birds coming home to roost ... on the banks of the Tennessee River," he said, noting that all three TVA nuclear stations, TVA's touted alternatives to smog-causing coal-fired power plants, are located along the river.

Harris, who as an energy consultant studied the finite nuclear waste storage issue as early as the late 1970s, said Yucca Mountain "is ultimately a political issue more than it is a technological issue."

Smith disagreed. Ensuring the safe storage of material that will remain radioactive "for longer than recorded history is a real scientific and technical challenge. It is something that sort of pales human ingenuity."

TVA, meanwhile, is studying the possibility of building a next-generation nuclear plant at its unfinished Bellefonte site in Alabama. TVA's third operating nuclear plant at Watts Bar in Tennessee, which came on line in 1995, has adequate space in its spent fuel pool until 2018.