Sweden prepares for a decade of nuclear decommissioning, NS Energy, By Kristina Gillin 27 Feb 2020 ,
Sweden is preparing to dismantle and demolish six large power reactors on three sites over the coming years.
By the end of 2020, half of Sweden’s nuclear reactors will have been permanently shut down for decommissioning. The six large reactors are expected to undergo nuclear decommissioning in Sweden over the next decade.
Besides these, the Ågesta prototype reactor, a combined heat and power plant is about to commence dismantling.
Nuclear decommissioning at Sweden’s Barsebäck nuclear power plant
The twin units at Barsebäck, a few miles across the straight from Denmark, ceased to generate power in 1999 and 2005, respectively.
After shutdown, all spent fuel was removed and shipped to Sweden’s central interim storage facility (Clab) in Oskarshamn. Major decontamination of systems was also done early. However, dismantling had to wait, due to a lack of facilities for storage or disposal of decommissioning waste………
Funding and nuclear waste disposal in Sweden
Owners of nuclear power plants in Sweden have a statutory duty to dispose of their wastes. They are also required to set aside funding for waste management and nuclear decommissioning in Sweden. The funding is held in the Nuclear Waste Fund, a segregated Swedish government fund.
To fulfil the obligations, they jointly own the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Co (SKB). SKB’s scope covers disposal of most radioactive waste streams, interim storage of spent fuel and transportation between the various sites.
SKB is also responsible for compiling cost estimates for decommissioning and waste management every three years.
This to ensure that payments into the Nuclear Waste Fund are sufficient to cover future costs.
According to the 2019 estimates, the total cost of waste disposal, spent fuel storage and decommissioning is approximately SEK 147 billion (around €14 billion). Of this, about SEK 53 billion (around €5 billion) has been spent to date.
These figures include most of SKB’s scope but exclude the costs of near-surface disposal facilities for very low-level waste at Oskarshamn, Ringhals and Forsmark.
The majority of low- and intermediate-level waste from all Swedish reactors will be disposed of in SFR, a shallow geological repository for short-lived waste on the Forsmark nuclear site.
SFR has been in operation since 1988 but is currently licensed for operational waste only. To accommodate decommissioning waste, SKB plans to expand SFR’s capacity from 63,000 to 180,000 m3. An application for the expansion was submitted in 2014.
Lawmakers seek safeguards on nuclear plant decommissioning, 22 WWLP.com by: Chris Lisinski: Jan 25, 2020 BOSTON (SHNS)– Lawmakers are seeking additional influence over the decommissioning of the recently shuttered Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station, but a representative for the company conducting the work argued Wednesday that those attempts may be unconstitutional.
Tom Joyce, a lobbyist for Holtec Decommissioning International, said that bills imposing higher clean-up standards (H 2904 / S 1949) or reforming how decommissioning is funded (S 1948, S 1992) would exceed the state’s authority and infringe on the jurisdiction of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Joyce told the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy that passage of the bills would likely prompt a lawsuit from Holtec, delaying the decommissioning process that the company has said will take seven years……..
Backers of the legislation, though, see the proposals as important steps to protect local stakeholders amid a process that has drawn criticism and a lawsuit from the attorney general.
Plymouth Republican Rep. Mathew Muratore, who filed one of the bills that would require decommissioning to meet stricter environmental standards, said his goal is to ensure the land is clean enough to appeal to potential businesses and avoid remaining vacant……
The Pilgrim facility officially ended operations on May 31 after decades of generating power. In August, the NRC approved the transfer of Pilgrim’s license from Entergy to Holtec International to handle its decommissioning.
Attorney General Maura Healey, with the backing of the Baker administration, filed a lawsuit seeking to block the transfer until the NRC holds a hearing on concerns about Holtec’s ability to decommission the plant safely, its financial stability and the company’s alleged involvement in a kickback scheme.
Speakers at Wednesday’s committee hearing said the case, which also features the Pilgrim Watch group as a party, is still pending.
