Radioactive Station Must Be Trucked Away : Dismantling Tested at 1st U.S. Nuclear Plant

Twelve years after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, President Eisenhower dedicated the Shippingport Atomic Power Station as part of the “Atoms for Peace” program.

Today the worn-out plant, the first U.S. nuclear reactor to generate electricity, is being torn apart chunk by chunk, pipe by pipe. In the process the government hopes to demonstrate that reactors can be dismantled safely and affordably, providing a primer for utilities to use when their plants outlive their usefulness.

An army of 200 workers has reached the midpoint in the five-year project.

“We’re about halfway there and accelerating,” says John Schrieber, project manager for the U.S. Department of Energy, owner of the Shippingport plant. “What we’re trying to do is help others who will be dismantling nuclear plants in the future.”

Small by Comparison

Shippingport, located 25 miles west of Pittsburgh along the Ohio River, was the granddaddy of the nation’s 84 operating reactors. But the 72-megawatt reactor, a dwarf compared to modern 1,000-megawatt units, reached retirement age five years ago and was taken out of service Oct. 1, 1982.

“It was a demonstration plant,” Schrieber says. “It had served its purpose. It’s a dead fish now.

“It’s like an old car. As it gets older, more and more parts break down--the brakes, the transmission, the carburetor. You’re running down to the repairman every six months. When it’s new, all you have to do is put gas and oil in it and drive it.”

Congressmen, government officials and utility executives around the world have come to observe the dismantling of Shippingport, seeking answers to the questions of radioactive waste disposal, cost, safety, time and demolition methods. A videotape is being made as part of a training film.

Since a nuclear plant is contaminated, it can’t be abandoned or leveled with a bulldozer. The land can only be restored to unrestricted use by completely removing radioactive parts.

Others Mothballed, Entombed

Shippingport is the largest nuclear plant in the world to be dismantled to date. Other plants have been mothballed or entombed, two ways of keeping them in safe storage until they are demolished.

Plants have an operating life of 30 to 40 years.

Several reactors have been idled and will be decommissioned when adjacent reactors are shut down. These include Peach Bottom Unit 1 in Pennsylvania, Dresden Unit 1 in Illinois and Indian Point 1 in New York.

Fifteen U.S. plants will reach the end of their useful lives by the year 2000, according to the DOE. The number could grow to 53 by 2005 and 70 by 2010 unless their lives are extended by replacing critical parts that become brittle from neutron bombardment.

Worldwide, more than 350 nuclear reactors may be taken out of service in the next 30 years. Critics like the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, D.C., research organization, say no one is ready to deal with radioactive garbage.

“Not one of the 26 countries currently relying on nuclear power is adequately prepared for this undertaking,” says Cynthia Pollock of Worldwatch.

But government officials disagree.

Not ‘Ugly Monster’

“Decommissioning is not the ugly monster people make it out to be,” Schrieber says. “There’s no buried dogs or hidden problems out there.”

But because Shippingport is owned by the government, it enjoys options not available to private utilities who will be dismantling their own reactors.

For example, Shippingport’s spent uranium was removed in 1984 and taken to a military dump in Idaho. There are no non-military sites open that can handle high-level wastes, and a national repository for spent fuel won’t be open until 1998 at the earliest.

Almost all of the 12,000 metric tons of spent uranium fuel from private reactors is now stored temporarily in water-filled utility holding ponds, according to Worldwatch.

The Shippingport dismantling will cost $98.3 million. That’s about 12% of what it would cost to build the plant in 1987 dollars, according to the DOE.

It took three years and $120 million to build the plant, which went on line on Dec. 18, 1957. It generated 6.35 billion kilowatt hours of electricity.

Test Breeder System

The last of its three nuclear cores was a breeder system activated by President Carter in 1977 in a test to show a reactor could produce more fuel than it consumes.

The most eye-catching part of the Shippingport project will be ferrying the 770-ton radioactive reactor vessel in one piece on a 7,800-mile barge trip to a federal burial ground in Hanford, Wash. Shippingport gets special treatment here, too. By law, new burial grounds must be opened to take trash from dismantled private reactors.

The Shippingport vessel is 25 feet high and 10.5 feet in diameter with steel walls 8 inches thick. It is to be filled with concrete, lifted off its bolted platform by a crane and placed on a special barge in October, 1988.

The cargo will go down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to the Gulf of Mexico, through the Panama Canal, up the West Coast via the Pacific Ocean to the Columbia River.

The radioactivity is contained in the steel walls. Officials say that a three-foot layer of concrete around the vessel will shield anyone from exposure.

‘An Innocuous Package’

“This really is an innocuous package,” Schrieber says. “I’m seriously thinking of putting a patio table next to it when it sails. You could sit on it.”

If it’s not shipped in one piece, the vessel would have to be cut up into little pieces for 80 cross-country truck trips to Washington, Schrieber says. The barge method will save $7 million, reduce radioactive exposure to workmen and mean a year’s less work.

But critics say the one-piece method may not be suitable for larger, more radioactive vessels at privately owned plants.

“The strategies being used there are not replicable at larger plants,” Pollock says. “I don’t think it’s going to be feasible to lift them in one piece.

“I think they’re being very shortsighted. The most difficult task decommissioning crews of the future face is dismantling the pressure vessel and its contents.”

The largest plant taken apart so far was a 22-megawatt test reactor at Elk River in Minnesota. The reactor vessel was cut up in 1974 and a parking lot was built at the site.

Half-Gutted Building

At Shippingport, the rust-colored, warehouse-like building is half-gutted. Deep in the plant’s innards, 40 to 60 feet below ground, technicians scrub radioactive residue from walls.

When the job is finished in 1989, grass will be planted on the seven-acre site and the land returned to its owner, the Duquesne Light Co. The utility has built two 833-megawatt reactors near the original.

“The level of radioactivity will be such there will be no restrictions on the use of the ground,” says G. Richard Mullee of General Electric Co., the main contractor on the dismantling.

“It might be a neighborhood picnic ground.”