TRANSPORTATION IMPLICATIONS OF STORAGE SOLUTIONS
transporting spent fuel currently stored at 11 decommissioned reactor sites to a federal facility, other existing reactor sites, or “a competitively-selected interim storage site” (ibid.). Responding to the Appropriations Committee’s charge, in December 2008, OCRWM released its “Report to Congress on the Demonstration of the Interim Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel” (DOE 2008g). In the report, OCRWM found that it lacked authority under the NWPA to implement interim storage before the Yucca Mountain repository became operational. OCRWM identified four specific legislative changes that would need to be made before the program could initiate the demonstration project envisioned by the House Appropriations Committee: • Direction to take spent fuel from decommissioned reactors; • Establishment of an expedited site selection and development process; • Authorization to construct and operate the facility or, if the facility were to be regulated by the NRC, provisions for an expedited siting and licensing process; and • Funding reform to ensure OCRWM would have sufficient funding to carry out its activities (ibid., pp. 15-16). OCRWM’s report focused mainly on the legal restrictions that would prevent it from carrying out the plan suggested by the Appropriations Committee. The transportation section – less than a full page in length – mentioned cask procurement, estimated costs, and the shipping schedule needed to make 294 shipments of spent fuel over a four-year period (ibid., pp. 12-13). Unlike the plan in 1995, the 2008 report would have OCRWM making shipments by train. Also unlike the 1995 report, the report to congress did not address the transportation planning process. The timeline in the report did indicate that OCRWM anticipated spending a little over one year planning shipments, but no mention was made of consultative planning with the states (ibid., p. 14). Following the yearlong planning effort, OCRWM anticipated spending five years acquiring the necessary transportation resources. Although the report did not make the observation, OCRWM could, in theory, spend those five years not only procuring hardware but also conducting the institutional planning that the states feel is necessary to support a campaign of this magnitude. OCRWM estimated the costs (in 2009 dollars) of carrying out 294 shipments to be $232 million over the five-year period of acquisition and operations. It is worth noting that keeping the states engaged in planning through the existing four regional cooperative agreements would reasonably cost on the order of $6 million or 3 percent of the cost of purchasing casks and conducting shipments, assuming $600,000 per year for 10 years (six years of planning followed by four years of operation). Concerned that OCRWM might receive direction to implement interim storage, in 2008, the MRMTC codified “transportation implications of storage solutions” as one of the region’s “key issues.” The region stated that, “For any federal solutions, OCRWM must consider the impacts of transportation when selecting storage locations” (MRMTC 2008a, p. 1). In April 2009, the Midwestern
Once the opening date of Yucca Mountain began to recede far into the future, proposals for federal centralized interim storage began to surface. The most recent of these proposals came in 2008, when the House Appropriations Committee suggested that OCRWM look into the possibility of using an existing or new federal site to store spent fuel from 11 decommissioned reactors. The Midwestern states were among the stakeholders that voiced concern about interim storage proposals possibly resulting in spent fuel and high-level waste being shipped following a very aggressive schedule that would not permit time for a consultative, collaborative transportation planning process. The states also opined that, in selecting a storage site, transportation should be a consideration to avoid shipments being transported twice over unnecessarily long distances. OCRWM was first faced with the possibility of a Congressionally- designated interim storage site in the mid-1990s, as the federal government approached the 1998 date of spent fuel acceptance specified in the standard disposal contracts with utilities. Responding to this possibility, in 1995, OCRWM prepared a “Transportation Contingency Plan for Limited Capacity Shipment (Revision 1)” (DOE 1995g). The purpose of the report was to “define and discuss those activities which must take place…to ensure that spent nuclear fuel shipments could begin earlier than 2010,” which was then the estimated date of repository operations (DOE 1995g, p. 1). OCRWM found it “most logical” to rely “primarily…on transport by highway” to conduct the shipments (ibid.). Section 1.2.6 of the report addressed OCRWM’s plans for the institutional program. In this section, OCRWM“recognizes that the success of the [transportation program] depends on both safety and stakeholder understanding of and confidence in program activities and objectives” (ibid., p. 4). OCRWM committed to “identifying, evaluating, and adequately incorporating safety factors into program decisions” (ibid.). Section 2.1.6, on Institutional Considerations, provided detail on the actions that OCRWM would need to take in order to identify routes, implement Section 180(c), develop NRC-approved physical protection measures, establish a uniform inspection procedure for truck shipments, and further develop the OCRWM risk management program. OCRWM anticipated spending three years planning and conducting institutional activities prior to shipments starting, including “12 to 18 months of intense effort” (ibid., p. 21). A decade later, in 2008, the target date for opening the repository had shifted from 2010 to 2017 and beyond. Concerned about the lack of progress and the federal government’s growing liability for the cost of the utilities’ continued on-site storage of spent fuel, the Appropriations Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives directed OCRWM to develop a plan for demonstrating that it could “move forward in the near term with at least some element of nuclear waste policy” (U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee 2007, p. 88). The plan was to consider
112
Made with FlippingBook Annual report