Other bills before the committee (S 1948, S 1992) would charge the owners of any nuclear power station in the state $25 million per year and stash the money into a fund managed by the state treasurer only to be used for postclosure activities.
Pilgrim Watch chair Mary Lampert said that money would serve as an “insurance policy” – if decommissioning concluded using the existing trust fund set aside for those purposes, the owners would get back the additional funding plus interest, she said. If not, the state would have a reserve ready to cover any shortfall.
Without a safety net backing up the more than $1 billion trust fund, Lampert said taxpayers would be on the hook.
“Who’s going to pay the difference? We’re going to pay the difference,” she told the committee. “Holtec cannot be required to do so. Why can it not be required to do so? Because it is a limited liability company and you cannot get blood out of this stone.”
Rep. Sarah Peake, a cosponsor of the bill, said Connecticut found itself footing a $480 million bill to complete decommissioning of the former Connecticut Yankee Nuclear Power Plant.
Like the legislation concerning cleanup standards, Joyce argued the funding proposals would unconstitutionally circumvent NRC authority….
Muratore and Lampert said they did not agree with that argument, with the latter arguing that the bills in question are all “money bills” and therefore grant the state authority to take additional action.
“States have the authority to enact a more conservative (environmental) standard if it applies after NRC has released the site because once the NRC has released the site, it no longer has authority, so there is not a question of preemption,” Lampert said.
In his fiscal year 2021 budget unveiled Wednesday, Gov. Charlie Baker proposed language that would allow the Department of Public Health to assess operators of nuclear reactors in the process of being decommissioned — such as Holtec — for the costs of radiation monitoring and emergency planning associated with the project. https://www.wwlp.com/news/state-politics/lawmakers-seek-safeguards-on-nuclear-plant-decommissioning/
Japan Times 23rd Jan 2020,Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. has estimated that it will take 44 years to decommission its Fukushima No. 2 nuclear plant. Tepco presented the outline of decommissioning plans to the municipal assembly of Tomioka, one of the two host towns of the nuclear plant, on Wednesday.
The Fukushima No. 2 plant is located south of the No. 1 plant, which suffered a triple meltdown accident in the wake of the March 2011 massive earthquake and tsunami.
According to the outline, the decommissioning process for the No.
2 plant will have four stages, taking 10 years for the first stage, 12
years for the second stage and 11 years each for the third and fourth
stages.
Tepco will survey radioactive contamination at the nuclear plant in
the first stage, clear equipment around nuclear reactors in the second,
remove the reactors in the third and demolish the reactor buildings in the
fourth. Meanwhile, the plant operator will transfer a total of 9,532 spent
nuclear fuel units at the plant to a fuel reprocessing company by the end
of the decommissioning process, and 544 unused fuel units to a processing
firm by the start of the third stage.
Nuclear waste removal begins 30 years after power station closure, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-somerset-50866867 5 Jan 2029,Work has begun on removing nuclear waste from Berkeley power station, 30 years after it was decommissioned.The disused Magnox generator, situated on the banks of the River Severn in Gloucestershire, closed in 1989.
It was the world’s first commercial power station and its laboratories and many of its buildings have already been dismantled.
Work emptying its vast concrete vaults of the nuclear waste Berkeley generated is only now able to safely begin.
But it will not be safe for humans to go inside its reactor cores until 2074.
The BBC has been given a rare glimpse of what is stored under the disused site.For the past 50 years parts of the coastline of the west of England have been dominated by nuclear power stations.
The 1960s saw the construction of Hinkley A and Hinkley B in Somerset, with both Oldbury and Berkeley built on the banks of the River Severn in the 1950s.
Only Hinkley B is still in use but the nuclear waste the stations generated has remained in place.
It takes hundreds of years to decompose and has to be stored underground.
It will cost an estimated £1.2bn to fully decommission Berkeley.
About 200 people are currently working on the site under strict security.
Work emptying waste products from the concrete vaults, eight metres (26ft) underground, is a complicated process.
