Nuclear Waste: Meltdown of Vermont Harmony

It is an engineering problem as fundamental as a car without an exhaust pipe. It is a political problem summarized by the phrase “not in my backyard.”

Dozens of nuclear power plants around the country are running out of room to store their highly radioactive waste.

The evolution of the problem at the Vermont Yankee plant, whose plans to expand on-site storage of spent fuel are being fought by Vermont officials, illustrate the dilemma as well as any.

In the summer of 1985, Gov. Madeleine M. Kunin fought vocally to remove Vermont from consideration as a site for a permanent federal repository of high-level waste.

Key Power Source

But she didn’t then and doesn’t now want to shut down the state’s source of that waste, Vermont Yankee, because it is also a source for a third of Vermont’s electricity.

“It’s a terrible dilemma,” Kunin said recently. “There were assumptions made when nuclear power came on-line that all of this would be resolved, that there would be a solution to what to do with the waste just around the corner.”

It is a story told around the country.

In Virginia, the Surry nuclear plant has had to resort to very expensive dry cask storage because what was supposed to be a temporary spent-fuel storage pool is full. In California, the twin reactors at Diablo Canyon, opened only in 1985, are already seeking Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval to expand their spent-fuel storage capacity.

According to the NRC, 60 of the country’s 106 nuclear plants will run out of room to store their highly radioactive waste by 1995.

The Department of Energy, which is responsible for solving the dilemma, recently announced that the earliest it can have a permanent waste repository ready is 2003.

Date Pushed Back

President Gerald R. Ford, in 1976, ordered that a permanent waste repository be built by 1985. President Reagan signed a bill in 1983 pushing the date back to 1998.

The waste is produced when radioactive materials are used to generate tremendous heat, boiling water and turning electric turbines with the steam to make power.

The heat is generated in the reactor core. The core holds the fuel assemblies, which look like a fistful of 12-foot-long pencils, each pencil a tube of Zircolay metal containing ceramic pellets of uranium oxide. The uranium is an isotope, U-235, whose atoms are among the easiest to split.

Every year or so, some of Vermont Yankee’s 368 fuel assemblies, usually about one-third, burn out. Removing them is a delicate job.

The reactor core is flooded, and a small crane lifts the rods--each weighing about 1,000 pounds--and carries them through a gate from the reactor into the spent-fuel pool next door.

At Vermont Yankee, opened in 1972 at Vernon, the spent-fuel pool was designed to hold 600 rods. It could take two years’ output of nuclear waste and still have room to hold all 368 rods in the core if they needed to be removed for plant repairs.

Reprocessing Proposed

The way Scott Peters of the Washington-based Atomic Industrial Forum and the NRC’s Dick Clark tell it, the notion was that when things began to get crowded in Vermont Yankee’s fuel pool--and those of other nuclear plants around the country--the waste would be shipped off to one of several regional reprocessing plants around the United States.

There, still good uranium and plutonium could be leached out of the fuel rods for reuse--as fuel for commercial reactors or for sale to the Defense Department for nuclear weapons.

But President Jimmy Carter and others worried that plutonium being shipped around the country would tempt terrorists bent on making crude bombs. Carter scrapped the country’s main effort at reprocessing, the Clinch River Breeder Reactor in Tennessee.

That was in 1977, and Vermont Yankee’s spent-fuel pool was nearing its capacity of 600 rods. The plant applied to the NRC that year for an amendment to its license allowing it to “re-rack” its spent-fuel pool and fit more rods in it by placing them closer together.

With no reprocessing plants to take the waste and Ford’s promised repository eight years off, it was either re-rack or shut down the plant. The NRC let Vermont Yankee re-rack, expanding its capacity to store spent-fuel assemblies to 2,000. The agency has granted similar permission to dozens of other plants.

Added Weight Questioned

The state of Vermont and some anti-nuclear activists questioned whether Vermont Yankee’s spent-fuel pool could stand the added weight of 1,400 additional fuel assemblies. But plant officials told critics that if the pool filled up again and no other site had been found for the waste, the plant would shut down.

In three or four years, plant spokesman Harry McBrien now says, the pool will be so crowded that plant engineers won’t be able to empty the core into the pool to make room for repairs.

Vermont Yankee has asked the NRC for permission to re-rack again, this time to 2,870 fuel assemblies in the pool.

Critics point to a new study from the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, which says that if a fuel pool lost its cooling water because of an earthquake or for some other reason, a nuclear catastrophe could result.

The NRC’s Clark said the Brookhaven study “postulates a lot of wild things that don’t take into account the design barriers we have against their happening.”

But at a recent NRC hearing on the Vermont Yankee re-racking plan, Ann Sorenson, who lives nearby, pleaded: “Close the plant and free the people of this area from the fear of an accident.”

Broken Promises Cited

In its legal brief challenging the new re-racking, the state of Vermont pointed to procrastination, broken promises and continuing controversy that have surrounded the federal government’s plans to build a permanent waste site.

Besides Vermont, many states have fought their way off a Department of Energy list of potential permanent disposal sites. The last three states on the list, Texas, Nevada and Washington, all have gone to court to try to keep from being chosen.