‘The day of reckoning’

Benjamin Grove

Sunday, Dec. 5, 1999 | 9:33 a.m.

CALVERT CLIFFS COUNTY, Md. -- Fishing boats bob on the steel-blue Chesapeake Bay near this picturesque shore. Surrounding fields are a fading summer green. Forests are awash in red, gold and rust.

White-tailed deer dart into the woods. A bald eagle soars. Sea breezes blow.

This beautiful setting seems a strange place to find one of the nastiest substances on Earth.

But nestled on this former Maryland tobacco farm is the state's only nuclear power plant, where two 850-megawatt nuclear reactors generate electricity for 450,000 households -- and 35 to 40 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste a year.

The waste at Calvert Cliffs is like any other produced by 103 reactors at 72 plants nationwide: spent uranium fuel rods stored in pools of water inside the plants.

This waste is a sample of the radioactive material bound for permanent storage in Nevada under a current proposal. Calvert Cliffs and the rest of the nation's plants want to store their waste in a single site -- a geologic repository -- inside Yucca Mountain 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"The plants are running out of space," said Steve Unglesbee, spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's powerful lobbying arm. "The day of reckoning is here."

A glimpse inside Calvert Cliffs offers some insight into the nuclear industry's campaign to make Nevada a nuclear burial ground.

Nuclear power plants in operation since the late 1950s have stored their own waste, mostly in concrete, steel-lined pools of water. But the pools were not designed to store waste forever.

"A safer way to deal with the fuel is to have it in one central location," said Calvert Cliffs spokesman Karl Neddenien. "The Nevada desert is a perfect place where the waste can be carefully supervised and monitored. Everything shows that the American public wants an answer to this problem. They don't want it sitting here."

In 1982 a federal law directed the U.S. Department of Energy to study sites where America could store its nuclear waste for eternity. A 1987 law, sometimes dubbed the "Screw Nevada Bill," made Yucca Mountain the only site under consideration. Today scientists are conducting a battery of tests inside a 5-mile-long tunnel in Yucca to determine the site's suitability.

The DOE now hopes to complete its analysis and recommend Yucca by 2001, then open it by 2010, or in 2007 at the earliest. Trucks and trains eventually would haul 77,000 tons of waste to Nevada from Calvert Cliffs and the nation's 71 other plants, most located east of the Mississippi.

Officials had thought Yucca would be open by Jan. 31, 1998, when the DOE by law was required to take custody of the waste. But the date came and went with Yucca far from finished.

Meanwhile, waste continues to pile up at the nation's power plants, about 36,500 tons so far.

Calvert Cliff's 25-by-108 foot waste storage pool contains about 1,500 bundles of 12-foot-long spent fuel rods stored in underwater racks. The pool was originally designed to hold about 900 bundles but has been "re-racked" to accommodate more.

The fuel rods are submerged in 38 feet of 85-degree water that cools the radioactive rods and insulates them from the world.

The pool is tightly controlled. Technicians remove jewelry, use tethered tools and wear scrubs without pockets or buttons around the water.

"We can't make change for a dollar at the pool," jokes system engineer Scott Hargus.

The rods, full of spent uranium oxide pellets not much bigger than a pencil eraser, were once at the core of the nuclear reactor. The depleted pellets are still highly radioactive after four to six years of nuclear fission, or atom splitting, that produces extreme heat.

Because the waste pool is full, Calvert Cliffs constructed two concrete bunkers to store more waste in a wooded enclave near the plant. Plans call for three more bunkers for a total cost of $43 million.

Spent fuel rods are moved to the outdoor bunkers after seven to 10 years in the pool, when the rods have lost most of their heat and radioactivity.

Three times a year a heavy, slow-moving truck hauls the waste from the pools to the bunkers. The material is still dangerous enough that radiation experts and armed guards, wary of terrorists, plod alongside the truck during the move.

Technicians then slide the casks into slots in the bunker, like bodies on a drawer in a nuclear morgue.

The casks are designed to last decades -- at least 30 years beyond the life of the plant, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Calvert Cliffs is one of 18 plants nationwide that have built expensive storage casks because their waste storage pools are full. Thirty-two more plants will fill their pools in the next five years.

"Consumers are going to pay an additional $5 billion more by 2010 if a central storage facility is not built," Unglesbee said. "By 2015 the cost goes to $7 billion. It is a money-ratepayer issue."

The Prairie Island plant in southeastern Minnesota could one day become the first plant to close due to a waste storage crunch.

"We're faced with the possibility of shutting our plant down in 2007," said nuclear projects manager Scott Northard, of Northern States Power, which operates Prairie Island.

Prairie Island filled its waste pool years ago and will fill 17 steel waste casks outside the plant in the next seven years. Minnesota law prohibits more than 17 outdoor casks, so plant managers are scrambling for options, including U.S. federal court.

Northern States is the lead plaintiff among several plants that filed lawsuits against the DOE because the department didn't take their waste in 1998 as promised.

Plant managers point to their ratepayers. Homeowners nationwide who use nuclear-generated electricity had dumped $15 billion into a fund hoping that Yucca would have been opened by 1998. The Minnesota ratepayers have spent millions more to construct the 17 casks.

Federal courts ruled that the DOE is indeed obligated to take the waste, even with no place to put it. The plants await an award in appeals court.

"We are asserting that the federal government is liable for $1 billion -- with a B -- worth of damages because of a breach of contract," Northard said. "They gave us an ironclad guarantee that they would take the waste by Jan. 31, 1998, which seemed reasonable at the time. You know the rest -- they didn't meet their end of the bargain."

The nuclear industry is now preparing for early next year when the latest version of a nuclear waste bill will be debated in Congress. The bill would allow for waste shipments to be delivered at Yucca as early as 2007.

Nevada's Democratic Sens. Richard Bryan and Harry Reid will argue against the bill. Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, will lead the bill's supporters. Whispering in the ears of all four will be members of a coalition of nuclear interests, including power plant managers, politicians ranging from mayors to state legislators and a number of lobbyists.

"We've been awfully concerned about pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into this national nuclear waste fund to identify, characterize and prepare a high-level disposal site at Yucca Mountain," said Dennis Schornack, a radioactive waste commissioner for Michigan Gov. John Engler. "We've put a lot of money in and not gotten much progress."

Michigan has four nuclear reactors.

"States for the last several years have been trying to get Congress to live up to its obligation to remove nuclear waste," said John Strand of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.

Others working the pro-Yucca circuit include Idaho state lawmaker Jack Barraclough, a retired hydrologist who has studied waste storage.

"Nature never creates an ideal location, but Yucca comes as close as you could find," said Barraclough, who works closely with Sen. Craig on the waste issue. "The Department of Energy and Congress have not held up their obligation. We can solve the waste problem but there doesn't seem to be enough political will to do it."

Augusta, Ga., Mayor Bob Young is another politician who has become active on the issue. He visited Yucca Mountain last summer.

"I heard the people out there in Nye County on their concerns and I understand their concerns," Young said. "But those of us who live in communities where waste is being stored temporarily have concerns, too. We're very confident with the science that has been used to determine Yucca is a suitable site."

The Nuclear Energy Institute likely will continue to take the most visible role in lobbying Congress. The institute pledges to continue lobbying for Yucca until it opens.

"The fuel can be stored safely on site (at power plants), but it gives you an added measure of safety and efficiency to consolidate the fuel in a dry and remote location and get it away from the nation's oceans, lakes, rivers and bays," Unglesbee said. "It makes environmental sense."

archive