They contain used graphite from the fuel elements in the nuclear generating process, material from the cooling ponds and from the laboratories.
The removal is expected to take five or six years to complete.
Rob Ledger, waste operations director at Berkeley, said: “When the power stations first started generating I don’t think there was much thought put into how the waste was going to be dealt with or retrieved.
“It’s taken a while to develop the equipment and the facilities [to do this].
“A mechanical arm moves the debris into position and then a ‘grab’ comes down through an aperture in the vaults and picks up the debris [and] puts it into a tray.
“Each debris-filled tray weighs up to 100kg (220lb).
“The automated machinery is controlled by computers [and] tips [the waste] into a cast iron container.”
The containers will house the waste in an intermediate storage facility until a long-term solution can be found.
“Nuclear waste does take a long time to decay… it’s hundreds of years. And that’s why we have to go to these lengths, to store it safely,” said Mr Ledger.
Eventually the boxes will be housed deep underground in a long-term storage facility. The location has not yet been decided by the government.
There are currently estimated to be almost 95,000 tonnes of nuclear waste in the form of graphite blocks across the UK.
But if the Carbon 14 can be extracted from the blocks, they become much safer and easier to deal with.
A new process is being explored, by scientists at Bristol University, to ensure not all of the waste will be discarded.
They have developed a process that uses reactor core spent contents in a new power form.
Carbon 14 from nuclear reactors is infused into wafer-thin diamonds, man-made in a lab at Bristol University.
They then become radioactive and form the heart of a battery that would last for many thousands of years.
The tiny batteries could be used in pacemakers, hearing aids or sent into space as part of the space programme.
The process is being piloted in association with the UK Atomic Energy Authority in Abingdon.
It is hoped the decommissioned Gloucestershire site may be redeveloped to manufacture the new batteries, creating jobs in the region.
In the wake of the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011, Germany ordered the immediate shutdown of eight of its 17 reactors, and plans to phase out nuclear power plants entirely by 2022.
The Philippsburg 2 reactor near the city of Karlsruhe in southwestern Germany has provided energy for 35 years. The Philippsburg 1 reactor—opened in 1979—was taken offline in 2011.
Over the past few years, nuclear power generation in Germany has been declining with the shutdown of its nuclear plants, while electricity production from renewable sources has been rising.
In January this year, Germany became the latest large European economy to lay out a plan to phase out coal-fired power generation, aimed at cutting carbon emissions—a metric in which Berlin has been lagging in recent years.
A government-appointed special commission at Europe’s largest economy announced the conclusions of its months-long review and proposed that Germany shut all its 84 coal-fired power plants by 2038.
Germany, where coal, hard coal, and lignite combined currently provide around 35 percent of power generation, has a longer timetable for phasing out coal than the UK and Italy, for example—who plan their coal exit by 2025—not only because of its vast coal industry, but also because Germany will shut down all its nuclear power plants within the next three years.
The closure of all nuclear reactors in Germany by 2022 means that Germany might need to retain half of its coal-fired power generation until 2030 to offset the nuclear phase-out, German Economy and Energy Minister Peter Altmaier said earlier this year.
Germany shuts down atomic plant as nuclear phase-out enters final stretch, DW, 1 Jan 2020, The Philippsburg power station is one of the only plants still operating in the southern state of Baden-Württemberg. Germany has vowed to start decommissioning every nuclear power facility by the end of 2022.Operators began shutting down the Philippsburg nuclear power plant in southern Germany on Tuesday, as the country puts into motion its plan to begin decommissioning all 17 of its atomic energy facilities by the end of 2022. …..
The 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan led to widespread anti-atomic-power protests across Germany. Two months after the accident, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that all plants would be closed over the next decade, making Germany the second country after Italy to shut down all of its atomic energy stations.
The German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation (BUND) welcomed the news. A BUND spokesman said the group hoped to see the end of nuclear power being “conjured up again and again as a supposed healing charm and climate savior.”
