Nuclear fuel plan raises hope, concerns

A proposal to ship spent nuclear fuel from out-of-state reactors to South Carolina for recycling is reigniting concerns while its supporters say it would generate high-paying jobs and electricity without contributing to global warming.

The waste would be recycled at the Department of Energy's Savannah River Site near Aiken. Environmental concerns are being raised that the plan would make South Carolina more of a dumping ground for the nation's nuclear waste.

Both sides are closely watching a federal commission that is studying what to do with the nation's waste now that the Obama administration has shelved plans for a national repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the private company that operates SRS under contract with the Energy Department, has proposed an energy park at the complex that could include four experimental nuclear power plants capable of burning radioactive waste for fuel.

The company describes three of the proposed plants as potential alternatives to Yucca Mountain, since they would recycle waste that would have gone into the repository.

The energy park would also explore other energy technologies, such as making fuel from biomass or algae, and could create 25,000 high-paying jobs over time, according to the company's presentation.

The Savannah River National Laboratory at SRS has hired Thomas L. Sanders, immediate past president of the American Nuclear Society, to lead development of the proposed energy park.

Terry Michalske, laboratory director and a key executive involved in the plan, wasn't available for comment, a spokeswoman said.

New concerns

The energy park plan hasn't been funded or approved by the Energy Department or regulators, but it worries Susan Corbett, chairwoman of the South Carolina chapter of the Sierra Club.

Corbett said she thinks officials are considering SRS as a possible interim storage site for the spent fuel that's piling up at the nation's commercial nuclear power plants, including Duke Energy's Oconee Nuclear Station on the shores of Lake Keowee.

"They have 67,000 tons of irradiated fuel from reactors sitting around the country, and they don't know what to do with it, so they are looking at Savannah River Site," said Corbett, a Midlands resident who also chairs the national Sierra Club's nuclear issues activist team.

"We are probably No. 1 or No. 2 in the crosshairs of where to dump this stuff."

Corbett said she thinks officials are thinking about storing the waste at SRS "with some plan down the road to come up with some miracle technology. But in the meantime, we are once again going to become the nation's nuclear waste dump."

Corbett said environmental groups across the state are ready to band together to fight against shipments of spent fuel to SRS as they did in 2008 to fight additional low-level radioactive waste at a storage site in Barnwell.

"We're going to oppose any missions at SRS that will result in the creation of more nuclear waste," Corbett said. "We already have a very heavy burden of nuclear waste in our state that will very likely never leave. And we are opposed to having more in our state from any front."

Tom Clements, Southeastern nuclear campaign coordinator for the Washington-based Friends of the Earth, said there's no path for the waste to leave South Carolina once it comes in.

"There's going to be a fight if we're going to become the new Yucca Mountain," said Clements, a Columbia-area resident who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate on the Green Party ticket and is former executive director of the Nuclear Control Institute in Washington.

Corbett shared her concerns Tuesday in testimony to the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future.

"Nuclear waste tends to stay where you put it last," she told commissioners. "And certainly that's been true in South Carolina, where we have been the recipients of massive amounts of waste and very little has ever left."

Spending plan

The commission, chaired by former U.S. Rep. Lee Hamilton and former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, is expected to release draft recommendations in July. Those could include a plan on how to spend more than $20 billion in the federal government's Nuclear Waste Fund.

The money was collected to cover the costs of a national repository and came from fees added to the electricity bills of consumers in South Carolina and other states with nuclear power plants.

South Carolina consumers have paid nearly $1.3 billion of the fees over the years, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute.

Members of the commission are scheduled to visit SRS in January in a fact-finding trip that Scowcroft said was intended to "hear from communities that have a large stake in solving the waste problem."

Eric Loewen, chief consulting engineer for GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, said there's already enough nuclear waste in South Carolina to test the small, modular nuclear power plant his company plans at SRS.

South Carolina ranks No. 3 among states in the amount of spent fuel stored at nuclear power plants -- more than 3,700 metric tons of uranium, according to the NEI.

Loewen said it would take a network of 20 recycling centers with six reactors each 60 years to recycle all of the waste produced so far by U.S. commercial nuclear plants.

GE Hitachi, based in Wilmington, N.C., says the technology behind the experimental plant extracts more than 100 times more energy from uranium than the process used in nuclear power plants now and the resulting waste requires safe storage for 500 years instead of one million years.

The company also says its process doesn't separate pure plutonium and therefore doesn't raise the same security concerns as the spent fuel reprocessing that the federal government abandoned in the 1970s.

Loewen said taxpayers would foot the estimated cost of $2 billion to $5 billion for the plant if it's built.

The 299-megawatt plant could also use as fuel the 36 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste left at SRS from its Cold War-era mission of making nuclear bomb materials, Loewen said.

"This project would put this nation on a different path," he said. "It would show that we could use what we consider waste as a fuel. South Carolina would be a part of leading not only the nation but the world in a different way."

Still, Loewen said the recycling plant is not a panacea and would require a repository for storing the radioactive waste it would produce.

Savannah River Nuclear Solutions also envisions small, modular nuclear plants built by Hyperion Power, TerraPower and General Atomics as part of the energy park.

The partnership is led by Fluor Corp., a Texas-based engineering and construction company with a major office in Greenville.