VERNON, Vt. — Vermont and three other states that host Entergy Nuclear power plants scheduled for shutdown can expect to keep spent radioactive fuel for the foreseeable future, a top Nuclear Regulatory Commission official said Tuesday.
John Lamb, project manager from the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, told a gathering of officials from Vermont, Massachusetts, New York and Michigan there appears to be little interest in Congress to pay for additional studies into Yucca Mountain, the proposed national depository for highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel in the Nevada desert.
“Yucca Mountain is basically in a stall,” Lamb said in response to a series of questions from Massachusetts antinuclear activists during a conference call. He said legislation to breathe new financial life into the Yucca Mountain site, which is about 100 miles north of Las Vegas, had gone nowhere so far.
“Dry cask (storage) is going to stay until some solution,” Lamb said.
During the Obama administration, work on Yucca Mountain ground to a halt thanks to the influence of one of Nevada’s senators, Harry Reid, a Democrat who was the then-Senate majority leader.
Many of the questions Tuesday dealt with the timing of the transfer of the radioactive fuel from wet storage to dry storage.
Vermont Yankee last week started the process of transferring about 2,000 spent fuel assemblies from the plant’s spent fuel pool into individual concrete and steel casks — a method of storage that is called dry cask storage.
Questions were raised about how the NRC could approve storage of the fuel, which remains highly radioactive for thousands of years, in concrete and steel casks whose effective lifespan is estimated at about 100 years.
Lamb said the casks can be replaced.
“If onsite storage goes beyond the current storage, they can be reloaded into different canisters or moved from the site,” Lamb said. There might be an interim storage site established, so fuel at plants such as Vermont Yankee can be moved out of Vernon pending the final construction of Yucca Mountain, he said.
Steven Scheurich, vice president of decommissioning for Entergy Nuclear, and Paul Paradis, the Entergy manager of decommissioning, outlined various shutdown scenarios and fuel transfer goals of the Pilgrim plant in Massachusetts, Indian Point 2 & 3 in New York, and Palisades in Michigan, as well as Vermont Yankee.
Paradis said there were “lessons learned” by Entergy from the first two years of Vermont Yankee’s decommissioning which it would be applying to the subsequent shutdowns and decommissions, referring to licensing submittals, schedules, “stakeholder outreach,” and communications with the NRC.