Kansai Electric Power Co. will spend ¥118.7 billion to dismantle the Nos. 1 and 2 units at the Oi nuclear power plant, with work expected to wrap up in the fiscal year ending March 2049.
The units, which each have an output capacity of more than 1 million kilowatts, are the most powerful reactors to be approved for decommissioning by the Nuclear Regulation Authority since a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami caused a meltdown at the Fukushima No. 1 plant in March 2011.
Following the disaster, the government placed a 40-year limit on the lifespan of reactors in the country, with a possible 20-year extension if strict safety standards are met.
As both units came online in 1979 and were approaching the 40-year limit, Kansai Electric had a choice of applying for the extension or scrapping them.
In December 2017, the utility announced it would scrap the aging reactors, citing the high cost of implementing additional safety measures. Kansai Electric submitted the decommissioning plan to the authority in November 2018.
The plant’s Nos. 3 and 4 units came online in 1991 and 1993, respectively, and are currently active.
Around 23,000 tons of low-level radioactive waste will be remain following the dismantling process, according to the plan, along with another 13,200 tons of nonradioactive waste.
The plan does not state where the waste will be stored.
Coastal Commission OKs permit to dismantle the San Onofre nuclear plant,Southern California Edison will begin demolition in coming months but entire process will take 8-10 years to complete, San Diego Union Tribune, By ROB NIKOLEWSKI, OCT. 17, 2019
The California Coastal Commission, on a 9-0 vote, gave approval Thursday for Southern California Edison to proceed with plans to dismantle the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, known as SONGS, where canisters loaded with nuclear waste are being moved from “wet storage” to a newly constructed “dry storage” facility on site.
The permit will allow Edison contractors to begin removing major structures at the facility, located on an 85-acre chunk of Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton owned by the Department of the Navy. SONGS is home to 3.55 million pounds of used-up nuclear fuel, between the Pacific and Interstate 5…..
Ultimately, the federal government has the final say about where used-up commercial nuclear fuel should go. But since a permanent site has not been found, nuclear waste at plants like SONGS have been piling up for decades. …….
A provision within the commission’s vote added a special condition to the permit concerning the demolition of two spent fuel pools where used-up nuclear waste is stored.
Under the provision, Edison will not get rid of the pools until it funds an independent third-party review of an inspection and maintenance plan regarding the condition of canisters in dry storage and forwards the findings to the Coastal Commission. Edison also agreed to start the plan by March 31, 2020 — seven months earlier than scheduled.
In return, the commission agreed to not sit on the report and vote on a recommendation by Coastal Commission staff by July 2020.
The proposed demolition of the pools at Units 2 and 3 dominated much of the discussion that dragged out for most of the day.
While fuel inside a nuclear reactor typically loses its efficiency after about four to six years, it is still thermally hot and emits a great deal of radiation. To keep the fuel cool, nuclear plant operators place the used-up waste in a metal rack and lower it into a deep pool of water, typically for at least five years. Once cooled, the fuel is often transferred to a dry storage facility.
Some speakers supported removal of the pools but others insisted they must remain to make sure the canisters holding the waste can be retrieved and inspected.
While fuel inside a nuclear reactor typically loses its efficiency after about four to six years, it is still thermally hot and emits a great deal of radiation. To keep the fuel cool, nuclear plant operators place the used-up waste in a metal rack and lower it into a deep pool of water, typically for at least five years. Once cooled, the fuel is often transferred to a dry storage facility.
Some speakers supported removal of the pools but others insisted they must remain to make sure the canisters holding the waste can be retrieved and inspected………
The dismantlement will be carried out by a general contractor selected in December 2016 — a joint venture of AECOM and Energy Solutions called SONGS Decommissioning Solutions. The decommissioning will be paid for by $4.4 billion in existing trust funds, The money has been collected from SONGS customers and invested in dedicated trusts. According to Edison, customers have contributed about one-third of the trust funds while remaining two-thirds has come from investments by the company.
Some of the work can begin before the waste transfers are completed, provided they are “geographically separate from locations where fuel storage and transfer operations occur,” Dobken said.
