NRC says pool storage of nuke waste is safe

Suzanne Struglinski

Monday, March 28, 2005 | 11:19 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Despite recent findings by the National Academy of Sciences, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is maintaining that keeping used nuclear fuel in storage pools is safe.

An academy report sent to Congress and the commission last year said the commission might want to move used nuclear fuel from pool to dry storage earlier than anticipated to reduce consequences in the event of a terrorist attack on a pool.

But in a letter sent to Congress on March 14, NRC Chairman Nils Diaz wrote that the latest security assessments of pool and dry storage shows pool storage "provides reasonable assurance that public health and safety, the environment and the common defense and security will be adequately protected."

"The NRC will continue to evaluate the results of the ongoing plant-specific assessments and, based upon new information, would evaluate whether any change to its spent fuel storage policy is warranted," Diaz wrote to Sen. Pete Domenici, the Republican chairman of the Senate Appropriations Energy and Water Development Subcommittee, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the subcommittee's top Democrat and six other lawmakers in the House and Senate.

Congress asked the academy to study spent fuel storage after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The academy sent the classified report to Congress and the commission last year, but a public version has not been released yet.

Academy spokesman Bill Kearney said the academy sent a possible public version to the commission earlier this year, but the commission deemed its contents to be sensitive and safeguarded information.

"We are still working toward releasing an appropriate and substantive unclassified public version of the report," Kearney said.

Diaz's letter contains the commission's responses to specific findings and recommendations made by the academy in its report, but not the report in its entirety.

Diaz makes clear in the letter's second paragraph that the commission disagreed with the findings in several areas and felt "they lacked a sound technical basis."

The academy recommended the commission should review and upgrade security requirements for protecting fuel assemblies from "theft from knowledgeable insiders."

Diaz said security measures in place as well as the "intense, physically disabling, radiation taken from spent fuel" make the likelihood of someone stealing fuel assemblies "extremely low.'

"The NRC does not consider the threat of a knowledgeable, active insider stealing a spent fuel rod, or portion thereof, to be credible," Diaz wrote.

Nuclear utilities store spent fuel in water pools and in dry containers on their properties as they wait for the radioactive materials to be moved to a central federal storage site. The government plans to move the waste to Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, but the Energy Department's project faces another round of delays.

Security concerns have been brought up by those for and against the Yucca Mountain nuclear dump. The government and the nuclear industry say storing the waste on-site at the nuclear reactors is safe, but only as a short-term solution. On-site storage is only designed to be a temporary fix and leaving waste in 103 different sites around the country is not good for future security. Moving it all to one place is the answer, Yucca supporters say.

Meanwhile, Nevada's congressional delegation and other critics argue that shipping the waste from dozens of sites around the country to Nevada will create potential moving terrorist targets. They also insist that as long as nuclear power use continues, it will generate waste on-site, forcing Yucca to be just one more storage site, not an all-encompassing site.

Under law, Yucca can only store 77,000 tons of waste, although there is room inside for more. If the site opens in 2012 or 2015 as now estimated, that current legal limit would nearly be reached.

Waste would still have to be stored at reactor plants while it waited in line to be moved to Yucca or another federal storage site.