Expensive and difficult – the nuclear waste storage and security problem

meanwhile the company was paying workers to monitor the fuel and keep the plant safe……
Removal of the fuel is a crucial step in dismantling the plant, a project that could take another seven years.

A nuclear option: After 25 years, Genoa reactor’s waste gets new home There are 333 fuel assemblies each a 6-by-6 inch bundle of 100 eight-foot metal rods filled with uranium dioxide pellets roughly the size of a pencil eraser sitting in a storage tank under about 15 feet of water on the top level of the reactor containment building in Genoa. The fuel contains elements including plutonium, cesium and strontium that are radioactive byproducts of nuclear reactions. Though no longer fissile enough to power a plant, they will continue to emit harmful radiation and some heat for thousands of years. La Crosse tribune • By Chris Hubbuch 15 July 12

MUNICIPAL IMPACT Dairyland Power is moving 333 spent nuclear fuel assemblies only 0.4
miles to the south, but the move could have major ramifications for the village of Genoa.

Under Wisconsin law, counties and municipalities hosting nuclear fuel receive $50,000 a year from money set aside by utilities to offset additional costs.

Because Dairyland sits just on the border of the village of Genoa and the town of Genoa, the village gets $40,000 and the town $10,000.

But the dry storage site is fully in the town, which means moving the fuel would cost the village $40,000 — about 30 percent of its annual operating budget.

After four years of trying, Dairyland and village officials think
they’ve found a solution: The village will annex part of the storage
site. If the Department of Administration approves, each municipality
would receive $50,000.

GENOA, Wis. — On Thursday, a 64-wheel beast of a truck creeping along
at just under 1 mph hauled a cask of radioactive waste from a
long-dormant power plant to a concrete pad between Hwy. 35 and the
Mississippi River, the first of five such trips it will make this
summer in one of the final chapters of the Coulee Region’s atomic era.
A quarter century after Dairyland Power Cooperative shut down its La
Crosse Boiling Water Reactor, the spent fuel remains. Starting last
week and continuing through the summer, workers are transferring the
radioactive waste into dry cask storage in a move designed to save the
company millions in annual costs.

It’s a massive undertaking, more than five years in the planning, and
the numbers are staggering.

All told, it will take a crew of 40 people working two shifts a day
most of the summer to complete the project. When loaded, each cask
will weigh 98 tons and require approximately 3,000 pages of
documentation. That’s a stack of paper about a foot high. There are
more than 500 steps that must be followed. Just to weld a lid on one
of the casks workers must follow 120 pages worth of procedures. The
cost could reach $45 million…..
LACBWR was permanently shut down on April 30, 1987. At the time,
Dairyland assumed the federal government would take the spent fuel,
which was stored in a tank of water inside the plant, to a permanent
repository.

A government contract later guaranteed it would take possession by 1998.

Twenty years ago, dry cask storage was a relatively new technology.
Not wanting to be the guinea pigs in a highly regulated industry, and
trusting the government to honor its contract, Dairyland put off the
costly step of moving fuel into dry storage; meanwhile the company was paying workers to monitor the fuel and keep the plant safe……
Removal of the fuel is a crucial step in dismantling the plant, a project that could take another seven years.

Decommissioning is funded by a $108 million trust, money the utility
set aside to cover the eventual cost of decommissioning the plant.
Dairyland also sued the government and won a $38 million award for
costs incurred between 1998 and 2006. Berg said he’s confident the
co-op will prevail in a second suit for the years since.

Opponents of nuclear energy don’t like dry cask storage but concede it
may be the best of all bad alternatives.

Gail Vaughn, who lives in Ferryville and passes the LACBWR site each
day on her commute to La Crosse, has long protested atomic energy. She
doesn’t like having the waste stored in her neighborhood, or so near
the Mississippi River, but she’s more opposed to the creation of a
national repository that would encourage the use of more nuclear
power. (A state moratorium prohibits the construction of any new
nuclear power plants until there is a federally licensed repository,
and the Obama administration has stopped development of a planned site
in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.)

“It creates all of this deadly stuff that doesn’t need to exist,”
Vaughn said. “I’m not in favor of any legislation that will take (the
waste) off their hands.”

A retired sociologist at UW-L, Al Gedicks has studied the impact of
uranium mining on Native American communities in the southwest, where
much of the nation’s uranium supply is mined. He’s just as concerned
that the nuclear industry tends to target native lands — where
regulations tend to be less stringent — when it comes to disposing the
waste.

“Literally at every stage of the nuclear fuel cycle … native people
are the first and the primary victims,” Gedicks said. “This is a
classic case of what sociologists like myself call environmental
racism.” http://lacrossetribune.com/news/local/a-nuclear-option-after-years-genoa-reactor-s-waste-gets/article_38fce0e2-ce37-11e1-8c0c-0019bb2963f4.html?comment_form=true