BBC 15th Oct 2019, Radioactive material jammed inside a Scottish nuclear reactor since the 1970s has been removed for disposal. Remotely-operated tools were specially made to extract the breeder elements from the Dounreay Fast Reactor (DFR).
The DFR and its dome-shaped housing are to be demolished as part of the
wider decommissioning of the former nuclear power site near Thurso.
Dismantling the 60-year-old DFR is among the most challenging of the
decommissioning work. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-50055003
It won’t be free of radioactive material until 2078.
Jon Fingas, @jonfingas An important if ignominious chapter in American nuclear energy has come to a close. Exelon has shut down Three Mile Island’s Generating Station Unit 1 reactor after 45 years of use. The reactor isn’t the one behind the accident in March 1979, but this effectively marks the closure of the plant — Unit 2, the reactor that failed, has been dormant for the past 40 years. It didn’t directly provide a reason, but it had warned in 2017 that it would shut down the plant in 2019 due to the high running costs.
This doesn’t mark the end of the overall story, however, as it’ll take decades to clean up. Some of the teardown will take place quickly. Staff will remove the reactor’s fuel supply in the next few weeks and store it in the used fuel pool. It’ll take much longer to fully decommission the reactor, however. Exelon estimated that the plant won’t be fully clear of radioactive material until 2078, or more than a century after it entered service. Unit 2 is expected to close in 2036.
Unit 1 has been relatively safe, with the only notable incident being an air pressure change that briefly exposed 20 employees to a mild amount of radiation. However, the reactor has long lived in the shadow of Unit 2, whose partial meltdown exposed nearly 2 million people to radiation. There don’t appear to have been any publicly disclosed health effects, but the incident led to stricter oversight and, along with the Chernobyl disaster, defined the public perception of nuclear energy.
Exelon wasn’t shy in trying to pin the blame on local government. It claimed that Pennsylvania law “does not support the continued operation” of the reactor, and that rules “fail to evenly value clean energy resources” while dirty power sources could “pollute for free.” It doesn’t think nuclear is getting a fair shake compared to renewables and other clean energy sources, in other words. It has also complained about low natural gas prices that make Unit 1 difficult to run.
It’s not certain just what happens next, but the odds aren’t high for a revival. While nuclear is relatively clean, the rises of both renewables and natural gas have reduced the demand for it. Like it or not, the industry has moved on — the closure is a symbol of that transition.
Groups worried about transportation of nuclear waste, pouring treated water into sewer,
David Shield · CBC News ·Aug 30, 2019 Environmental groups from across the country are expressing concerns about the decommissioning of a small nuclear reactor near the University of Saskatchewan campus.
The Saskatchewan Research Council is applying to dismantle its SLOWPOKE-2 reactor. The demolition would likely happen next year, but before that happens the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) will hold a hearing in Ottawa next month to look at approving the plan.
Environmental groups’ concerns about the plan include the intentions to release treated water from the reactor pool into the City of Saskatoon’s sewer system and to send the non-radioactive building materials to a private landfill.
“We don’t know what the cumulative effect or the additive effect of the radioactive burden is going to be of either of those practices,” said Brennain Lloyd, project manager of Northwatch, an environmental group in northern Ontario.
Other concerns include the fate of the reactor pool itself. The proposed plan includes filling the empty pool with concrete, rather than removing the contaminated site completely, as long as the site meets radioactivity guidelines.
Michael Poellet of Saskatchewan’s Inter-Church Uranium Committee Educational Co-operative (ICUCEC) questioned leaving the pool site in the ground.
“The issue there is that the cement in the pool has absorbed radioactivity,” said Poellet. “It’s not assured that the cement will be able to keep that radioactivity within that cement.”
Northwatch, along with the ICUCEC and Nuclear Waste Watch, have all applied to provide comment at the hearing.
