Oyster Creek's Spent Nuclear Fuel Casks Aren't Going Anywhere

LACEY TOWNSHIP, NJ - The Oyster Creek Nuclear Plant may be closing in October, but the spent nuclear fuel stored at the plant off Route 9 here for nearly 50 years isn't going anywhere.

Why? There is no place in the United States to store them.

The proposed Yucca Mountain underground storage facility in Nevada never materialized. So nuclear plants around the country have been storing spent nuclear fuel in dry casks onsite for decades. Oyster Creek's spent fuel is stored in horizontal dry casks in an area located near the entrance checkpoint off Route 9, NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said.

"It is in the plant's Protected Area, which is the fenced-in, highly secured area," he said.

Spent fuel pools were originally designed as a short-term solution. The fuel would then cool enough so it could be shipped offsite to be reprocessed.

"But reprocessing didn't end up being an option for nuclear power plants and the pools began to fill up," according to the NRC.

Janet Tauro, chairman of the environmental group Clean Water Action and other environmental groups are calling for Oyster Creek's dry casks to be "hardened," meaning additional reinforcement in the future. They also want the capability for instrumentation, with the amount of heat and radiation inside each cask able to be monitored.

"Lacey Township is going to be a mini-Yucca," Tauro said.

Sheehan says Oyster Creek's dry casks consist of stainless steel canisters that hold the spent fuel. The canisters are then loaded into a steel-reinforced concrete vault.

"The vaults certainly qualify as “hardened,” as they weigh more than 100 tons when loaded and must be able to withstand hurricanes, tornadoes and more," Sheehan said.

Oyster Creek is the oldest nuclear plant in the United States. It went online in December of 1969. The plant has a General Electric Mark I boiling water reactor, the same as the ill-fated Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan.

“None of our country’s Fukushima-design reactors should have operated for even one more day
once we saw the catastrophic events publicly unfold worldwide at Fukushima,” said Paul Gunter, of Beyond Nuclear, an anti-nuclear watchdog group.

In June 2013, the NRC ordered that all Mark I and Mark II reactors upgrade their containment systems with a hardened venting system designed to vent the extreme pressure, heat and radiation from a severe nuclear accident.

Oyster Creek was granted a license extension to operation until 2029. But after Exelon announced it would close on Dec. 31, 2019, the NRC agreed to Exelon's request for a waiver from the venting system upgrade until Jan. 31, 2020, one month after Oyster Creek was originally slated to close, according to Beyond Nuclear.

“Following the three explosions at the Fukushima nuclear reactors, the NRC finally admitted that
this containment design doesn’t work,” Gunter added. “And yet the agency has been utterly
delinquent in ensuring that the safety upgrades the NRC itself ordered have been made at our
country’s most dangerous nuclear power plants.”

Exelon, Oyster Creek's owner, announced last week that the plant would close in October, more than a year before the plant's official closing date of Dec. 31, 2019.

The news came as a surprise even to the NRC.

Although the plant will cease operations in October, rather than December 2019, Oyster Creek will still have to follow a lengthy process to decommission the aging plant.

"Our regulations state that the decommissioning process for a nuclear power plant must be completed within 60 years," Sheehan said.

Exelon will have to submit a Post-Shutdown Decommissioning Activities Report (PSDAR) - a roadmap for how it plans to decommission Oyster Creek and give the NRC timeline information, he said.

"Exelon will have up to two years after the permanent cessation of operations at Oyster Creek to submit that to us" Sheehan said.

Photos: Patricia A. Miller, generic cask photos courtesy of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.