New Focus on an Old Nuclear Problem

By MATTHEW L. WALD

PEACH BOTTOM, Pa., June 1 — The nuclear plant here split its first atom in December 1973. Both halves are still here.

So is all the other fuel that the twin Peach Bottom reactors have used in almost three decades of making electricity. The same is true at more than 120 other nuclear power plants around the country, even though nearly 20 years ago their owners signed a contract with the federal government for the Department of Energy to take the fuel to Nevada for burial, beginning in January 1998.

What to do with used nuclear fuel is a technical and political conundrum that is getting new attention as the Bush administration pushes for a greater role for nuclear power, while Senate Democrats say they will not agree to the longstanding plan to bury the waste at the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada.

The problem will only grow as reactors built years ago seek license renewals to keep running for many more decades. Next month, the owners of the Peach Bottom power plant will apply to extend its operating license from the once standard 40 years to 60.

Recognizing the storage problem, in the last few months Peach Bottom has set itself up to store its fuel on site for decades to come.

"We never intended that Peach Bottom become a temporary storage site for used fuel," said James P. Malone, vice president for nuclear fuels at Exelon, the company that runs Peach Bottom's two reactors and 15 others around the country.

But Yucca Mountain, the federal government's proposed site for permanent storage, was never a sure thing and is about to become even less so when Nevada's senior senator, Harry Reid, a longtime opponent of the project, becomes assistant majority leader.

An engineer here who is now deeply involved in waste storage, Paul R. Rau, said that when he first went to work for the company that runs Peach Bottom 23 years ago, "I would never have thought about it."

But the neat grid of 3,819 spaces at the bottom of a pool where the plant stores its spent fuel has steadily filled with fuel rods.

So at this 620-acre site on the banks of the Susquehanna River, just north of the Maryland state line, Mr. Rau has built enough storage space to handle waste far beyond the expected lifetime of the reactors. The company built what looks like an exercise yard at a prison, a concrete pad two to three feet thick, surrounded by floodlights, motion detectors and two dozen cameras, with a double row of 10-foot fences topped with concertina wire. On the pad, which is the size of a football field, the company installed four casks last summer, each 18 feet high and 8 feet in diameter, each weighing 90 tons and holding 24 tons of spent fuel. This summer the company will add five more; eventually the total could reach 72, and even after that, the pad could be expanded.

The casks, which could also be used for shipping, are designed to last at least 40 years. They are filled with inert gas to prevent corrosion, and require no mechanical cooling systems; David J. Foss, an engineer here who supervised their loading, said maintenance consisted mostly of inspecting them and sweeping the leaves off the pad.

Peach Bottom's approach is typical. For now, the 103 operating power reactors around the country store their wastes in spent-fuel pools like the ones here, 40 feet on a side and 40 feet deep, designed to withstand earthquakes and filled with purified water. Since the fuel rods still generate heat, even years after being removed from a reactor, the water is needed to prevent meltdown. It also provides radiation shielding. But the pool requires additional systems: heat exchangers to keep the water from boiling away, and filtration systems to pick out the radioactive material that builds up in the water. Over the long term, corrosion and cooling are concerns.

The Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's main trade association, says there are already 16 reactor sites with dry cask storage, and an additional 20 that will run out of space in their spent-fuel pools by the end of 2004 and will probably need such storage. Nearly all will need it by 2010.

But it costs more than $1 million for enough casks to store a year's worth of fuel for one reactor. So Peach Bottom's operator, at the time the parent company of the Philadelphia Electric Power Company, was one of 12 utilities to sue the Energy Department to recoup its costs after the 1998 deadline; Peach Bottom, like other reactors, had been paying the government a tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour generated, in exchange for a government promise, now broken, to take the fuel.

Peach Bottom settled, with the department agreeing that the plant could skip payments equal to the price of the casks. But this has not placated Exelon, which is highly likely to be a builder of new plants if any are ever ordered in this country. The company, like other utilities, would like the waste problem solved first.

The cask storage sites have created a political role reversal: the companies that build them hate them, and the people who want to phase out nuclear plants see them as bolstering their argument.

The companies are eager to empty them and have the Energy Department move the fuel, preferably to a federal burial site, but at a minimum to a centralized above-ground repository — probably looking much like the one here, only bigger. For the companies, the casks are a reminder of an unresolved problem.

But opponents are happy to emphasize that the problem is unsolvable, and that the waste should stay in its containers, right where it is, a reminder in five dozen locations that there is no permanent repository. Their goal is to convince the public that the reactors should stop producing waste — in other words, that they should stop operating.

"Their ulterior motive is to say that there is no solution," said Marvin S. Fertel, senior vice president at the Nuclear Energy Institute.

But storing the fuel in casks is "not a pressing problem," said Dr. Arjun Makhijani, the president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, a nonprofit group often critical of the Energy Department. Assuming proper regulation, Dr. Makhijani said, cask storage is quite safe, probably safer than Yucca.

"So long as the reactors are operating — and this is not a plug for relicensing — the waste should be stored on site," he said.

Dr. Makhijani and others say that the government has proved unable to deal with its own nuclear wastes, from weapons production, and should not be trusted to find a burial spot that will stay essentially intact for 10,000 years.

But other scientists like burial, and the industry contends that Congress will, too. "If you don't vote for it, the waste stays in your state for 40 or 50 years," Mr. Fertel said. Under the language of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, any senator can introduce a motion to approve the project, and the Senate must then take up the matter.

When the reactors now operating were designed, mostly in the 1960's, the builders assumed that reactors would store their wastes for only a few years before they were reprocessed for further use. One reprocessing plant ran for a few years in the 1960's, in West Valley, N.Y., but was a technical and financial failure. When Jimmy Carter was president, he barred a second plant, in Illinois, from opening. The Bush administration's energy report raises the possibility of reviving reprocessing, but experts say that technology's prospects are highly uncertain.

Even if Yucca Mountain opens, it is too small; under the 1982 law it is supposed to accept 77,000 tons of civilian and military wastes, but the civilian wastes alone will come to more than that, partly because of license renewals, which were not anticipated in 1982. The industry hopes that by the time this becomes a problem, Nevadans will see the economic benefits of the repository and support a change in the law to accept more waste. But the other possibilities are lengthy storage in casks and the search for a second site, which no one wants to undertake.

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company