The groups said they have important questions, including concerns about eight cubic meters of nuclear waste being transported hundreds of kilometres to a holding facility in South Carolina and parts of the reactor being sent to long-term storage in Chalk River Laboratories in Ontario.
“It’s a big deal project,” said Lloyd. “It seems to have been flying under the radar but it needs to come out out front.” Continue reading →
Spectacular Video Shows Nuclear Power Plant Demolition in Germany
How to demolish a nuclear power plant without blowing it up, By Sheena McKenzie, CNN August 16, 2019 London(CNN Business)This is how you demolish a nuclear power plant German-style. No big red button. No dramatic countdown. No “kaboom!”
The engineers who brought down a disused power plant on the River Rhine last week did so without an explosion. Instead they used robots to gently collapse it like a house of cards.
Or at least, as gently as you can flatten an 80-meter (262-foot) concrete cooling tower.
The tower was part of the Mülheim-Kärlich power plant, which was in operation for just over a year in the 1980s. The plant was shut down in 1988 following licensing issues and concerns about the risk of earthquakes in the area. The hefty task of dismantling began in 2004.
Germany decided to phase out all its nuclear power plants in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in 2011. And it’s also planning to close all its coal power plants by 2038 in an effort to cut its greenhouse gas emissions, which are currently the largest in Europe. That means there are likely to be many more such demolitions in the coming years.
Decades ago, Germany’s power plants were a symbol of its engineering prowess. Today the country has become a world leader in taking these complex buildings apart.
Robot power
n May last year, engineers began shortening what was then the 162-meter-tall cooling tower at Mülheim-Kärlich. They attached a robot to the lip, and for the past year it’s been munching its way down the building -— a bit like a caterpillar devouring a leaf.
By June this year, the tower was half its previous height.
Engineers still needed to finish the job. But as project manager Olaf Day explained, they didn’t have permission from authorities for an explosion, so instead came up with a different plan.
The tower was supported by 36 V-shaped pillars. Last week, the team of experts used a giant robotic “hammer” to weaken some of the pillars, and then another high-tech pair of “scissors” to cut them until the tower collapsed, said Day.
“It was the first time in the world this demolition method has been used [on a nuclear plant],” he said, adding that the entire “hammer and scissors” process took just under four hours.
There was another benefit to this unique method.
Explosives cause “huge amounts of dust that fly everywhere,” explained Professor Miranda Schreurs, chair of environmental and climate policy at the Technical University of Munich. The Mülheim-Kärlich tower, however, just “fell in on itself,” producing minimal dust.
While the tower was not deemed radioactive, there’s still an interest in “minimizing potential spread of any harmful materials,” she said.
The new nuclear experts
For more than three decades, the cooling tower dominated the skyline in this small town in western Germany, the legacy of an era when the country generated around 30% of its electricity from nuclear power, according to Schreurs.
Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, nuclear energy was seen as a “sign of Germany’s engineering prowess,” Schreurs said.
But when the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in nearby Ukraine caused radioactive clouds to drift over western Europe, concerns about the safety of nuclear energy “took on a whole new dimension,” she said.
Following the reunification of Germany in 1990, more Soviet nuclear plants in the former East Germany were decommissioned that “did not meet the West German safety standards,” said Schreurs.
Germany has been cooling on nuclear power since 2000, but it was Japan’s Fukushima disaster in 2011 that really swung the government into action.
Chancellor Angela Merkel quickly set new deadlines. Of the country’s 17 reactors, eight were immediately shut down. The seven reactors still in operation today are due to close by 2022.
As the plants closed down, a new industry has emerged.
Even after a power plant shuts, “you still need people who are experts in radioactive materials, you still need people who know how to deal with the robots that operate inside nuclear facilities,” said Schreurs.
That know-how could be exported to other countries. There are about 450 nuclear power plants in the world, many of them approaching the end of their lifetimes.
“So you’re not going to have the same level of expertise as you have here in Germany,” said Schreurs. “That means Germany will probably play quite an important role in helping other countries to also deal with decommissioning.” …….
