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4 September 2014. Update satellite images.

Nuclear Power Plants and WMD Series: http://cryptome.org/nppw-series.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/30/us/spent-nuclear-fuel-is-allowed-to-be-stored-above-ground.html Nuclear Waste Is Allowed Above Ground Indefinitely By MATTHEW L. WALD, AUG. 29, 2014 As the country struggles to find a place to bury spent nuclear fuel, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has decided that nuclear waste from power plants can be stored above ground in containers that can be maintained and guarded indefinitely. The decision, in a unanimous vote of the commission on Tuesday, means that new nuclear plants can be built and old ones can expand their operations despite the lack of a long-term plan for disposing of the waste. The chairwoman of the commission, who voted with the majority but dissented on certain aspects, said Friday that the vote risked allowing Congress to ignore the long-term problem. “If you make the assumption that there will be some kind of institution that will exist, like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, that will assure material stays safe for hundreds or thousands of years, there’s not much impetus for Congress to want to deal with this issue,” the chairwoman, Allison M. Macfarlane, said Friday. “Personally, I think that we can’t say with any certainty what the future will look like. We’re pretty damned poor at predicting the future.” In the 1980s, Congress picked Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas, as the prime location for a burial site, but that consensus fell apart in the face of sharp opposition from Nevada and a changing political balance. The Energy Department is now saying that a burial site will be established by 2048, but the agency has no method for finding one. The commission approved a generic environmental impact statement, under which nuclear activities can continue, but did not address the impact to the environment if the stored nuclear waste were abandoned, which would leave it vulnerable to attack or allow the containers to break down. Ms. Macfarlane said it was wrong to predict institutional control indefinitely. “Best not to say anything about something so uncertain,” she said, “and just to work with what we can know for sure.” For decades the commission has allowed nuclear plants to operate under what it called its waste confidence rule, which said that although there was no repository, there would most likely be one by the time it was needed, and in the interim, the storage of the highly radioactive waste in spent fuel pools or in dry casks would suffice. But in June 2012, a court ruled that the commission had not done its homework in studying whether the waste could be stored on an interim basis. As a result, the commission froze much of its licensing activity two years ago. On Tuesday, however, the commission approved a finding by its staff that waste could be stored — as opposed to disposed of — indefinitely. The vote was 4-0. Some nuclear opponents say the issue is certain to wind up back in court. At the Natural Resources Defense Council, Geoffrey H. Fettus, the lead lawyer in the original case, said in a statement: “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission failed to analyze the long-term environmental consequences of indefinite storage of highly toxic and radioactive nuclear waste; the risks of which are apparent to any observer of history over the past 50 years. The commission failed to follow the express directions of the court.” The action, though, allows the commission to extend the licenses of two reactors in Pennsylvania, Limerick 1 and 2, and to extend the license for storage casks holding spent fuel at another two-unit plant, Calvert Cliffs, in Maryland. Several other license renewals would have had to have been denied had the new policy not been put in place, including Indian Point 2 and 3, in Buchanan, N.Y., but those license applications still have other unresolved issues. Likewise, several applications to build reactors would eventually have been blocked, except that those plants were not very likely to be built in the near future. In coming years the agency will need to reconfigure its staff to handle a different problem: an increased number of plants shutting down and entering the decommissioning process, Ms. MacFarlane said. And, she said, the commission needs to rewrite its rules for decommissioning plants. For example, she said, once the nuclear fuel has been removed from a reactor core, the security requirements at the plants should probably be relaxed because the risk is reduced.

22 October 2012. Update images:

Arkansas Nuclear One
Palisades Nuclear Generating Station
Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant
Grand Gulf Nuclear Generating Plant
Seabrook Nuclear Generating Station
Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station
Oconee Nuclear Station
Columbia Generating Station
Point Beach Nuclear Plant.