BERLIN — The cooling tower of a former nuclear power plant next to the Rhine River in Germany that was online for just 13 months has been demolished, 31 years after it stopped producing electricity.
Remote-controlled excavators on Friday removed pillars that supported the tower at the Muelheim-Kaerlich plant, near Koblenz. The tower, whose top half had already been removed by a specially designed robot, collapsed under its own weight in a cloud of dust a couple of hours later.
Muelheim-Kaerlich was switched off in September 1988 after 13 months in service when a federal court ruled the risk of earthquakes in the area hadn’t been taken into account sufficiently. After a lengthy legal battle, demolition started in 2004. Operator RWE says nearly all radioactive material had already been removed by then.
Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. will decommission the Fukushima No. 2 nuclear plant, its president, Tomoaki Kobayakawa, told Fukushima Gov. Masao Ochibori at a meeting Wednesday.
The facility is the second nuclear plant that the utility company has decided to decommission after accepting it would need to shutter the nearby Fukushima No. 1 plant, which was crippled by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster in the world’s worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl.
Tepco’s decision to scrap Fukushima No. 2, which is expected to cost some ¥280 billion ($2.6 billion), will be formally approved at the company’s board meeting later this month if local municipalities accept the plan.
The prefecture has demanded the utility scrap the reactors at Fukushima No. 2, saying their existence would hamper its reconstruction efforts. The plant has been offline since its operations were suspended due to the 2011 disaster.
If the plan goes ahead, all 10 nuclear reactors in the prefecture — four at the No. 2 plant and six at the No. 1 facility — will be scrapped.
It will also leave the utility company with only the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant in Niigata Prefecture and the planned Higashidori nuclear plant in Aomori Prefecture.
Kobayakawa said at the meeting, also attended by the mayors of the two towns — Naraha and Tomioka — that host the plant, that Tepco plans to build a new on-site storage facility for spent nuclear fuel from the reactors at the Fukushima No. 2 plant.
The fuel will be placed in metallic containers and cooled using a dry storage approach, according to the operator.
No decision has been made regarding final disposal of the spent fuel, raising concerns that the radioactive waste may remain on-site for a long time.
The Fukushima No.2 plant currently has around 10,000 assemblies of spent fuel cooling in pools.
As jarring as the closure of the Three Mile Island One nuclear power station is to longtime Harrisburg-area residents, a cadre of them told Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials Tuesday they’d like the plant’s planned decommissioning to take a faster track.
It’s known in NRC lingo as DECON, and it can allow for the deconstruction, clean-up and re-use of closed nuclear plants in less than a decade, as opposed to the six decade-plus track Three Mile Island Unit One’s owners, Exelon Generation, has started planning for.
“How many dog and pony shows can you (the NRC) bring to Harrisburg over the last 40 years?” asked longtime TMI activist Gene Stilp, bemoaning the fact that under the current safe storage plan the island would be a nuclear waste dump long past the lifetimes of any current residents.
“You could start getting jobs for clean-up right now,” Stilp said. “Get retrained in some fashion and set up things for that. But you could actually have jobs right now and start on that. Not just monitoring the site… Start providing jobs right now, by starting the clean-up right now.
“This bargain with the devil to store it (spent nuclear fuel) on the Susquehanna River is an abomination to the river, an abomination to the citizens who live here…. and it provides more terrorist targets in a big way.”
NRC officials noted Tuesday it is ultimately the licensee’s decision whether to put a plant into safe storage or rapid decontamination.
Exelon’s current timeline calls for the site to spend most of the next 60 years in a “dormancy” stage, in which most activity will center around storage of spent fuel, and a wait for residual contamination levels to naturally break down until major reactor buildings and components can be dismantled.
Exelon, however, has recently changed paths with other retired nuclear plants – including one in New Jersey this year……..
There are other ways to join the TMI decommissioning conversation. Written comments on the report can be submitted through Oct. 9 either:
online to the NRC using Docket ID NRC-2019-0142 on the Regulations.gov website;
nuclear-news 