1 June 2011. Add images for Fort St. Vrain, Surry, North Anna and Millstone.

30 March 2011. Related:

isfsi-security.pdf    US Nuclear Spent Fuel Storage Security    March 30, 2011 (410KB)

Revise Haddam Neck site, add three drawings of casks. Detailed report on safety, security and durability of dry casks:

Evaluation of the Technical Basis for Extended Dry Storage and Transportation of Used Nuclear Fuel, United States Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, December 2010:

http://www.nwtrb.gov/reports/eds_execsumm.pdf (145 pp, 5MB)

Conclusions

The technical information currently available, together with the experience gained to date in the dry storage of used fuel, demonstrates that used fuel can be safely stored in short term and then transported for additional storage, processing or repository disposal, at least for low burnup fuel. However, additional information is required in order to demonstrate, with similarly high confidence, that high burnup fuel can be safely transported and any type of used fuel can be stored in dry storage facilities for extended periods without the fuel degrading to the extent that it may not perform satisfactorily during continued storage and subsequent transportation.

However, the Board recommends a number of research and development programs be implemented to demonstrate that used fuel can be stored safely in dry storage facilities for extended periods. However, research alone will not be sufficient. Because the experience base for extended dry storage of used fuel is short and the credible degradation phenomena are several and not robustly predictable in a quantitative sense, an in-service inspection and aging maintenance program appears to be necessary to support extended dry storage of used nuclear fuel. The technical details of such an in-service inspection program will depend on the desired safety objectives of extended dry storage. Consequently, a practical engineering approach that is based on the observational method and periodic assessments will likely be required to provide an adequate safety basis in addition to what can be learned from targeted scientific investigations.

The regulations concerning dry storage of used fuel do not currently address storage for extended periods. There is also some inconsistency between the regulations that apply to dry storage and those that apply to transportation and it is unclear how to meet both sets of regulations. It would be helpful in managing extended dry storage of used fuel if the regulations were to be revised as an integrated set and based on a risk assessment for safety significance and consequence. In addition, the Board considers that the regulatory requirements related to physical security and terrorist threats should also be reviewed on a risk-informed basis using potential consequence analysis and integrated with the storage and transportation regulations.

At this point, the nuclear waste management policy of the United States is unclear, with the result that used fuel will be stored at reactor sites for longer than originally foreseen. It is thus essential that the appropriate research and development programs, and monitoring and inspection programs, are implemented as a matter of priority in order to demonstrate that used fuel can be safely stored for extended periods and then transported and handled as part of a future waste management program.

26 March 2011. Updated with minimally secure cask areas.

http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_risk/sabotage_and_attacks_on_reactors/
spent-reactor-fuel-security.html

What about spent fuel stored in dry casks?

When the spent fuel pool in the "attic" of the nuclear plant fills up, some of the highly radioactive fuel assemblies are loaded into large casks and stored outside on concrete pads. Weapons available on the black market, and even some that can be legitimately purchased in the U.S., or explosives could cause the casks to be penetrated resulting in the release of large amounts of radiation. At some plants, the casks are line-of-sight visible from open access (i.e., unsecured) areas while other plants place casks inside unguarded chain-link fences.

What should the NRC do about spent fuel security?

As soon as it is safe to do so, most of the spent fuel at reactors should be put into dry casks. Fuel in dry casks is less likely to catch fire, and terrorists would have to break open many dry casks to release the same amount of radioactivity that a single wet pool could release.

To reduce the vulnerability of these dry casks, the NRC should adopt new "physical protection standards" that enhance the security requirements for dry cask storage so that the fuel will be protected against reasonably foreseeable threats that might emerge over several decades. The new standards should consider credible scenarios by which attackers could gain access to and release the radioactive material from the dry casks. Protection would involve a combination of operational measures and physical measures, such as putting spent fuel casks into enclosed buildings, using earthen berms, or erecting other barriers.

24 March 2011

Background: Safety and Security of Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel:
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11263

US Nuclear Spent Fuel Storage Casks Eyeball

US Nuclear Spent Fuel Storage Casks Eyeball

http://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-storage.html Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel There are two acceptable storage methods for spent fuel after it is removed from the reactor core: Spent Fuel Pools - Currently, most spent nuclear fuel is safely stored in specially designed pools at individual reactor sites around the country. Dry Cask Storage - If pool capacity is reached, licensees may move toward use of above-ground dry storage casks. http://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-storage/dry-cask-storage.html Dry Cask Storage In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the need for alternative storage began to grow when pools at many nuclear reactors began to fill up with stored spent fuel. Utilities began looking at options such as dry cask storage for increasing spent fuel storage capacity. See the graph of nuclear fuel storage pool capacity. Dry cask storage allows spent fuel that has already been cooled in the spent fuel pool for at least one year to be surrounded by inert gas inside a container called a cask. The casks are typically steel cylinders that are either welded or bolted closed. The steel cylinder provides a leak-tight containment of the spent fuel. Each cylinder is surrounded by additional steel, concrete, or other material to provide radiation shielding to workers and members of the public. Some of the cask designs can be used for both storage and transportation. There are various dry storage cask system designs. With some designs, the steel cylinders containing the fuel are placed vertically in a concrete vault; other designs orient the cylinders horizontally. The concrete vaults provide the radiation shielding. Other cask designs orient the steel cylinder vertically on a concrete pad at a dry cask storage site and use both metal and concrete outer cylinders for radiation shielding. See the picture of a typical dry cask storage system. The first dry storage installation was licensed by the NRC in 1986 at the Surry Nuclear Power Plant in Virginia. Spent fuel is currently stored in dry cask systems at a growing number of power plant sites, and at an interim facility located at the Idaho National Environmental and Engineering Laboratory near Idaho Falls, Idaho. See the map showing the location of existing independent spent fuel storage installations. http://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-storage/diagram-typical-dry-cask-system.html Cask Loading into Storage Bunker at San Onofre Nuclear Plant Source: http://taxdollars.ocregister.com/files/2011/03/canister_2.jpg Three drawings below from: Evaluation of the Technical Basis for Extended Dry Storage and Transportation of Used Nuclear Fuel, United States Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, December 2010

http://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-storage/locations.html

Minimally secure cask area Browns Ferry Farley Palo Verde Arkansas Diablo Canyon Rancho Seco San Onofre Humboldt Bay Fort St. Vrain Haddam Neck Millstone St. Lucie Hatch TMI-2 Idaho Facility GE Morris Dresden Quad Cities Duane Arnold River Bend Maine Yankee Calvert Cliffs Yankee Rowe Big Rock Point Palisades Monticello Prairie Island Grand Gulf Ft. Calhoun Seabrook Hope Creek Oyster Creek Indian Point FitzPatrick McGuire Davis-Besse Trojan Limerick Susquehanna Peach Bottom Oconee Robinson Catawba Sequoyah Private Fuel Vermont Yankee Surry North Anna Columbia Point Beach

Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant, Limestone County, AL 29 November 2013 34°42'15.12" N 87°06'53.74" W

Farley Nuclear Power Plant, Houston County, AL 1 February 2013 31°13'16.06" N 85°06'40.01" W

Palo Verde Nuclear Power Station, Maricopa County, AZ 28 April 2013 33°23'15.68" N 112°51'22.05" W

Arkansas Nuclear One, Russellville, AR 12 November 2012 35°18'41.68" N 93°13'45.84" W Image below from Bing.com/maps

Decommissioned Rancho Seco Power Reactor Facility, Herald, CA 18 April 2014 38°20'46.30" N 121°07'36.70" W

San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant, San Onofre, CA 27 April 2014 33°22'14.06" N 117°33'28.21" W Image below from Bing.com/maps

Decommissioned Humboldt Bay Power Plant, Eureka, CA 28 May 2014 40°44'30.06" N 124°12'43.59" W

Decommissioned Fort St. Vrain Nuclear Generating Station, Fort St. Vrain, CO 19 June 2014 40°14'54.51" N 104°52'20.89" W Source of images: http://pbadupws.nrc.gov/docs/ML0104/ML010450036.pdf

Demolished Haddam Neck (Connecticut Yankee) Nuclear Power Station, East Hampton, CT 19 September 2013 41°28'53.03" N 72°29'09.57" W Source: http://www.connyankee.com/assets/images/43_vccs02.jpg

Millstone Nuclear Power Station, Niantic, CT 7 April 2013 41°18'41.80" N 72°09'55.29" W Image below by Bing.com/maps

St. Lucie Nuclear Power Plant, Hutchinson Island, Florida 23 April 2012 27°20'39.10" N 80°14'41.72" W

Image below from Bing.com/maps

Image below from Bing.com/maps

Below, Bing.com/maps